Space is the place the lives and times of Sun Ra
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 Wyno...
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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Books Print Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
New York :
Pantheon Books,
©1997.
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| Edition: | 1st ed. |
| Subjects: | |
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| Summary: | 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 the last of the great romantic composers, one of the premier avant-gardists of the latter half of the twentieth century, and a black cultural nationalist who extended Afrocentrism from ancient Egypt to the heavens. |
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| Physical Description: | xviii, 476 pages, [8] pages of plates : illustrations ; 25 cm |
| Awards: | Association for Recorded Sound Collections Award, 1998. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 389-425) , discography (p. 427-448) , and index. |
| ISBN: | 0679435891 9780679435891 1841950556 9781841950556 |
| Author Notes: |
