Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra

of Stravinsky’s Le Sacré du Printemps. The

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

The main point concerning the synthesizer is the same as in all other instruments, that is, its capacity for the projection of feeling. This will not be determined in a large degree just by the instrument itself, but always in music, by the musician who plays the instrument.

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.

Art Tatum, Earl Hines, Fats Waller, Teddy Hill, Chick Webb, Lionel Hampton, Tiny Bradshaw, Louis Armstrong, Henry Red Allen, and Jay McShann, mostly—then

Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun or Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet.

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.”

Ray Bradbury had already brought America’s racial anxiety to bear on space in one of his stories in The Martian Chronicles, “ ‘Way Up in the Middle of the Air,” where all the black people of earth leave in rocket ships for another planet.

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