In the
definitive biography of Sun Ra Space is
the Place: The lives and times of Sun Ra, biographer John Szwed asks, “What
is the legacy of a musician who thrived on paradox and mystery, and made
contradiction an art form?” What often
happens with Sun Ra and his legacy is that people either project what they want
onto him or they misunderstand him completely.
Until recently most of his writings have not been widely available so
much of the philosophy behind the music has been mired in obscurity. With the recent publications of Sun Ra’s
poetry, the Immeasurable Equation as
well as the trio of books published by Whitewalls including The Wisdom of Sun Ra. It is easier to now historically place Sun Ra
within the larger context of African American thinkers.
Sun Ra
draws from so many different sources and makes so many thought-provoking
conclusions it is often hard to keep up. He used sound, the written word, theatre, and
film to get across a consistent vision.
It is all done with a very specific and focused intent. When you look at the entirety of Sun Ra’s
works across the different mediums you see a unified pattern of themes and
messages. Below I’ve compiled quotes
from Sun Ra and critics that shed some light on his unique philosophy.
In
Szwed’s biography Space is the Place: The lives and times of Sun
Ra, he explains why there is
such difficulty in understanding Sun Ra’s philosophy:
Sometimes these interviews and semipublic
lectures were published with ideas abruptly introduced without context, or left
hanging and undeveloped. In part this
was Sun Ra’s style: his ideas were almost never complete, parts of them were
dropped in one conversation to be continued in an interview the same night, or
another night, with another interviewer.
The meaning might only become obvious after hearing ten or twenty
lectures, or after reading thirty interviews.
In any case, he detested completeness—things which were complete were
“finished,” “ended,” dead. But in large
part the difficulty in understanding Sun Ra was the result of him being edited
and abbreviated, inaccurately transcribed or poorly translated (345 Szwed).
Sun Ra
always took a very Afrocentric approach that was common among Black Muslims at
the time. In The Wisdom of Sun Ra, Arkestra saxophonist John Gilmore explains:
At the time when I got introduced to his
wisdom, he was printing his philosophy on these papers, a lot of which Black
Muslims embraced. They embraced a lot of
his philosophy and started putting it in their newspapers as their own
thing. He and I would always hang out
and they would always be questioning Sun Ra.
They used to love to talk with him because he would always tell them the
opposite of what they would be expecting to be told. They loved to talk with Sun Ra…That’s how
they got some of their philosophy because he would share things with them. For instance, he told them that Negro meant
“dead body” and it came from a word “necromancy.” He told them about interchangeable G’s and
C’s and other grammar, that’s when they started giving themselves X’s. But they were filtering information from some
of Sun Ra’s papers too. Coltrane was
influenced by his papers. Sun used to
print up these papers and give them out to people who were interested in
expanding their scope of how they’d been looking at things. Before Sun Ra, they didn’t know anything
about the type of stuff he was talking about.
He researched and found about this stuff by himself and nobody was
familiar with what he was talking about but he just spread it out and that’s
how Trane got hold of some of it. Pat
Patrick let him have a few papers and a few records. Reading Sun Ra’s philosophy and listening to
the music opened up his mind (5 Ra, Corbett).
The
interchangeable G’s and C’s is illustrated in one of the recently published
broadsheets that Gilmore spoke of above:
Jesus said let the Negro bury the Negro at
least that is what he said in the original Greek version of the New Testament. But according to genesis C and G are
interchangeable and for this reason the words of Jesus also reads, “let the
Negro bury the necro.” In the present
day language, the sentence just quoted reads: “let the dead bury the
dead.” The original Greek and ancient
Hebrew definition of Negro or Necro is dead body. Many people think that Negro means black but
if it really meant black only black people could be called Negro…Unfortunately
for the Negro the word Negro means dead body…The cemetery itself is named after
the word Negro: Necropolis or city of the dead.
The word Niger is a Latin word meaning Black and Simon the Apostle upon
whom the church was built was called Niger because he was a black man (66 Ra,
Corbett).
In a lot of
these writings he is riffing on derogatory names for African Americans finding
hidden meanings or solutions to equations, as he would call it by making word
plays.
Stop.
