Nebulae

Sun Ra (piano, bass marimba, electric celeste). From the album The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, Volume One (1965).

Sun Ra believed that humanity had to be awakened. He wanted to free himself from the old ideas and customs. As a child he spent his time playing the piano and composing, and he loved books. He read the ancient Egyptian and Greek texts, the works of P. Ouspensky, Booker T. Washington, Helena Blavatsky, James Joyce and Rudolf Steiner. He also read about the history of blacks African Americans and studied the origins of language, the Bible, the Kabbalah and the Rosicrucian principles. He learned that it was possible to order the turmoil of human knowledge because all disciplines were part of a unified existence. Sun Ra eliminated sleep, drugs and women from his life because he didn’t want to waste even a single moment of his time. He vowed to live every instant with anticipation and he did it through jazz. In jazz, unity can exist because it requires discipline, precision and a clear mind. Jazz was the path to mystical experience.

Sun Ra claimed that blacks African American belonged to a secret society with their own language, music, codes and cultural manifestations that only they could understand. He also declared that he had been sent to Earth from the cosmos to save humanity and bring harmony to the world. In the Sun Ra Arkestra performances you could find music, dance, theater and slide shows, and the musicians were disguised as Egyptians, Africans, space beings and carnival. In addition, they lived, worked and thought together. The group breathed the music and abandoned itself to it as one enlightened organism whose guide was Sun Ra.

In this musical piece, the only one who intervenes is Ra playing his instruments. He start with the electric celeste offering an intrepid and stimulating speech that he then softens. Then he briefly plays the marimba and at once moves onto the piano with a very slow solo in which he introduces faster phrases in between.