Read Online Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture by Ytasha L. Womack - Free Book Online

for contemplation.
    â€œHe had a very original concept that was way beyond his time,” says Nicole Mitchell, avant-garde jazz flutist and composer who met Sun Ra when she was twenty. “He was one of the first African Americans to start his own record companies and was one of the first jazz artists to incorporate African percussion as well as improvising electronics into his music. He wanted to find the real power of music,” she says, noting that he also believed music could develop telepathy.
    With so many ideas to explore, space analogies were the ideal way for Sun Ra to escape the parameters of music and humanity, and they freed him creatively to ponder the life questions he seemed so dedicated to answering and addressing through music. Hyperlinking his music to space travel created a prism of creativity for Sun Ra. He explored with healing tones, new sounds, and pushed jazz beyond its bebop dimensions. Songs like “Astro Black,” “Nubia,” and “Dance of the Cosmo Alien” explored cosmic origins and sonically both abided and broke the rules of modern jazz simultaneously.
    Arthur Hoyle played with Sun Ra in Chicago before leaving to travel with Lionel Hampton. He shared a story about how the two reconnected in New York shortly after Sun Ra moved there in 1961. Sun Ra and his Arkestra came up the steps in their space-aged garb and elaborate wired headgear. The combination of shield-like metal ornaments caused the motley crew to clankwith every step. A neighbor peered into the hall and shut her door immediately. “She probably thought they were from outer space,” Hoyle said. While Sun Ra claimed he was from Saturn, he created a cosmology for himself and his music that rooted its eccentricities in a land beyond the stratosphere.
    Sun Ra was also a showman, and the theatrical costumes combined with the music was a one-two punch that would come to define the assault on the senses that many musical artists in Afrofuturism would use as a model. Sometimes he drew his own album covers. He was also a fervent poet. By the time he moved to New York in 1961, he sported his onstage garb daily, walking the streets of Harlem with his Arkestra of Saturn-born ingenues. The band lived, ate, and created music together while immersing themselves in Sun Ra’s philosophy and synergizing their unique approach. Anyone in conversation with him, during rehearsal breaks and elsewhere, was either held hostage or caught spellbound by his verbal debates and attempts to solve the mysteries of the world.
    In 1974 Sun Ra starred in the cult classic
Space Is the Place
, an independent feature film directed by John Coney. An incredibly magical film that underscores the quagmires of self-determination, backed by Sun Ra’s effervescent piano solos and rhythmic big band space music,
Space Is the Place
is named after one of Ra’s most popular songs. The story follows Sun Ra’s earthly return and attempt to convince African Americans to leave Earth and embark on a new life on a distant planet with different vibrations and “under different stars.”
    The film opens on this lush planet world. Sun Ra sits in a multihued garden in his new colony wearing Egyptian sphinxhead garb and states that time is officially over. He “works on the other side of time,” he adds. He then concludes that he would bring the black populace to this world “through isotope, teleportation, transmoleculization or, better still, teleport the whole planet here through music.” Sun Ra then travels back in time to his early musical haunts and must contest with proverbial freedom gatekeepers, including a pimp named the Overseer, while embarking on his quest to transport the race to the far-off space colony with music. The film defies categorization, but Sun Ra’s celebration of the unity of life is clear. “Yes, you’re music too,” he states. “We’re all instruments. Everyone is