Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #88304 in Books
• Published on: 1998-08-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

Amazon.com 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.

Review
... Szwed has produced a rare jazz biography--one that takes full account of the history that shaped the music and its central personalities. An anthropologist, historian and musicologist who teaches at Yale, Szwed brings an impressive array of skills to this job. He needs them all to track down a subject whose every word seems intended to protect him from scrutiny. -- The New York Times Book Review, Brent Staples

One of America's most prolific and daring musicians, Sun Ra located himself in outer space, beyond both the geographical limits of the United States and the ideological limits of Jim Crow and the Cold War. Such views, spliced with a homegrown Egyptology, earned Sun Ra a reputation as an Afro-eccentric charlatan-genius in the tradition of Marcus Garvey and Elijah Muhammad, and kept his"Arkestra" below the radar of concert halls and record companies. This biography charts Sun Ra's career, showing how he defied critics' periodization schemes, pioneering free jazz and electronic music in the 1940s and reviving big bands in the 1970s. Szwed presents Sun Ra's neoplatonic philosophizing as serious scholarship, however, rather than the charismatic myth-making and -unmaking that it clearly was. The book's treatment of his music--a joyful noise authorized by biblical prophecy, rooted in his native Birmingham's African-American fraternal, club, and society dance orchestras of the 1930s, and branching out into the heavenly spheres--suffers by comparison. Perhaps this late romantic jazz totalist, who shunned sex and drugs, rejected modern notions of race and nation, and took his merry band of"tone scientists" on shoestring-and-bootstrap world tours, will never be brought down to earth.
Copyright © 1996, Boston Review. All rights reserved. -- From The Boston Review

From the Inside Flap
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.

Customer Reviews

The Sun Shines Brightly
Sun Ra has remained one of the most misunderstood musicians of our time. And in the case of many music geniuses, Sun Ra would keep the critics and fans at arm's length, but welcome musicians into his world of philosophy and art.

Author John F. Szwed does an almost impossible task of peeling of the layers of myth and disinformation to present the real life, struggles and triumphs of Sun Ra. Szwed brilliantly weaves through the situations which shaped his life while growing up in Birmingham, Ala., the highs and exteme lows in the jazz world of Chicago and New York City & how persistence finally yielded an understanding - on various levels - from fans who also wanted to challenge the barriers erected in the music industry.

The philosophy of Sun Ra is explained and Szwed shows how it influenced every facet of his life on and off stage. I strongly believe Szwed ends any debate on how Sun Ra lived his life and what he demanded from those around him.

This must have been a very difficult undertaking for Szwed, but his outstanding research and balanced reporting yields a fantastic biography on a person we can continue to learn from.

An erudite effort for a daunting task
Frankly, Sun Ra seemed to go out of his way to make a biography pretty much impossible. Professor Szwed is to be commended for his effort, though I think at times the professor takes Ra and himself too seriously. It is a hip jazz disease that Ra played off of brilliantly and would have been amused by.

What is of value is you get some idea of the depth of this fellow, the complexity, the seriousness and simultaneous playfull nature. In being too deep or altogether dismissive of him, we missed the amazing creations.

The book confirmed my evaluation of Ra's heart and motivation. A few years prior to reading this book, I went with my family to an assembly of jazz musicians who processed, played outrageous free jazz, and did this while listening to an old woman recite Sun Ra's poetry while "dancing" and "singing" in Wichita. My young daughter was squealing with delight and loving the wild affair. The adults were being so "into it", solemn, and so serious. This book confirmed to me she was likely the only one Sun Ra would have concluded got it. He probably would have commenced to direct the band to improvise off of her squeals.

He from above probably was smiling and particularly happy that a little white girl "understood the vibrations" and would have been encouraged for the future of the earth which he was convinced would take all the races working in harmony to rescue.

equal to its subject
Great book.
If you have an interest in who Sun Ra was you ought to read this. Not a lot of musical analysis, but an extrordinary explanation of the ideas and philosophies behind it. Good job on the life as well.
I wish the highly-praised Lewis Porter Coltrane biography was a quarter as good as this.