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You’re listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I’m Eric Molinsky.

This podcast is about sci-fi and other fantasy genres – which of course is a big passion of mine. But I have other interests too, which don’t come up -- like I really love jazz. I’ve made a lot of trips to New Orleans. I’ve seen Wynton Marsalis in concert more times than I could count. And I was heartbroken when one of my favorite clubs in New York, The Jazz Standard, closed due to the pandemic.

But there is one place where my interests collide: Sun Ra. That’s sun, like the sun in the sky, and Ra, like the Egyptian god.

CLIP: If I told you, I was from outer space, you wouldn’t believe a word I said, would you? Why should you? You lost your way; you have nothing to say.

Sun Ra is considered one of the best jazz composers, musicians and band leaders of his era. The height of his career being the 1970s. But he stood out for other reasons. He created a sci-fi mythology around himself through his music, his costuming, and himself. He said he wasn’t from Earth. He was from Saturn.

CLIP: You lost your celestial rights, you can’t go Jupiter, you can’t even go to Mars, you can’t even go to any other planets in the stars.

Sun Ra is also considered the father of Afrofuturism – the movement that blends science fiction with the African American experience. Even through Sun Ra died in 1993, he has become more influential than ever, and not just in music.

Now, I hate to be a killjoy in saying this, but Sun Ra was not actually born on Saturn. He was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1914. And his given name was Herman Blount.

When he was a teenager, he had an experience that sounds like the classic alien abduction, not the scary one with alien probes, but the enlightening version. He claimed that he was visited by extraterrestrials who teleported him to Saturn. They told him that our world was in chaos, and it was his job to heal to the human race through music.

For a long time, he kept that experience to himself. But he had other reasons to feel like an alien. When World War II broke out, he declared himself a conscientious objector. That was a tough stance for anyone to take back then, let 2 alone a Black man. He was thrown in prison, for years, which was severely traumatic. After the war, he fled the South and moved to Chicago. For a long while, he pursued fairly conventional career as a jazz musician.

And then in the 1950s, he told his manager about that extraterrestrial encounter he had in the ‘30s. And his manager – who was a good friend -- encouraged him to use that experience creatively in his music.

John Corbett wrote several books on Sun Ra. He says if you were in Chicago back then and you went to see Sun Ra’s band, The Arkestra – that’s a-r-k-e-s-t-r-a.

JOHN: The Arkestra at that point might be wearing like glittery capes. And a couple of the members of the band might be playing, might be wearing these Buck Rogers caps that had blinking red lights on top of them specifically. And apparently in some of those performances band members would send little robots, little battery-operated robots out into the audience that, so that must've been I think, quite a surprise for people who came out just to see an evening of jazz.

Sun Ra founded his band in 1954. That was also the year that a book called Stolen Legacy came out. The book had a huge influence on him, and a lot of African Americans because it claimed that Egypt and North Africa was the real birthplace of modern civilization.

That’s when he changed his name his Sun Ra and started wearing costumes all the time. His most famous one was an Egyptian-like headdress with a giant spiked ball on his head that was either gold or glass. Sun Ra and his band were also dressed in metallic gold and silver garments, and capes, that looked ancient and futuristic as the same time. And his song titles became more fantastical, like “Dance of the Cosmos Aliens” or “Tapestry from an Asteroid,” or his most famous song, “Space is the Place.”

As you can imagine, a lot of music critics back then were skeptical about Sun Ra. They thought the sci-fi thing was a gimmick. But John interviewed him several times.

JOHN: He told me he was really interested in, in comic books. And, uh, he was interested in comics in particular and including some of the space oriented, uh, comics and science fiction comics that were popular in that era that he came up. 3

He took it very seriously. The space aspect of what he was doing was a very serious aspect of it. It was also not that uncommon thing to be interested in, the space race was an everyday part of the news.

Although the bigger question was whether Sun Ran himself was a persona. I mean, he claimed he was from outer space. And he started carrying around a passport that listed his birthplace as Saturn.

JOHN: There was a cover story on him in a major jazz magazine that said, “genius or charlatan.”

The word “charlatan” came up in a lot of articles I found about him. And I have to admit, I used to think Sun Ra was a persona – although I admired what I thought was his commitment to this character he created.

JOHN: I spent a bunch of time with Sun Ra and Sun Ra was not a persona. Yes, he was dressed a little bit more wildly on stage than he was off stage, but it wasn't like he came off stage and suddenly turned back into Herman Blount. He was always Sun Ra.

And he always had a sense of humor about himself.

JOHN: Famously when asked about Star Wars. If he had seen the movie, Star Wars, he said, I did, it was very accurate.

