Sun Ra.

Baraka, Amiri

I passed through Ra's orbit when they 1st arrived from Chicago into the Loisaida (pre Latino street signs), early '60s. They swept in, with tales and a frantic grapevine of every which observation.

The Weirdness, Outness, Way Outness, Otherness was immediate. Some space metaphysical philosophical surrealistic bop funk. Some blue pyramid home nigger southern different color meaning hip shit. Ra. Sun Ra.

Then they put on weird clothes, space helmets, robes, flowing capes. They did rituals played in rituals, evoked lost civilizations, used strangeness to teach us open feeling as intelligence.

In those cellars & lofts, Sun Ra spun a cosmic metaphor. He was a philosopher musician. He used music as language, and image.

His was an historical music. He began himself before he played with Fletcher Henderson, playing alternate piano in the orchestra when Fletcher conducted. In recent years he even brought Fletcher and Duke back with a sweetness and contemporary restatement that was thrilling.

Ra was so far out because he had the true self-consciousness of the Afro American intellectual artist revolutionary. He knew our historic ideology and socio-political consciousness was freedom. It is an aesthetic and social dynamic. We think it is good and beautiful!

Sun Ra's consistent statement, musically and spoken, is that this is a primitive world. Its practices, beliefs, religions are uneducated, unenlightened, savage, destructive, already in the past.

That's why Ra left and returned only to say he left. Into the Future. Into Space. He played Interplanetary Music. He described Angels & Devils At Play. From his Heliocentric vision, Ra's music unfolded; it was always, it seemed, always there. What it was. But it let us go into it further, showed us its multiple shapes, its wholeness.

Ra was at the Black Arts in Harlem the 1st program we had. He was always up there with us. Talking. Playing. He was one of the presences preaching expanding black consciousness, as expanding human consciousness.

The Sphinx is half-human, half-animal. It rises in fire as the human soul, BA, the Black Bird.

It was Sun Ra and The Myth Science Arkestra that marched across 125th St. with us the day the Arts opened in Harlem, announcing the '60s cultural revolution and sparking a Black Arts Movement, Poetry, Theater, Music, that complemented the Malcolm X-inspired rise of the new SNCC, Panthers, RNA, CAP, YOBU, and the insurrectionary phase of the Black Liberation Movement.

It was Ra, those weekday evenings at The BARTS, who introduced the so-called "Light Show" the rockers ripped off. With his "Space Organ" with its Pythagorean connection of Sound to Color. A low note, a dark hue. A high note, a bright color. Flashed into the dark theater from Ra's miraculous Space Organ.

Ra was also the pioneer in using various - then weird - electronic instruments. But he used everything. You could characterize one aspect of his music as African, as Indian, Latino, Caribbean, but it was all that as Afro American jazz.

No matter how "far out" the insiders said Ra was in the Harlem streets, he was a rare treat. Likewise on Stirling Street, Newark, in a vacant lot up the street from our Spirit House, Ra brought a huge crowd one summer. And we bathed and luxuriated in the swelling twilight funk, like we were stretched from here to anythere.

We brought the Arkestra back later for a Mardi Gras Kimako's Blues People put on. "What you gonna do when they push that button?" they chanted, marching up Branford Place up onto a flatbed truck on Broad St.

"Kiss your ass, Kiss your ass, Kiss your ass, Goodbye." The long screaming chord by the whole Arkestra had stopped people in their tracks, like an encounter of the further than 3rd type.

"What you gonna do when they push that button? Kiss your ass, Goodbye!"

At times Ra and his Cosmocentric or Heliocentric or Myth Science or Omniverse Arkestras would raise their music as an expression of strange ritual drama. There were Space Goddesses: June Tyson, Verta Mae Grosvenor, who strode through the music in dances of forgotten language, expressing the ancient continuum of religion and ritual drama.

That was a fundamental expression of Ra's music: a communal consciousness, describing the life before Babel and its mindless tower, as well as prophesying its coming.

The Arkestra was a family whose life was music, a life of philosophy. Many giants moved through it, but there were giants who remained.

Pat Patrick, the great baritonist and multi-reed hipster, was my very good friend. People always told us we looked alike, which was funny to us, even if it was true.

John Gilmore I have always thought is one of the finest and hippest tenor players I know. Plus I have known John since I met Ra. John is always on it, into Another Kind of signification and expression.

It's true, Trane did cop from John Gilmore. Trane would be the 1st to tell you that, too. He told Gilmore.

Marshall Allen, a giant. There is no alto saxophonist I know today, or generally, hipper than Marshall. That this is not common knowledge is depressing.

Sun Ra did the music on a record I produced of my play A Black Mass, a telling of Elijah Muhammad's telling of the myth of Jacoub, the mad black magician who created white people!

After the Newark Mardi Gras, Ra came up to the house. It was a block party, in and out of our basement theater. Ra held court in front of a spectacular spread of classic Afro American cuisine Amina had prepared. A bottle of Courvoisier, diverse friends . . . like the grand salons of advanced civilizations, where philosophers and intellectuals and artists could hold forth in open, pleasurable, serious discussion about the whole world and profound reality.

There was in Ra, and continues to be in his music, the witness of alternatives to all of this and what it's got going on. The evolution of humanity was his theme - from revelation to revelation, immeasurable, revolution to revolution, like heartbeats of truth. The breathing of always.

"We Travel The Space Ways," in that beautiful harmony as song chant, spiritual and scientific. Our bodies, our minds, our worlds, our consciousness, what is, travels the spaceways.

"From planet to planet." Perhaps earth will be evacuated, as Welles and Azimov and Bradbury wrote. The environmentalists could explain.

But also, the tower, the to where? Destiny, but as a constant character of motion and change. When?

We are the creators of Heaven and Hell. Everything you imagine has already been done and can be done. What you can't even imagine is where Sun Ra begins.

The possible is obvious, what is desired is the impossible.

What is not is what drives what is, and transforms it into itself. What is becomes what is not and what is not becomes what is and what is not.

The future is always here in the past.

"Next stop, Jupiter!"

Amiri Baraka, often called "the father of the '60s Black Arts Movement," is the author of Blues People, one of the most influential books on Black music ever written.