THE SUN RA ARKESTRA & Timesplace.

"People have two harps in their head, their ears, just like a harp. They hear by the strings in their ears. If I play something very strange, then some strings that never vibrated before will vibrate. The whole nervous system will become alive -- SUN RA. (Sale 1987: 55, also Corbett 1989: 24).

Brought to congress by Sonny Bount (SUN RA),
A cast of vibrational scientists combine their instruments in new ways
Exploring inner and outer spaces.


"."The Others in Their World", "From Out Where Others Dwell",
"Moon People", "They Dwell on Other Planes".

Like the old hermetical saying, "As above, so below",
You may operate spacetime & skyrockets that lie
Barely inches behind the eye-socket.
Marshall Allen like an optical scientist,
A Dr. of Saxophany. Probing the frequency spectrums.

The 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s were the space-race years
SUN RA and his Arkestra were in the race,
Playing the musical Nemesis of the arms-race.
Life music in good time.
John Gilmore breaking sound & light boundaries
Thought previously to be, boundaries.
Iron birds fly from the horn.
Babbling brook and chattering river voices.
From the 65' Coltrane explosion, fragments linger
Like soft spoken Billie's echoplextasy.

July 28th 1969: John Sinclair’s bogus trial had been postponed,
Temporarily for the spectacle of the moon landing.
After the landing the judges sentenced John to 10 years in jail
For being - set up - with two joints by an undercover police
Robot officer.

"The Satellites are Spinning", "The Cosmo-Fire",
"Lights on a Satellite", "Cosmo-Energy", "Friendly Galaxy",
"Irregular Galaxy", "Space is the Place."


“Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives useful equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, spheres, and the like, but equations for the human emotions” –Ezra Pound.

SUN RA's interpretation of SPACE, TIME, TRAVEL,
MUSIC, JAZZ, PHILOSOPHY, ASTROLOGY,
MAGICK, POETRY, LANGUAGE and
INTER-PLANETARY ECONOMICS have stayed NEWS.

Most of the evidence is time-binded into various artefacts,
Records (ESP DISKS) books, linear notes of poetry
Scattered about earth for humanity to discover and reactivate.
Dark star Danny Davis Alto Sax. The great
Pat Patrick blowing vortex about clarinet.

I admire Sun Ra for openly embracing the Full Blown Myth
And living his life according to his vision.
RA made a magical oath and transformed himself using a new program.
Changing reality in conformity with will as empowered by musical
Instruments, new methods, languages, symbol systems and
Hermetic-cosmological data.


"Sun Ra asserted that the ever-changing name of his ensemble reflected the ever-changing nature of his music." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ra


The relatively inexpensive, open source research that Sun Ra
Conducted benefitted the whole tribe.
Sun Ra was manifesting hyperdimensional physics equations
Using the stage as his living laboratory and timesplace.

Sharing scientific results with humanity via the language of music,
Hieroglyph and poetically attenuated alphabet "word"
NASA has no music and so not much chance of reaching the stars IMHO.
Like SUN RA, scientific methods for intergalactic shifting.
Atakatun, Odun and Chiea 6 hands as 24' on congas.

My own experimentation with music and altered states
Of awareness quickly led me to the music of Sun Ra,
John Coltrane, Miles and other exciting recordings
From the legends of the jazz idiom.

I was a late bloomer and missed the original scene, by 30 years
Influenced by the book - More brilliant than the sun by Kodwo Eshun
Kindly lent to me by a DJ and Sun Ra fan: Kevin Gator.

"Imagination", "Enlightenment", "Strange Dreams",
"Rocket Number Nine", "Journey Among the Stars",
"Moonship Journey", "We Travel the Spaceways",
"Strange Celestial Road",

Other sufficiently connected musicians exhibit
An equal mastery of healing Vibrational states
And musical moderated psychology -

Coltrane, Monk, Alice Coltrane,
Pharoah, Miles, these artistic spacetime explorers are
Distinguished from NASA's rocket propulsion technologists
And their use of mathematical trajectories,
Directed for the outer-space walking missions,
That cost Billions of bio-survival tickets and yet,
Produce no music, literature or new space philosophy.
Billy Higgins and Earl Buster Smith on drum-mathstrology

"I would say that it's black from the point of view that it's still got the darkness of myth. And it really pinpoints ancient Egypt in a definite way" -- SUN RA. (Burks 1969: 17).


