el is a sound of joy

El Is A Sound Of Joy, Sun Ra and His Solar Arkestra »

enlightment (no, that is not a typo)

Q. What does a Sun Ra Symposium look like?
A. Something like this »

p.s. ask me what I thought about in another 8 hours or so -- I need to get some sleep first.


Update: The above pic, She Sax, made Gaper's Block on 13 November. Thanks to desertson for the heads up!

the sun ra odyssey begins

Hanging at the Hideout -- the show was sold out but AMB said "don't worry about it -- Sun Ra will take care of it"-- and, apparently, he did.

Morning after update:
So here's the thing: I know nothing about Sun Ra. My brother, on the other hand, knows quite a bit -- he's just now wrapping up a Masters' Thesis on the guy, and he's come to town for a whole round of Sun Ra-ness -- including ephemera at the Hyde Park Art Center and a seminar that runs through the weekend.

We opened the weekend with a show at Chicago's Hideout last night, featuring Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth and local keyboardist Jim Baker, along with a couple of Arkestra veterans. We weren't supposed to get into the show -- it was deeply sold out -- but did. No problem. Sun Ra? You tell me.

Something extraordinary happened in that room last night, but I completely lack the language to write about it -- other than to say that it was largely at a vibratory level, and that sounds just plain silly. So forget I said that.

My goal for the weekend, in tagging along to a few of these things, is to learn a little bit something more about what Sun Ra contributed to music in America. Already we have this little tidbit for Anali in Boston: Your man Deval is the son of an Arkestra member. Small world.

space is the place

From the moment he discovered the material, Corbett wanted to keep it together as a singular archive of Sun Ra’s Chicago years, and he hopes eventually to find an institutional home for it. “It only articulates a story if it’s together,” he says. “Little bits and pieces of it are collectorfetish ephemera, but when it’s all together you start to see this interesting phenomenon . . . which is the way that Ra sort of fit into a southside Afro-futurist community of thinkers, designers, and musicians who were all pondering the future, independent businesses, and separatism.”

John Corbett in « Ra Materials » by Peter Margasak in this week's The Chicago Reader

You're either going to care about this a whole lot, or be completely indifferent. I'm posting this for someone dear to me who I expect will trend toward ape-shit.

The show, "a treasure trove of Sun Ra ephemera: album art, recordings, writings, ledgers, and scraps of paper like ticket stubs and gig flyers," opens on Sunday in Chicago's Hyde Park Art Center.

Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn & Chicago’s Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954-68
Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell
773-324-5520
Reception 10/15, 3-5 PM
Show runs from Oct 1st through January 14th
Admission is Free