Sun Ra (1914-93) was one of the most wildly prolific and unfailingly
eccentric figures in the history of music. Renowned for extravagant
performances in which his Arkestra appeared in neo-Egyptian garb, the
keyboardist and bandleader also espoused an interstellar cosmology that
claimed the planet Saturn as his true home. In Sun Ra's Chicago,
William Sites brings this visionary musician back to earth--specifically
to the city's South Side, where from 1946 to 1961 he lived and
relaunched his career. The postwar South Side was a hotbed of unorthodox
religious and cultural activism: Afrocentric philosophies flourished,
storefront prophets sold "dream-book bibles," and Elijah Muhammad was
building the Nation of Islam. It was also an unruly musical crossroads
where the man then known as Sonny Blount drew from an array of
intellectual and musical sources--from radical nationalism, revisionist
Christianity, and science fiction to jazz, blues, Latin dance music, and
pop exotica--to construct a philosophy and performance style that
imagined a new identity and future for African Americans. Sun Ra's
Chicago shows that late twentieth-century Afrofuturism emerged from a
deep, utopian engagement with the city--and that by excavating the
postwar black experience of Sun Ra's South Side milieu, we can come to
see the possibilities of urban life in new ways.
