Customer Reviews

The Wisdom of Sun Ra: Sun Ra's Polemical Broadsheets and Streetcorner Leaflets

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Being that he was a freejazz pioneer, Sun Ra was also naturally a deepspace thinker. This book collects a bunch of early dispatches directly from the uniquely racially and numerically-obsessed mind of one of the true greats of modern music. This is a dimension only hinted at in his song lyrics. It is full-on cosmic weirdness to the highest degree. The book is equally as "unreadable" as his music is "unlistenable". It taps a vein that, thank god, very few of us have access to and it shines a bright light on some of what made this complex man tick. Up until now, his primarily white audiences probably have had no clue what he was really about, unless they happened to catch his low-budge cultfilm "Space is the Place". Here, his apparent frustrations about being black in America are turned into kooky political/religious ranting prose and his fascination with numbers is woven in as if it were just part of the same sort of cosmic conversation. Madness or genius? You decide. Bonus: the book features nice scans of the original, typed papers, plus much more legible transcriptions. It's a lot to ask of a reader, but also a cool supplement to the available music. It is a very short read, thus the less-than-best rating.

The discovery of these texts in 2000 and their excellent and faithful reproduction in this edition have marked a new era in Sun Ra scholarship, and another key text in Black cultural production saved from the ashes.

They were found in a chest in a house slated for demolition in Chicago marked with the words "One of Everything" in Ra's handwriting, which would have made a nice title for the text, except that coming from a figure like Ra, any declaration of the wholeness or completeness of an archive/discography sounds more like a taunt. For years Ra's intellectual and theological formation in Birmingham, and then Chicago, has been a guesswork. While lovers of Sun Ra's music have spent years tracing the emergence of Ra's revolutionary sound from New York to its bebop/hardbop origins in Chicago, listening to every note and unpressed arrangement for the moment of transition, a similar archival work has been scarcely possible in tracing the development of Ra's discourse, which plays an integral role in the music.

While the broadsheets offer few definitive answers, they will become the source text for this and many other questions of Ra's intellectual formation. They are also in themselves a powerful literary work, and read like something between Nietzsche's aphorisms and a pentecostal Ishmael Reed.