Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra
- ISBN-10
- 0307822443
- ISBN-13
- 9780307822444
- Category
- Biography & Autobiography
- Pages
- 496
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2012-07-25
- Publisher
- Pantheon
- Author
- John F. Szwed
Description
Always riveting, Space Is the Place is the definitive biography of "one of the great big-band leaders, pianists, and surrealists of jazz" (The 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.
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Other editions
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- 2020-07
- 192 pages
- Paperback
- Spector Books
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