Cauleen Smith is an artist and filmmaker who spent three years producing multi- media projects about Sun Ra and his influence on pop culture.

CAULEEN: I don't think he was like pretending or acting. I think he was like offering a proposal about how, um, a Black cultural production might be understood, positioned and utilized through this idea of an other, of an alien. People's like, oh, I just thought he was ridiculous, like a cartoon character. And for me, I don't even know how that's possible if you're actually listening to the music. Um, cause the music is like, has like these levels of dynamism and complexity that really suggests his artistic practice is extended beyond music into the performative into the material.

In that sense, Sun Ra was using outer space as a way to talk about Black liberation. He wasn’t necessarily encouraging Black people to go into space – although he did often point out that there weren’t enough Black astronauts. But he was more interested in inspiring people to transport themselves through their imagination and find freedom in creativity. And he practiced what he preached. 4

He worked with as many Black-owned business as he could in producing his records, and the band’s other paraphernalia.

In fact, I was watching a documentary about Sun Ra – and at one point, we see a community bodega that was run by one of his band members. And the shop was branded with Sun Ra’s iconography and messaging.

CLIP: You see right over there, there’s a sign, space is the place, and I try to teach the kids about space, precision and discipline…

CAULEEN: These are these enterprises and initiatives are simply extensions of what he thinks his music does. And again, this is like something that I think, um, you know, Brent Hayes Edwards, a scholar writes about so beautifully in terms of understanding so many African American 20th century musicians is that you can't wholly understand them simply through their music. You have to look at all of the different extensions of their practice, the writing, visual arts performative, et cetera. And with Sun Ra I think that's especially true.

But I think the best way to understand how sci-fi influenced his music and philosophy is to look at the science fiction movie he starred in from 1974, called Space is the Place.

The movie was made by a white filmmaker who was inspired by a series of lectures that Sun Ra gave at Berkeley. The movie is a strange hybrid of a concert film, an experimental art film, and a blaxploitation film. But I love it because it’s so earnest. And the production design is great even though they were on such a low budget.

The movie starts with a prologue of Sun Ra on another planet. He’s in this extraterrestrial garden, with fantastical plants. He’s wearing his classic Egyptian- like costume with a gigantic spikey ball on his head. He’s followed by a figure in a black robe, whose face is a mirror. And Sun Ra has a scepter that floats in the air like a tentacle, with a sort of UFO on top.

CLIP: The music is different here, the vibrations are different, not like planet Earth. Planet Earth sounds of guns, anger, frustration. There was no one to talk to on Planet Earth who would understand. We set up a colony for Black people here. We bring them here either through either isotope teleportation, transmolecurlziation, or better still transport the whole planet here through music.

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After that, Sun Ra flies to Earth, or California. His ship looks like a giant yellow pair of binoculars with fiery eyeballs at the end. And his band emerges from the ship like The Day the Earth Stood Still, surrounded by press.

CLIP: This is incredible, I can’t believe this is really happening!

Afterwards, Sun Ra appears at a youth center in Oakland. And he literally appears -- out of thin air. He’s flanked by guards wearing giant Egyptian-style animal heads with futuristic antennas on top. The kids laugh and ask if he’s for real.

CLIP: How do you know I’m real? I’m not real, I’m just like you. You don’t exist in this society. If you did, your people wouldn’t be seeking equal rights. You’re not real, if you were you’d have some status among the nations of the world. So, we’re both myths. I do not come to you as a reality. I come to you as the myth.

Ytasha Womack wrote a book about Afrofuturism. And she thinks Sun Ra was using the metaphor of an alien to talk about the Black experience in America, and his own experience in the music industry.

YTASHA: I think that at the time when Sun Ra came of age, he could only contextualize these very futuristic ideas and approaches he had to music by thinking of himself as being an alien. And if he thought of himself as alien, then he can sort of justify how he wanted to justify these new sounds that he was creating, that didn't always fall within the, uh, within the musical paradigms that people were familiar with at the time. So, to think of yourself as coming from Saturn, uh, that you're really here to heal the world, that you are connected to an ancient deity. It roots you in a past, but also projects you into the future and is incredibly empowering. So, at that point, you can create any kind of music you want, and you aren't limited by this identity of being Herman from Birmingham.

