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

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

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

ALAN LOMAX, Notes to Blues in the Mississippi Night, Rykodisc 90155 [1990] Little Sally Walker, sitting in a flying saucer Arkestra chant at Slug’s, c. 1967

at The Cry of Jazz and another film called Unheard Melodies, which showed how wind caused statues to

Wilson proposed that a booklet of Sonny’s notes be included with the record—a very unusual practice then or now, as musicians are seldom trusted to explain their own work—and he took full advantage of it, filling it with his poetry and various musings. Yet when Sonny suggested the notes be titled “Preparation for Outer Space,” Wilson thought he was

“Ancient Aiethopia” calls up the spirit of Ellington’s programmatic

There, among Hubert Humphrey, Vladimir Nabokov, Marianne Moore, Robert Graves, Senator George McGovern, William Safire, Isaac Asimov, Timothy Leary, Muhammad Ali, Bob Hope, Truman Capote, Ayn Rand, W. H. Auden, Marshall McLuhan, Justice William O. Douglas, Ed Koch, Gwendolyn Brooks,

“The Code of Interdependence,” on

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