The Wisdom of Sun Ra
ed. John Corbett University of Chicago Press, 144pp, £13
The avant-garde jazz legend Sun Ra was born, his biographers tell us, Herman Poole Blount on 22 May 1914 in Birmingham, Alabama. The facts were contested by Ra, who claimed to have "arrived on earth" from Saturn on an unspecified date, though he was, he admitted, a Gemini.
Whatever the truth of his extraterrestrial origins, it's certain that by the 1950s Ra was a fully fledged spacecake, playing free-form jazz with his "Arkestra" while running a secret reading group, Thmei Research, and preaching its cosmic discoveries on the street corners of Chicago. In addition to haranguing passers-by, Ra distributed pamphlets and broadsheets on everything from civil rights to grammar and etymology: "negro", he insisted, derived from "necromancy" and meant "dead body".
The Wisdom of Sun Ra is a facsimile collection of these yellowing typewritten pages, annotated in Ra's flowing script with afterthoughts such as "Satan Is the God of the Spook". It's easy to overdose on Ra's liberal use of capitals and frequent invocations of Neptune, but for browsing, John Corbett's selection offers a fascinating window on to the weird world of one of the 20th century's most influential musicians.
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