Over time, Sun Ra earned the respect of music critics – although the musicians of his generation always had huge respect for him. But it was frustrating to wait so long before he got that kind of recognition. Again, John Corbett:

JOHN: I believe he thought he should be. I think he thought that he deserved to be better known by the world by the planet than he was. Um, when I talked to him a couple of the times that I talked to him in separate cases, he mentioned that he was playing the low profile because the, the creator had told him he should play the low-profile and in the long run, that would be better. And in some ways, that's actually, what's, that's, that's what's turned out to happen, but during his lifetime, he did struggle. He struggled 6 a lot. And part of the reason he struggled is that he had the absolutely unrealistic goal of keeping a big band together in a period where big bands were completely impossible.

And since Sun Ra was appreciated in Europe than the U.S., he went on all these European tours that were costly, to the point where he couldn’t afford the keep the whole band together by the end of the tour. And at one point, he and the band moved into a communal home together in Philadelphia.

JOHN: Part of the reason he wanted that is that Ra wanted to be able to call a rehearsal at four o'clock in the morning. If he had a great idea by all accounts, he would do that with some frequency.

Did the band resent it? Hardly.

Sun Ra died in 1993, but the Arkestra is still together. Their current leader, Marshall Allen, is 96-years old. And they’ve brought in younger members so they can keep playing Sun Ra’s music indefinitely.

Sun Ra always thought he was ahead of his time – and was he ever. In many ways, we are living in the future he imagined. We’ll get there after the break.

BREAK

There’s an old joke about the Velvet Underground that their first album only sold so many copies but everyone who bought it started their own band. The same could be said of Sun Ra.

I talked with a musician in the Bay Area named Idris Ackamoor. His group, The Pyramids, which was heavily influenced by Sun Ra in terms of their music and costumes. Idris used to see Sun Ra in concert back in the ‘70s.

IDRIS: One of the, one of the things that have was, was incredible was they're known for breaking the fourth wall of jumping, getting off the stage and, you know, taking the music from the stage and the pageantry into the audience, and then creating that mystique in the audience. Not only just music, but it's music, its dance, it's costumes it's light shows the merging of the form, which is also very African. Having lived in Africa that’s one of the things I came away with, the interdisciplinary nature, in Africa you don’t usually have a single art discipline being done.

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Idris also appreciated the way Sun Ra took his art and his message seriously, but always had a sense of humor.

IDRIS: But not in a parody kind of way but just in certain things that make you smile, (singing) travel the space ways from planet to planet, we travel the space ways. You never get that out of your mind, you know. Next step Jupiter! Next step Jupiter! You know, you know, like, I mean you can make sure that it makes you, it gives you, it makes you feel good, you know?

As I mentioned earlier, Calueen Smith was inspired to create a series of multi- media artworks about Sun Ra. And in one of her films, she created a flash mob -- a one-hundred-piece high school marching band playing Space is the Place in Chicago. And even though it was pouring rain that day, the kids were super committed and inspired.

CLIP: MARCHING BAND

Cauleen was debating whether to send the kids to a Black neighborhood or a white neighborhood. Instead, she decided to send them to Chinatown.

CAULEEN: Like in many cities, Chinatown in Chicago functions as this barrier, um, between white Chicago, and then Brown and black Chicago. And so the thing about flash mobs is you don't really get permission. They just happen. So, it was kind of a delicate prospect of like invading this community with another community. And I was kind of curious to see what was happening. And I was hopeful that then being a marching band, young people, uh, playing this music, the gesture would be understood as it was intended as an invitation and a celebration. And it was like, um, it's just kind of phenomenal to watch them do this. And it's like, exactly, exactly what Sun Ra was so interested in was this sort of like ferocity of youth and its potential combined with what's possible when some discipline and organization and singular purpose is applied. I got really lucky with that video, but it's one of the works that I'm proud of stuff from that period of working on Sun Ra.

But the biggest impact Sun Ra made was on Afrofuturism – which is remarkable because the word Afrofuturism wasn’t coined until 1993 – the year Sun Ra died. When the journalist Mark Dery invented the word, he was trying to describe a type of work that existed for a long time but didn’t have a category. Sun Ra was one of the first artists that was retroactively deemed Afrofuturist.

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But the resurgence of Sun Ra really began around the time Black Panther came out. There was a renewed interest in Afrofuturism. Many of the articles explaining what Afrofuturism was featured Sun Ra as their prime example.

Or they’d put a picture of Sun Ra next to a picture of Janelle Monae from the cover of her album The ArchAndroid, where she was dressed as her alter ego -- the android Cindi Mayweather, who wore a costume that was both futuristic and ancient Egyptian. Music critics were also connecting the dots from Sun Ra to Parliament Funkadelic, Outkast, Solange, and Daveed Diggs’s group, clipping, which creates sci-fi concept albums.

Ytasha Womack wrote a book about Afrofuturism. And when she first started promoting the book 8 years ago.

