Happy Mutant Hall of Fame - Sun Ra

"Erroneously reported by the straight world as having been born on May 22, 1914, as Herman "Sonny" Blount in Birmingham, Alabama, [Sun] Ra was actually born on Saturn "around 5,000 years ago—give or take a few minutes"—as he was quick to point out." Will Kreth is good enough to present the truth of Su Ra as (stellar) gospel.

Sun Ra made glorious noise, and a LOT of it. Will covers the Arkestra's wailing brass polyphony over a bed of Afro-Latin percussion, call-and-response chants, and his role as an early musician to embrace the Moog synthesizer. But there's also stellar performances of jazz standards, space-age jazz, and avant-garde space funk.

In 1995, finding Sun Ra's music could have been a bit of work. Originally, Ra's music was pressed in limited runs, sometimes 75 copies, other times 150. And sorting out the history of the Arkestra's recordings was complicated by Sun Ra compiling albums from various recording sessions, or delaying releases a few years or more after recording. And many tracks didn't find their way onto official releases until decades later, after archivists tracked down the history of recording sessions.

But now in 2020, we can enjoy the work of those archivists, and platforms like YouTube and Bandcamp, where you can find not only most, if not all, of Sun Ra's recordings, but also with extensive liner notes. I geeked out about Sun Ra's life and extensive recording history a few years back, linking to official audio as much as possible, and much of it available to buy and stream from Bandcamp (see Sun Ra Music and Sun Ra via Strut).

Sun Ra's work to make this world a better place lives on.