"One for the Road:" Sun Ra

By Chuck Sudo in Arts & Entertainment on Nov 9, 2010 10:45PM

Musician Herman Poole Blount claimed to have taken a trip to Saturn in the late 1930s, but he didn't make his full transformation into Sun Ra until his time in Chicago. We've been listening to a lot of "Jazz in Silhoulette" and "We Travel the Spaceways" lately and the fact is: get past the Egyptology and science fiction influences and you'll find Sun Ra was firmly rooted in bop tradition, as his song "Plutonian Nights" shows.