As far as anybody knows, Sun Ra was born Herman Poole Blount on 22nd May 1914, making today, 22nd May 2014 the day that would have marked his 100th birthday. While there’s something curious and slightly arbitrary about these milestones, Sun Ra is a musician for whom a posthumous celebration perhaps makes most sense, given that birth and death weren’t really concepts he bought in to. For in the narrative he spun for himself, he was never born (and therefore, presumably, would never die), but instead was delivered to Earth from Saturn in order to spread universal truths from the cosmos.
If you’ve got this far you’ll be at least vaguely familiar with the story. Pianist and band-leader Sun Ra was a colossus, a visionary, teacher, poet and thinker whose revolutionary approach to form in the arts pushed the limits of human creativity to the brink, a man who constructed a myth around himself that shone celestial light on the day to day experience of black Americans and sought to reconnect that identity with its roots on the Ancient Egyptian banks of the Nile. In the words of pianist Lonnie Liston Smith “Sun Ra was Sun Ra, the name alone was enough”.
The resonance of that name and its significance for contemporary music is by no means restricted to the esoteric or strictly jazz-minded. He is the source for a stream of afro-futurist aesthetics that runs through George Clinton’s P-funk and Afrika Bambaataa’s Zulu Nation, through hip hop, house and techno to modern exponents like Madlib, Flying Lotus and Janelle Monae.
Furthermore, overflowing from this central stream, his collateral influence has been huge. More a teeming river that has burst its banks, extending itself into the surrounding areas, the reach of Ra’s influence, whether in teaching, music, art and even politics has saturated the roots of contemporary music more than we could ever begin to document.
To give you an impression of this fertile breadth, we’ve gathered testimonies from across the spectrum of musicians, producers DJ’s and collectors. From the likes of jazz legend Lonnie Liston Smith, who witnessed Ra first hand as he was forging his own career in the creative furnace of 60′s New York, to Brainfeeder beat man Ras G and Detroit techno ambassador Mike Huckaby, whose own work most directly reflects the ethic and feeling of the myth of Ra.
Our brief was intentionally vague, accompanied, when requested by a few prompts and the responses were varied and idiosyncratic in the extreme, their myriad styles as much a testament to the liberated legacy of Ra as the music itself. Sun Ra undeniably evokes in people the urge to be expressive and we hope this has been captured.
Finally, before we begin, as our friends at FACT alerted us to, Mr Beatnick, in his infinite wisdom, dedicated his most recent show on NTS Radio to Sun Ra. We strongly advise you accompany the reading below with his superb 2-hour selection.
MIXCLOUD LINK
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