Sun Ra turns 100 in 2014.

It is the 100th anniversary of Sun Ra’s arrival on the planet in 1914 and SUN RA CENTENNIAL DREAM ARKESTREA is celebrating this occasion with his compositions and new elements with the direction of Marshall Allen, original member of the Arkestra.

Sun Ra started his career in 1940s in Chicago.
He added avangard elements into swing/bop jazz orchestrations and tried to reach uncommon music experimentally. His delicate piano notes turned into chaotic organ sound or screaming synthesizer phrases. He incorporated elements drawn from black vaudeville, modern dance, Egyptian cosmology, Eastern philosophy, numerology, surrealism, kitsch, and the Bible to serve a corpus that deployed African rhythms, atonal melodies, electronic timbres, raw blues expression, unfailing swing, and still, one-for-all discipline drawn from the big bands that Ra internalized in his youth.

Sun Ra left the planet in 1993 and he still lives on in the current edition of the Sun Ra Arkestra, led by Marshall Allen.

The saxophonist Danny Thompson said, “We’re here to enlighten people’s minds about outer space, and try and better this planet.”


http://sunraarkestra.com/