YTASH: …and I asked people about Sun Ra, 99% of the people who I spoke to, even if they were music enthusiasts had no idea who he was. And today, if I'm in a room and I ask people, if they've heard of Sun, Ra a significant number of people in the room know who he is.

In fact, Ytasha was once at a celebration of Sun Ra’s music in Chicago.

YTASHA: And someone introduced me to a gentleman who had been in Sun Ra’s band. They showed them a copy of my book. Afrofuturism. The singer, he was looking at the book and he said, Oh, this looks really cool. You know, Sonny, meaning Sun, Ra would have really loved this book. And I said, oh my God, he's in the book. Like, what do you mean? He wouldn't have just liked it. He’s part of the reason why this book even exists. And the smile that came across this man's face was one that I'll always remember. But it's also a reminder to me that you got so many innovators who were in the trenches, who influenced so many and they don't always get to see that impact.

Of course, there were Black science fiction creators before Sun Ra. But he was one of the first to gain that level of recognition. And one of the major ways he influenced Afrofuturism was how he imagined time as being non-linear – not just in his costumes but also his music. He would incorporate classic songs from the 1930s with experimental modern jazz, like hopping in time within a single song.

YTASHA: He’s embodying both a history and a past and in doing so it's a statement about resilience. The enthusiasm that comes with thinking about the future is that it makes people remember that many people in the past were thinking about futures and that's how they were able to push past difficult moments. Oh yeah. And so, and that you 9 start thinking of yourself as being part of a continuum because you're in someone else's future.

Imagining the future can still be a radical act. Ytasha discovered that when she asked to give a talk about Afrofuturism to a group of fifth graders in Chicago.

YTASHA: And I'm thinking, oh, this will be great. Their kids, you know, as soon as I started talking about the future, they're going to talk about, you know, space, societies and technology. But when I started thinking, talking about Afrofuturism and sort of describing what it was, it became very obvious to me that the kids weren't comfortable imagining futures. So, I would say, oh, well, what are some things you would like to see in the future? And they would say, oh, well, you know, I don't want to see violence. And I'm thinking, oh, okay. It's like, oh, we don't want to see people being killed or gang rivalries. And then I said, oh, wow. Okay, well, let's talk about what a world looks like. If there is no violence, because you've had plenty of experiences where, um, that weren't shaped my violence? So, let's talk about that. How do people treat one another? If there's no violence, you know, they thought about it for a moment. And they said, Oh, well, you, you're nice to people. And, um, people are respectful, and it means we could play outside. And, you know, and so that was me sort of walking them backwards, you know, slowly we were able to get into this point where we started talking about futures and what features look like. But for them, it was very in the moment. So, you know, I mean, at one point, one of the kids said, well, you know, I don't want to see racism. I said, all right. You know, and they started saying, can Afrofuturism stop racism. And these are fifth graders. I just found the moment to be very profound. At the end of the class, one of the kids said, one of the young ladies, she said, well, are you trying to tell us that we can actually change the world? And I said, yeah, I think we assume that children have these active imaginations and generally speaking, they do. But it was really interesting to see that so many of them by fifth grade and already started to kind of shut down around even thinking about a future, um, because to do so was not realistic. And so this big epiphany for one of the students who said, Oh, wait, you're telling us we can actually change the world. We can actually change our neighborhoods. There was this moment of empowerment and, you know, they were like, okay, I'm going to make alien music and change in my neighborhood. I'm ending racism. (Laughs) I mean, it was very beautiful, but it was the process of getting, there was one that stuck with me.

When I heard that story, I kept thinking of that scene in Space is the Place, where Sun Ra appeared at the youth center in Oakland, almost 50 years ago. And if you think of time as being non-linear, then he’s still materializing, in spirit, at these teachable moments. 10

One of the great qualities of science fiction is that it can use your imagination to transcend reality and reinvent yourself – never settling for the categories society puts you in. Sun Ra accomplished that and a lot more by creating another world and inviting people to join him. Although it seems like the only person who actually got to live there, full time, was Sun Ra.

That’s it for this week, thank you for listening. Special thanks to John Corbett, Cauleen Smith, Ytasha Womack and Idris Ackamoor.

My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emolinsky and imagine worlds pod.

The best way to support the podcast is to donate on Patreon. At different levels you can get either free Imaginary Worlds stickers, a mug, a t-shirt, and a link to a Dropbox account, which has the full-length interviews of every guest in every episode. You can learn more at imaginary worlds podcast dot org, where I put videos of Sun Ra, and Cauleen Smith’s flash mob playing Space is the Place.