Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra - Hardcover

Szwed, John F.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679435891 ISBN 13: 9780679435891

Publisher: Pantheon, 1997

Synopsis

Always riveting, Space Is the Place is the definitive biography of "one of the great big-band leaders, pianists, and surrealists of jazz"  (New York Times)--unparalleled for his purposeful outlandishness, a man who exerted a powerful influence over a vast array of artists.

Sun Ra--a/k/a Herman Poole "Sonny  Blount--was born in Alabama on May 22, 1914. But like Father Divine and Elijah Muhammad, he made a lifelong effort to obscure many of the facts of his early life. After years as a rehearsal pianist for nightclub revues and in blues and swing bands, including Wynonie Harris's and Fletcher Henderson's, Sun Ra set out in the 1950s to find a way to impart his views about the galaxy, black people, and spiritual matters through the various incarnations of the Intergalactic Arkestra. His repertoire ranging from boogie-woogie, swing, and bebop to free form, fusion, and whatever, Sun Ra was above all a paragon of contradictions: profundity and vaudeville; technical pianistic virtuosity and irony; assiduous attention to arrangements and encouragement of collective improvisation; respect for tradition and celebration of the fresh.

Some might have been bemused by his Afro-Platonic neo-hermeticism; others might have laughed at his egregious excesses. But Sun Ra was at once one of the great avant-gardists of the latter half of the twentieth century and a black cultural nationalist who extended Afrocentrism from ancient Egypt to the heavens.

About this title

Review:

Born Herman Poole Blount in Alabama in 1914, he reinvented himself in the 1950s as Sun Ra, the great surrealist of jazz whose free-form performances with his Arkestra amply justified the description "'jspace music." His mystical beliefs were equally avant-garde; Yale professor John Szwed sympathetically explains some fairly far-out notions as "driven by a hunger for totality that only music could express." Szwed recovers the biographical facts Sun Ra was often at pains to obscure, without losing sight of the overriding role imagination played in this visionary life.

About the Author:

John F. Szwed is Musser Professor of Anthropology, Afro-American Studies, Music, and American Studies at Yale University. He has written about music for many publications, including the New York Times, Musician, and the Boston Phoenix. He lives in Trumbull, Connecticut.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0679435891
• ISBN 13: 9780679435891
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 476