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

Through deft writing and detailed chronology, Yale professor and music critic Szwed manages to make the seemingly unintelligible, shiny-turbaned pioneer of big-band free jazz more accessible to society at large. Born Herman Poole Blount in Birmingham, Ala., Sun Ra (1914-1993) denounced his past with unprecedented thoroughness--he often said he wasn't born and that he had no family--when transforming himself in the 1940s and '50s from a gifted young jazz pianist into the leader of 30-odd musicians and followers who recorded ceaselessly and could play ""for the sake of beauty and enlightenment"" for 10 to 15 hours straight. As Szwed shows, an elaborate, paranoid and finally incoherent pastiche of cosmology, history and sci-fi fantasy underlay Sun Ra's musical and verbal ramblings, resulting in innovations like the ""space key,"" in which a drone anchored the piece while musicians improvised without the benefit of a particular key. Convincingly, Szwed finds method in this madness, juxtaposing Sun Ra's career and thoughts with the developing civil rights movement, and showing with encyclopedic aplomb (and an invaluable discography) how ""Sonny's"" career stretched from the 1930's Fletcher Henderson era through the extraordinary flowering of the black avant-garde in the 1960s and '70s, and beyond. Sun Ra, who by then had won the respect, if not the admiration, of some critics and musicians like Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk, continued to compose, record and perform until his death. Photos. (July)