To make sense of Sun Ra's teeming discography would require a forensic sensibility. The Alabaman's output was vast, reissues on multiple labels numerous, and the provenance of much of his studio work- ...

Few musicians have been as delightfully and fascinatingly weird as Sun Ra. He was born Herman Poole Blount, changed his name to honor the Egyptian god of the sun, believed he was an angelic being from ...

Avant-garde jazz icon Sun Ra is being celebrated not for his other-worldly musical compositions, but for his poetry. In a new album from Omni Sound, titled My Words Are Music: A Celebration of Sun ...

Bandleader Knoell Scott leads the Sun Ra Arkestra, performing at SFJazz on July 31, 2025. Photo by Frankie Solinsky Duryea. The Sun Ra Arkestra began the first of four San Francisco shows at SFJazz’s ...

A documentary covering the life and work of Alabama’s most singular musician will have a national debut next year. “Sun Ra: Do the Impossible,” will premiere on PBS Feb. 20 as part of its “American ...

Marshall Allen (left), age 99, leads the Sun Ra Arkestra, keeping alive the avant-garde jazz stylings of the late Sun Ra. He is considered a pioneer of afrofuturism, exploring the intersection of ...

For the previous entry in the Red Hot and Ra series, the long-running AIDS activist group Red Hot Organization tapped bassist Meshell Ndegeocello to craft a gripping ...

February is Black History Month, and each week all month, World Cafe correspondent John Morrison is joining us to talk about a different trailblazer of Black music. These mavericks took musical risks ...

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... Hugh Ragin, as brilliant a trumpeter as he is a dedicated educator, greeted me at Englewood’s Colorado Jazz Workshop on a Saturday afternoon in January. He ...

Fantastico Sun Ra! Questo concerto registrato a Cleveland nel gennaio del 1975, sebbene la qualità del nastro non sia delle più brillanti, si apre all'insegna del funk-rap più immediato, con il basso ...

The Sun Ra Arkestra, the ensemble Ra led for nearly 40 years until his death in 1993, was a big band in fact if not always in style, and Kronos has called in a wealth of collaborators to match Ra’s ...