Don Michael, a one-armed pianist who played and recorded with Erskine Hawkins in the mid-1940s.

In fact, he was a romantic in the strict sense of the term, one who believed that music should be composed and played through the “addition of strangeness to beauty.”

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.

Sonny said, “If music is in your heart, you can’t do anything wrong.”

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

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,

“Saturday Night on Saturn,” “Atlantis,” “Voodoo Dreams,” and “Pyramid of the Sun.” Sonny first heard Baxter on Perfume Set to Music (1946) and Music Out of the Moon (1947), two albums built around melodies for theremin performed by Dr. Samuel Hoffman, a Los Angeles podiatrist who had played on the soundtracks of Spellbound and The Lost Weekend.

of Stravinsky’s Le Sacré du Printemps. The

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.