Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra

The main point concerning the synthesizer is the same as in all other instruments, that is, its capacity for the projection of feeling. This will not be determined in a large degree just by the instrument itself, but always in music, by the musician who plays the instrument.

On “Springtime in Chicago” Sonny played a piano so out of tune it sounded “prepared,” altered for percussive effects. And the electronic delay used on this cut was so extreme that it reverberates like Jamaican dub music which would not be heard until the 1960s.

When someone finally got around to asking Sun Ra if he was part of the underground, he declared that he was in the sub-underground.

There, among Hubert Humphrey, Vladimir Nabokov, Marianne Moore, Robert Graves, Senator George McGovern, William Safire, Isaac Asimov, Timothy Leary, Muhammad Ali, Bob Hope, Truman Capote, Ayn Rand, W. H. Auden, Marshall McLuhan, Justice William O. Douglas, Ed Koch, Gwendolyn Brooks,

(their whirring can be heard at the end of “We Travel the Spaceways”). Sonny’s own costume was constantly

Wilson proposed that a booklet of Sonny’s notes be included with the record—a very unusual practice then or now, as musicians are seldom trusted to explain their own work—and he took full advantage of it, filling it with his poetry and various musings. Yet when Sonny suggested the notes be titled “Preparation for Outer Space,” Wilson thought he was

Cotton Comes to Harlem, Shaft, Hit Man, and Superfly are also clear.

Ray Bradbury had already brought America’s racial anxiety to bear on space in one of his stories in The Martian Chronicles, “ ‘Way Up in the Middle of the Air,” where all the black people of earth leave in rocket ships for another planet.

of Stravinsky’s Le Sacré du Printemps. The