Two years later, Sonny headed to Chicago to reignite his musical career. He drank the Windy City down, its vibrant jazz and cabaret scenes, its Art Deco buildings and monuments, its convoluted history of Black Nationalism. Skipping from band to band, he finally formed his own. He called it the Arkestra. And on October 20, 1952, riffing on Egyptian mythology, Sonny renamed himself once more. He became Le Sony’r Ra, or Sun Ra for short. Herman Blount, he said, was a slave name.
Pictures of Sun Ra often suggest chaotic hybridity: priestly futuristic costumes and sets, ancient Egypt and the planet Saturn forming a palimpsest of past and future utopias. His sound synthesized big band, swing, hard bop, reggae, Afropop, electronic music, and Walt Disney musicals. His references—expressed in his lyrics, poetry, and pamphlets—showcased this eclecticism too: Kabbalah, gnosticism, freemasonry, pan-Africanism, Zen. When he taught a course at the University of California, Berkeley in 1971, his syllabus included The Egyptian Book of the Dead; the theosophical works of Madame Blavatsky, the nineteenth-century Russian medium; Henry Dumas, a brilliant poet gunned down by New York City Transit Police in 1968. He often cited George G.M. James’s Stolen Legacy (1954), which claimed that Greek philosophy had filched its ideas from Egyptian mythology.
In Sun Ra’s various writings and interviews, he always maintained that there was a metaphysical basis for what he called his “equations”: non sequitur chains of koans and runes, of numerology and etymology. He had a bit of the guru’s antiphony of the individual and the collective to him. Sun Ra was always gathering disciples, yet set himself apart from them. His biographer, John F. Szwed, quotes Sun Ra as saying, “I know what they’re talking about, but they don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m in the midst of what they’re doing but they’ve never been in the midst of what has been impressed upon my mind.” He was lone wolf and lupine leader, Anubis presiding over the vast nothing of the black world, the underworld, and outer space.
In 1974 Sun Ra cowrote, produced, and starred in a film that’s often considered the origin text of what we now call Afrofuturism. The premise of Space Is the Place returns us to his interplanetary vision: Sun Ra wants to “set up a colony for black people…. We’ll bring them here through either isotope teleportation, transmolecularization, or better still, teleport the whole planet here through music.”