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Sun Ra’s Chicago
AFROFUTURISM AND THE CITY
WILLIAM SITES
328 pages | 25 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 2020
Historical Studies of Urban America
Sun Ra (1914–93) was one of the most wildly prolific and unfailingly eccentric figures in the history of music. Renowned for extravagant performances in which his Arkestra appeared in neo-Egyptian garb, the keyboardist and bandleader also espoused an interstellar cosmology that claimed the planet Saturn as his true home. In Sun Ra’s Chicago, William Sites brings this visionary musician back to earth—specifically to the city’s South Side, where from 1946 to 1961 he lived and relaunched his career. The postwar South Side was a hotbed of unorthodox religious and cultural activism: Afrocentric philosophies flourished, storefront prophets sold “dream-book bibles,” and Elijah Muhammad was building the Nation of Islam. It was also an unruly musical crossroads where the man then known as Sonny Blount drew from an array of intellectual and musical sources—from radical nationalism, revisionist Christianity, and science fiction to jazz, blues, Latin dance music, and pop exotica—to construct a philosophy and performance style that imagined a new identity and future for African Americans. Sun Ra’s Chicago shows that late twentieth-century Afrofuturism emerged from a deep, utopian engagement with the city—and that by excavating the postwar black experience of Sun Ra’s South Side milieu, we can come to see the possibilities of urban life in new ways.
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Inhalt:
Urban Routes, Utopian Pathways
Part I: Birmingham
1 Downtown Sounds
2 Industrial School to Territory Band
3 Leadership Dreams
Part II: Chicago
4 South Side Music Scene
5 “Sound So Loud It Will Wake Up the Dead”
6 Utopian Chicago
7 African Space
8 Wonder Inn, 1960
Lineages/Legacies
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
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Auszüge aus Rezensionen:
The Wire
“An important contribution. . . Sites draws on an impressive number of disciplines to ground Ra’s spacebound theatrics in material history. . . . He cites work from urban studies, African American studies, theology, and literary theory. . . It’s difficult to imagine anyone other than Sites writing a work that demands mastery of these specific disciplines.”
Library Journal
„Not the launching point for an introduction to the life of Sun Ra, but rather a deeper dive into the city life and utopian vision informing his work and philosophy, emphasizing that (Urban) Space Is the Place.“
Erik S. Gellman, author of Troublemakers: Chicago Freedom Struggles through the Lens of Art Shay
“Sun Ra’s Chicago is a masterful account of the musician’s formative years. Sites deftly applies a wider lens to his biography, analyzing the urban spaces and networks that shaped Sonny Blount’s transformation from an itinerant musician into the otherworldly philosophical leader of the Arkestra. This book is essential reading not only for Sun Ra listeners but for readers interested in the crosscurrents of Black intellectual thought and the utopian possibilities, past and present, of America’s cities.”
Larry Bennett, author of The Third City: Chicago and American Urbanism
„Like its subject, Sun Ra’s Chicago is a category buster—social history, musicology, urban studies, hermeneutics, cultural reclamation—and as such, a revelation. Sites tells a story of countercultural ferment in 1950s south side Chicago that is detailed and provocative. Sun Ra, Alton Abraham, and the members and friends of the Arkestra were truly a ‚creative class‘ long before that term, as we know it, was coined.“
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alles von hier:
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo59259312.html
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"Don't play what the public want. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doin' -- even if it take them fifteen, twenty years." (Thelonious Monk) | Meine Sendungen auf Radio StoneFM: gypsy goes jazz, #151: Neuheiten aus dem Archiv – 09.04., 22:00 | Slow Drive to South Africa, #8: tba | No Problem Saloon, #30: tba