If you believe in love
Mine came true and yours will too
I swear by the stars above
Dreams come true, they just have to
True as the Sun above
Mine came true and yours will too
If you believe in love
Dream of romance
Strolling down Lover's Lane
In a trance
And dream it over again
Dreams come true, they just have to
To prove they're so supreme
Mine came true and yours will too
All you have to do is dream
-"Dreams Come True," Sun Ra
~~~
Sonny had a vision. His body was transfigured. Up he went, and down to a stage on Saturn. They told him to leave school, to speak through his music. The world was due to become a more chaotic place, and there would be trouble in the schools, but music was a language that would be heard.
Ten years later, in 1947, people began to talk about flying saucers. Sonny was always ahead of the curve, but now his private epiphany had some kind of cultural currency.
~~~
Ten years after that, Herman Poole Blount had become Le Sony'r Ra. He had an independent music label, El Saturn Records, and a big band, the Arkestra. With his manager and various associates and pen pals, he traded books and ideas about symbols and religion, ancient times and extraterrestrial encounters. Strange packages would arrive from corners unknown, holding secrets and clues. Long before the Internet, the esoterica of the day all got funneled through Sun Ra, listening to Long John Nebel on the radio when he wasn't writing and rehearsing.
His band were affordably dressed as Egyptians and space men, a silly expression of serious preoccupations of the bandleader. The costumes also helped to undercut the self-conscious rigour of the music.
Sonny was intense about discipline. When his band moved to New York and the music moved further into the avant-garde, he rejected the label of "free jazz." There was nothing free about it; this was music about mind and cosmos. This was space jazz.
~~~
It would be another twenty years before the zeitgeist was ready, and George Clinton produced a flying saucer funk that approximated Sun Ra's aesthetic. Outside of a rewarding cross-pollination that resulted in a series of approachable fusion albums, Ra's music remained a more dangerous, uncanny animal. It was not uncommon for a show to begin with a twenty-minute expression of the creation of the universe as explained by a wall of horns, or end with Ra snaking through the crowd and shouting in people's faces. This was music to change minds.
~~~
He is said to be a pioneer of Afrofuturism, and early on he closely identified with Black struggles. As time went on, he came to see blacks and whites alike as subject to the lies and illusions of a nefarious archontic power using us as pawns for its own amusement.
In some combination of inspired revelation, divine disclosure, informed intuition, and self-mythologising bullshit, Sonny told people that he was a member of the angel race.
~~~
He never changed his story about the time he went to Saturn, but no one saw him dissolve. The historicity of his prehistoric alien abduction is a moot point. It can be judged only in its possible effects.
Sun Ra pioneered the use of electronic keyboards and free improvisation in jazz, but that proves nothing. He was one of the most prolific recording artists of his century, but that proves nothing. He lived and breathed his music, living in a big house with his band and catnapping at the piano, but that proves nothing.
What might actually mean something is that today, twenty-three years after the man's transition, the Sun Ra Arkestra still tours in his name. Ninety-something Marshall Allen dresses as a wizard, blows an electronic whistle, and the band sings the old songs. The crowd and the performers enter a magical space in which a dead man is still alive. They dream of the future, of the boundlessness of infinity, of love in outer space. This is perhaps the greatest proof that Sonny was touched by something, reaching down to make a prophet of a man.
He warned of doom in the grand old tradition, but he used his every day on Earth to wake people up where he could. That he did so without arousing much recognition from the jazz or the flying saucer communities suggests he was right about that evil unseen force of injustice in the world.
~~~
They plan to leave this world one day
In sundry rocket ships to sail away
They plan to go to somewhere there
In splendid ships of models rare
They plan to find another place in the sky
Without saying farewell, without saying goodbye
They plan to put the White House on the Moon, soon
And the Kremlin on a satellite
-"They Plan to Leave," Sun Ra
~~~
Further reading
