February is Black History Month, and each week all month, World Cafe correspondent John Morrison is joining us to talk about a different trailblazer of Black music. These mavericks took musical risks ...

The outlandish persona Sun Ra created and maintained for himself over the years may sometimes distract from the adventurous intent of the music he made. Yet it is testament to his vigorous loyalty to ...

Without the jazz musician, poet, and bandleader Sun Ra, the music industry would look and sound somewhat different. Countless mainstream artists have been inspired by his boundlessness and his ability ...

Patrons of South Side jazz clubs in the 1950s might have noticed something a bit different about pianist Sun Ra’s big band — slowly at first, then all at once. Their sounds became more far-out, the ...

Do not expect The Criterion Collection to reissue the 1974 film Space Is The Place anytime soon. It is though, a cult classic in the truest sense of the word. Sun Ra and his Arkestra had been at the ...

Questlove, Dawn Richard and a range of other musicians, writers and critics share their favorites from the experimental pianist, organist and bandleader’s wide-ranging catalog. By Marcus J. Moore ...

Few musicians have been as delightfully and fascinatingly weird as Sun Ra. He was born Herman Poole Blount, changed his name to honor the Egyptian god of the sun, believed he was an angelic being from ...

Meshell Ndegeocello is spearheading the next installment in the ongoing Sun Ra tribute series, Red Hot + Ra, with the LP Red Hot & Ra: The Magic City, out April 12. The LP isn’t a traditional “tribute ...

Dave Pehling is website managing editor for CBS Bay Area. He started his journalism career doing freelance writing about music in the late 1990s, eventually working as a web writer, editor and ...

Had he lived long enough, Sun Ra, a man equally invested in preserving history and welcoming the future, just might have been a Bandcamp fan. At this point, more than 100 albums by the late ...