Like many breakthroughs before their time
SRA was largely ignored, mocked and misunderstood in his own time.
Treated like Finnegans Wake by James Joyce as being "obscure".
A Chaosmos of languages voicing spirits
All-at-once. Throwing sound and image onto the mind.

Jazz meets “free jazz” “sound Art” “experimental music”
“Cosmic Jazz” Cosmic! The Sun Ra Arkestra owns the term "cosmic music."
Used here to denote: scientifically speaking: Astrologically
& harmonically - Neurologically - modulated communications.
Ruth Wright as Earth mother. Soft screams and Primal scream.

Jazz of the spheres. Black Timespace Jazz, make it new.
Changes...Sun Ra and His Arkestra dedicate their lives to
The musical magickal ARTs
Their music deserves a deeper look,

A band of psychonauts aware of each other
And fully conversive. Each instrument and human being
Open at al times. Conversive.
In a state of extra sensory awareness,
Growing new ears on stage in front of the world
Tommy Hunter makes a jungle and a skyscraper
From percussion instr...

Open-source musical offerings of wild discipline,
Shamanic ritual chants and intonations, song and spoken word.
As John Sinclair asks -
“What is Jazz, but spirituals played through horns, piano’s”
Don Cherry, Philly Jo Jones and Archie Shepp make
HIROSHIMA HIROSHIMA!

"Most of the time the avant-garde looks so serious. . .They don't look like they're really having fun. . .I want people to laugh at the costumes I have on" -- SUN RA. (Macnie 1987: 62).


“Which form’s of alternative scripture seem apropriate
For the 20th Century and which for the 21st?“ RAW.
To switch the scripture with music we might then ask
Which forms of alternative music seem most appropriate
For the 21st century?


"Irise, Osirises!" James Joyce, Finnegans Wake Pg. 493.28.


In Literature, and the painted word (ART) and so
ART theory? huh. The only model of choice choice, for me -
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, and its hologramic form of
streamed self-replicating imagengines structural correspondence with
The "free" "Modern" jazz music of John Coltrane,
Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, John Gilmore, Marshall Allen.
Don Cherry, and so Bird, Lenny Bruce and Lester Young
And on...

"Cosmonaut-Astronaut Rendezvous", "Walking on the Moon",
"Space Shuttle", "When Spaceships Appear",
"As Spaceships Approach", "Journey Stars Beyond",
"Journey Towards Stars", "Journey Outwards".

Furthermore, the Joycean chaosmos of language,
Symbol, sign, pun - spilling out from all parts of the page like perfume
Are arguably comparable with the swirling mass of
Encyclopedic and self-prophesed UNIVERSAL languages
That was the SUN RA ARKESTRA
A new Afroblack Languaging Entity
An Awakening in every sense of the word.
Word-Sound-Image.


“Do people who think "ideogrammically" develop different "brains" than people who think alphabetically? Bucky Fuller and Pound agree with Fenollosa that they do. What do you think?” -- Dr. Robert Anton Wilson. The Tale of the Tribe.


“What planet is this?” “What planet is… this?”
Questions weaving riddles within the dense cloak of
Sound-art like a musical crossword puzzle.

Art, art, surely this is art music, nothing, virtual made flesh
Sheets of sound coming from all quarters.
Infra red to ultra violet. Flashes of horns and heads and regalia
Crashes of cymbal upon cymbal upon symbol.
Roger Blank, and Sun Ra and Robert Cummings drum
The sun myth into the earths atosphere.

Nothing is! so, now,
“What is life? What is death?”
Listeners must rethink for themselves.
The energy runs straight and direct to the mystery,
The unknown – beyond language – places of truth and beauty
The dark Myth, dark magus, the angular regions of dischord,
The nightworld, the sacred dreamspace
Where jazz often dwells

Differential SPACE equations and Cosmic calculus,
Cymbol systems and vibrational codes decoded.
– into the symbols and signs - SUN RA and his Arkestra
Cutting the edge off Avant Garden

It pays to listen to the records more than twice,
Tune into the fantastic conversations between the band,
Their music and their environment.
Out of nowhere!

Vast expanses, Cosmic Chaos, opening up
Seemingly in all directions at once,
Cracking open under foot, like
An atomic detonation under the ground.
Sun Ra Thunder enlightening.

