To make sense of Sun Ra's teeming discography would require a forensic sensibility. The Alabaman's output was vast, reissues on multiple labels numerous, and the provenance of much of his studio work- ...

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 ...

Avant-garde jazz icon Sun Ra is being celebrated not for his other-worldly musical compositions, but for his poetry. In a new album from Omni Sound, titled My Words Are Music: A Celebration of Sun ...

Bandleader Knoell Scott leads the Sun Ra Arkestra, performing at SFJazz on July 31, 2025. Photo by Frankie Solinsky Duryea. The Sun Ra Arkestra began the first of four San Francisco shows at SFJazz’s ...

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... Hugh Ragin, as brilliant a trumpeter as he is a dedicated educator, greeted me at Englewood’s Colorado Jazz Workshop on a Saturday afternoon in January. He ...

The Sun Ra Arkestra, the ensemble Ra led for nearly 40 years until his death in 1993, was a big band in fact if not always in style, and Kronos has called in a wealth of collaborators to match Ra’s ...

The iconic Dew Drop Inn Hotel & Lounge, recently restored to its former glory, announces its programming for the upcoming New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. The Dew Drop will introduce its first ...

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 ...

BIRMINGHAM, Ala (WIAT) — A jazz icon who was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, but made his musical and philosophical home among “the spaceways,” was recently featured on an episode of “The ...

Scientists from the Paranormal Institute met with Sun Ra, aka Herman Blount, a generation ago. Ra, who led the avant-garde Sun Ra Arkestra until he died in 1993, hailed from Birmingham, Ala., but ...

Sun Ra is best known for the extensive archive of recordings he made with his Arkestra, and most Ra enthusiasts are probably first attracted to his work by the sui generis imagination he brought to ...