Sun Ra

Herman Poole Blount was born on the twenty-second of May 1914 in Birmingham, Alabama, into the Black community of a post-Reconstruction steel city. His father was Cary Blount and his mother was Ida; the boy, called "Sonny," was doted upon by his mother and grandmother. A gifted and self-taught musician, he showed an early command of the piano and a voracious appetite for reading that would later feed his singular cosmic philosophy.

By the early 1950s he had settled in Chicago, where in October 1952 he legally set aside his given name and took the name Le Sony'r Ra, known ever after as Sun Ra. Out of the rehearsal ensembles he led through those years grew the collective that became the Arkestra — not a conventional band but a lifelong performance-art enterprise fusing music, mythology, ancient Egypt, and science fiction. He would lead it, in one form or another, until the end of his life.

Across four decades Sun Ra composed more than a thousand works and recorded well over a hundred albums, ranging from swinging big-band charts to pioneering electronic and free improvisation. He moved the Arkestra to New York in the early 1960s and to Philadelphia in 1968, sustaining a communal household of musicians devoted to his vision. In 1979 he was inducted into the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame in his native city.

He claimed Saturn as his true home and peace as his mission, and in doing so became a founding voice of Afrofuturism, teaching that a people could reimagine their place in the cosmos. Sun Ra died on the thirtieth of May 1993 in Birmingham, the city that bore him. We honor the composer who turned the sky itself into a homeland for the imagination.