Space Is the Place: The Life and Times of Sun Ra - Tapa dura

A biography of the late avant-garde jazz musician, who claimed to be from the planet Saturn, explores his roots in the South, his erratic musical career, and his eccentric views on Blacks, the cosmos, and spirituality

ing, Space Is the Place is the definitive biography of "one of the great big-band leaders, pianists, and surrealists of jazz"  (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 pianis