Review: The Execution of Sun Ra

Thomas Stanley’s book, The Execution of Sun Ra: The Mysterious Tale of a Dark Body Sent to Earth to Usher in an Unprecedented Era of Cosmic Regeneration and Happiness Volume II, delves deep into the complicated theories and pronouncements Sun Ra was famous for. This is by no means an introduction to Sun Ra and his work or a biography. The best part of the book is Stanley’s first hand account of hanging out and being a fan of the Arkestra. He offers a unique perspective and knows the Sun Ra mythos well offering fresh engaging analysis of Sun Ra’s music and ideas.

The way that Stanley imagines Sun Ra’s musical legacy is of particular interest. The Arkestra rehearsed and recorded tunes that have never been released or performed publicly. Stanley claims that he’s:

Seen Marshall Allen, a pair of spectacles hanging from his nose, pull cassettes from a large plastic bag full of similar, hastily labeled, recordings made, I presume, during the hundreds (thousands?) of hours of rehearsals in the Philly rowhouse. There is more than one large bag like this.

The artifacts are all there. Stanley compares Sun Ra’s musical legacy as being different from Hendrix and Marley since there is still new Sun Ra music that you can hear the Arkestra play due to all of the sheet music and rehearsal tapes left behind that were never played live. Arkestra member Michael Ray confirms the so-called secret music of Sun Ra:

We always had new music to play all the time. We really never played the real music in concert—Sun Ra had so much stuff that we would rehearse but didn’t even play live, because he’d say, ‘I’m just putting this out for people to steal stuff from,’ and he’d keep a lot of it from even being played in public at all. Suitcases full.

Sun Ra’s musical legacy offers not only new music for listeners but lessons in composition from transcribing the cassettes and understanding the sheet music left behind. Of course, Stanley describes it more poetically: “A pharaoh’s ransom of potential future releases hidden in the miles and miles of tape that Sun wrapped around our planet like copper wire in an electric pickup.”

Stanley confronts Sun Ra’s declarations denouncing death and his lifelong asexuality while attempting to contextualize Sun Ra’s reasoning. He also defines certain Sun Ra isms such as Sun Ra’s vision of Alter Destiny, his: “construct for a posthuman future that excels beyond either our present condition or our skewed vision of progress.” If Alter Destiny was the broader term that Sun Ra applied to his unique vision, the method he used to develop this vision was Myth Science. From a discussion with Jac Jacson Stanley describes myth as: “anything that could not be proven true or false and as such, in this bizarrely suspended state of quantum epistemology, myths necessarily have a potent effect on the more definite facts of social history:”

The myth is the seemingly false and the seemingly impossible. The borders of the rim of myth are vast and nonexistent because there are no limits to the imaginated realm ideas of myth. It is a challenging frontier. (Sun Ra)

A lot of theoretical ruminating and ideas are presented in the book including sound as matter and the idea that God was hijacked from nature in a spiritual “God-jail” at Gobekli Tepe. Thomas makes the inversion that, “Early worship creates the necessity for agriculture. NOT the other way around.” This leads to the Sun Ra tie-in, “if liberation atheism seeks to free man from God, Sun Ra’s Myth Science conceals a timely plot to free God from man.” Stanley riffs a lot like this in the same way that Sun Ra would. Sometimes he meanders too far when describing things like the obscure deathless “jellyfish-like” Turritopsis nutricula. It always gets back on point with grand summations like:

“Rather than a lifestyle, Sun Ra was modeling a mode of existence that deftly renegotiated the pressures of normative society in such a way that, against all odds, something novel, even miraculous, certainly something legendary, if not entirely mythic, was able to take place.”

Or:

Sun Ra’s life, his myth-science, his dream media, encompassed and was greater than his music, his writing, his teaching, his circus; it was shared with us as a seed-crystal for (re)creation of order, another large play of human intelligence, creativity, and love worked out through a reshuffling, refreshing, reimagining of the possibilities inherent in human bodies in time and a place (space) to act. We have excelled at the building, rearrangement and destruction (but not disposal) of things, and the vanguard medium of Myth Science is sound. This sound is real, vibrational, psychocymatic force, the individual and collective result of which may well be such radical departures in human economy, politics, identity, and communication that if we envision such large changes in what we do (agenda) as being acted out by the current version of what we are, we’ll retard our transformation.

The Execution of Sun Ra is an overall highly entertaining book for the knowledgeable Sun Ra fan. Some of the best parts of the book are stories from Arkestra members like saxophonist Danny Ray Thompson's account of the Arkestra’s visit to an underground Egyptian tomb where everything went black, or the claim of Sun Ra having a live beetle with a string leash attached to its neck crawling around Sun Ra’s chest as some sort of scarab. Imagining exploring an Egyptian tomb with Sun Ra is incredibly appealing to any Sun Ra fan as is the couple of UFO stories thrown in there as well. There is also an extensive sources listed section, an “Immeasurable Mix Tape,” and a transcribed interview that Stanley did with Sun Ra in 1990. This book is a definite must read for any Sun Ra fan. 

Stanley, Thomas. The Execution of Sun Ra. Shelbyville: Wasteland, 2014. Print.

This Spotify track is one of three of a random rehearsal. I'm pretty sure an excerpt of this is from the 1980 Joyful Noise documentary.