100 Years of Sun Ra, part 1

100 YEARS of SUN RA!  
A 12 hour marathon of the music, words and life of SUN RA, hosted by Daniel Flessas, David Lifton, Chris Merrick and others..

Tune in to KBOO.fm from 7 PM til 7 AM (pacific time) for a joyful 100th birthday celebration of this genius of jazz, avant garde music and cosmo-love philosophy! Hear the many manifestations of SUN RA's amazing ARKESTRA over the decades.

INCLUDING, at 9:00 pm, a special LIVE in-studio performance by the SONIC INNOVATORS ARKESTRA (featuring David Ornette Cherry and students of Thara Memory's!)  

In Conjunction with the official launch of the SUN RA ARCHIVE, we will share EXCLUSIVE sneak previews (being released TODAY and Ark-ivist Michael D and Irwin Chusid are letting KBOO premiere these before the rest of Earth has them) of "a series of mastered for iTunes classic and UNRELEASED Sun Ra albums, sessions, rarities and cosmic mysteries" (-Michael D)

 One of the 20th century's most prolific and daring musicians, Sun Ra arrived on Planet Earth (in Birmingham, Alabama "The Magic City") 100 YEARS AGO TODAY, on May 22, 1914, but located himself in outer space, beyond both the geographical limits of the United States and the ideological limits of Jim Crow and the Cold War. Such views, spliced with a homegrown Egyptology, earned Sun Ra a reputation as an Afro-eccentric charlatan-genius in the tradition of Marcus Garvey and Elijah Muhammad, and kept his"Arkestra" below the radar of concert halls and record companies.

Tune in from 7 PM onward as KBOO explores Sun Ra's amazing 6-decade career, showing how he defied critics' classifications, pioneering free jazz and electronic music in the 1940s and reviving big bands in the 1970s. TURN IT UP and let your whole house revel in this music--a joyful noise authorized by biblical prophecy, rooted in his native Birmingham's African-American fraternal, club, and society dance orchestras of the 1930s, and branching out into the heavenly spheres--. Perhaps this late romantic jazz totalist, who shunned sex and drugs, rejected modern notions of race and nation, and took his merry band of"tone scientists" on shoestring-and-bootstrap world tours, will never be brought down to earth.