ISBN:
0679435891
,
9780679435891
,
1841950556
,
9781841950556
,
9780306808555
,
0306808552
Language:
English
Pages:
xviii, 476 pages, [8] pages of plates
,
illustrations
,
25 cm
DDC:
781.65092
Keywords:
Sun Ra Sun Ra
;
Sun Ra
;
Jazz musicians Biography
;
United States
;
Composers Biography
;
United States
;
Jazz History and criticism
;
Composers
;
Jazz
;
Jazz musicians United States
;
Biografie
Abstract:
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
Abstract:
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 pianistic virtuosity and irony; assiduous attention to arrangements and encouragement of collective improvisation; respect for tradition and celebration of the fresh. Some might have been bemused by his Afro-Platonic neo-hermeticism; others might
Abstract:
Have laughed at his egregious excesses. But Sun Ra was at once the last of the great romantic composers, one of the premier avant-gardists of the latter half of the twentieth century, and a black cultural nationalist who extended Afrocentrism from ancient Egypt to the heavens
Note:
Includes bibliographical references (pages 389-425) , discography (p. 427-448) , and index
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