Look! Listen! What people on earth call themselves
spooks? In what country do the spooks
dwel? In what country do the spooks
dwel?...In America of course…...Outside of America there are no people called
spooks….The spooks are in America…No other black or brown race call themselves
spooks the spooks in America are different from any other race on this
planet. Individual self….they hate the
thought of being what they are…They want to be white rather than the black and
brown that God made them. They are
completely off course….They are without wisdom or understanding….they are the
perfect prototype of Babylon…the Babylon that God destroyed…They are the ruined
city of tophet……They are the mystery..Babylon the great whore, mother of
whores……(72 Ra, Corbett).
His
philosophy of a lost black history is further explained in the following
passage:
……..There are two ethiopias……………………….
The American Negro is not an original
inhabitant of America. The American
Negro is likewise not an original inhabitant of Africa…the secret of the racial
origin of the Negro is in Asia; his early history begins there. Two places hold the keys to the identity of
the American Negro: Egypt and India. The
first Ethiopia was in India. India was a
civilization before Egypt. What we call
civilization started in Asia. Asia is in
the east therefore we call the Ethiopians of India “Eastern Ethiopians.” The Eastern Ethiopians migrated to the
vicinity of Egypt…they are the true founders of Egypt, they are known as “the
mighty builders.” They were considered
as the wisest of men, and were called “the blameless Ethiops…(81 Ra, Corbett).
In a recent
book The Astro Black and Other Myths,
critics and fans wrote essays trying to understand and place the legacy of Sun
Ra in a coherent context. The artist Kerry
James Marshall writes:
So why did “Sonny” Blount choose the Egyptian
style instead of the traditional Baptist, Christian model? I believe Sun Ra was inspired by early
Afro-centric teachings promoted by Elijah Mohammed, through the Nation of
Islam, and self-taught historians like J.A Rogers. The miseducation of the Negro by Carter G.
Woodson, creator of Negro History Week and stolen Legacy by G.M. James were
also highly influential in the emerging field of Afro-American studies. The “Black” man was the original man. They said, “Egyptian civilization,” which
European historians managed to de-link from the “Mother Continent” was a black,
African, civilization. For a people
desperate to recover a sense of dignity, this is pretty great stuff (59
Corbett, Elms).
Graham Locke
the author of the book Blutopia, goes
even further in his essay in, The Astro
Black and Other Myths book finding striking similarities of the idea Space
is the Place and an old text from the 19th century.
The film Space
is the Place opens with a scene in which Sun Ra inspects a distant planet
to check its suitability for habitation by black people from Earth. The reference here is to Martin Delany, a
pioneer of black nationalism, who, in 1859, led an expedition to the Niger
Valley to find locations in which African Americans would be able to
settle. Delany’s report of that
expedition was republished in 1969 under the title The Search for a Place, filmed in 1972, answers directly, a point
underlined by the fact that the film’s title first appears onscreen immediately
after Ra has approved for black settlement the planet he’s been inspecting (33
Corbett, Elms).
That could
in fact be the origins of the idea Space is the Place but Sun Ra made it clear
later in his career that the idea of space was a universal and open-ended idea
and not confined to the issue of race.
In the John Szwed biography Space
is the Place The lives and times of Sun Ra, Szwed quotes Sun Ra talking
about space:
When I say
space music, I’m dealing with the void, because that is of space too; but I’m
dealing with the outer void, because somehow man is trapped in playing roles
into the haven or heaven of the inner void, but I am not in that. That particular aim/goal does not interest my
spirit-mind and because of that it moves out to something else where the word
space is the synonym for a multi-dimension of different things other than what people
might at present think it means. So I
leave the word space open, like space is supposed to be, when I say space-music
(384 Szwed).
But I was
Talking about everybody (382 Szwed).
Bibliography
Corbett,
John, Anthony Elms, and Terri Kapsalis. Sun-Ra: Traveling the Spaceways :
The Astro Black and Other Solar Myths. New York, NY: WhiteWalls, 2010.
Print.
Sun, Ra, and John Corbett. The Wisdom of Sun-Ra: Sun Ra's
Polemical Broadsheets and Streetcorner Leaflets. Chicago, Il.: WhiteWalls,
2006. Print.
Szwed, John F. Space Is the Place: The Lives and times of
Sun Ra. New York: Da Capo, 1998. Print.
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