"Nubia", "Africa", "Watusa", "Aiethopia",
"Yucatan", "India", "Overtones of China",
"China Gates", "Ancient Ethiopia"."Ankh",
"Ankhnaten", "Pyramids", "Tiny Pyramids", "Pharoah's Den".

A Musical detonation of language and counterpointed
Fragments. Spezzazo. Splintered.
The word & image shot in all directions
Out through the horn and sent spinning off into hyperspace
Toward Saturn below your right ear.
To Jupiter at the top of your crown
Or any number of planets in the Omniverse within and without.


"Cosmic music is a place of tomorrow, it is the dimension and the balanced perspective of tomorrow . .It speaks to the worlds of the greater potentials awaiting the peoples of the worlds at every future point on every future plane. -- SUN RA. (Burks 1969: 17).


Words gone in and out the horn.
Instruments as word processors write encycopedias
And epics for earth people caught between two worlds.
The Arkestra graceful as a Japanese NOH theatre group
Elo Omoe blow bass clarinet as a FOG horn,
Clearing air, clearing.

A future circuit, looping, building semiotic links
Like a pre-historic search engine of jazz scholars.
Blending intention and music toward void. Null.
Nothing Is.
Something else.
Your guess is as good as mine.

The phalanx of musical languages unleashed
By SRA approximate the sound of all-at-once-music.
Omniversal as Finnegans Wake. Beautiful chaos.
With mind like qualities. Like Elliot Levin.
Like the word-sound-word of Elliot Levin!


“I finished the sirens chapter during the last few days. A big job. I wrote this chapter with the technical resources of music. It is a fugue with all musical notations: piano, forte, rallentando, and so on. A quintet occurs in it, too, as in the meistersinger, my favorite Wagner opera.” – James Joyce


Through the 19th Century American Orientalist
Ernest Fenollosa & then Ezra Pound later picked up on
And expanded somewhat upon this all-at-onceness,

Pound – by way of his IDEOGRAMIC METHOD,
Achieved a higher condensation of information,
Through his new methods, and with the help of his friends,
Humanity received new thinking and processing tools.

Sun Ra and His Arkestra have a similar affinity
With this process of condensation.
Pound and Joyce developed a whole new styling.
Marshall Allen styles the forces through courses of Van Allen Bolts.

Like the way Charlie “Bird” Parker
Made a whole new pattern recognition. A new discovery,
A new styling in music, which others would soon use.
And copy and reclaim.

Jump to John Coltrane and his new ways of connecting,
Condensing and reinterpreting the language of music - further.
Folded standards upon braodway hits upon folk tunes and spirituals
Packed into tighter and tighter packets of information.

Akmed Abdullah blows Trumpet, Noel scot alto sax, John Ore
Swings the bass around the axis, they dwell on other planets.
Entire Albums of what might pass for music in 2009
Are played within just 7 or 8 seconds: balanced equations
On the fly.

Such giant encyclopedic and epic
Imagengines of musical geniuses:
Theolonius Monk, Charlie Parker,
Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Sonny “SUN RA” Blount and his Arkestra.


SUN RA: “When I play I sometimes use “Myth science” – I’ve got some songs that come under that – and then I had some under the solar Arkestra… and then I got the Astro-Infinity – and all of them mean different things to me.

JOHN SINCLAIR: Other Planes of There…

SUN RA: Yes…all of them are based on those other planes, I think people need them now. They should be trying them out, see what’ll happen. In fact they’re gonna have to – because I might be on Jupiter or Mars by then. Because I’m not stopping my program. Now I got the Solar Arkestra, the myth science, and the astro infinity and soon I’ll have something else. Just like a University – I’ve got my different courses set up – and they deal with things that are gonna be beneficial to people –SUN RA. John Sinclair Interview. It's ALL GOOD: A John Sinclair Reader.


"In 1948, he performed informally with a trio consisting of Coleman Hawkins and violinist Stuff Smith. In this year he also made his recording debut with Eugene Wright and His Dukes of Swing, with a group that also included Yusef Lateef. Other activities in Chicago included playing with the Red Saunders band at the Club deLisa, and engagements at the Grand Terrace Club. In the early 1950s he led a nationalist group and began printing and distributing his own pamphlets. -- http://www.ethnomusic.ucla.edu/staff/martinelli/Sun%20Ra.htm


SUN RA makes more sense in the world of internet 2009 that he did in the 1960's.