Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn and Chicago’s Afro-Futurist Underground 1954-68

John Corbett, Anthony Elms and Terry Kapsalis

Philosopher, Afro-futurist, and jazz legend Sun Ra (1914–93) constructed much of his complicated public persona during his sojourn in Chicago in the mid-1950s. Working with a still-shadowy underground fraternal organization, Ra amassed a library of books on the occult, Egyptology, race studies, Theosophy, and religion—all in service of drawing elliptical connections between these disparate bodies of knowledge. This work became the foundation of the personal mythology Ra employed in the 1960s when he began fronting his Myth-Science Arkestra and started drawing attention from more mainstream jazz fans.

status	checked out
genre	Music » Music History
publisher	Whitewalls Inc
publish date	2006
popularity	checked out 0 time(s)