Sun Ra

USA, 1954–1993

Cosmic jazz avant-gardist and bandleader who built a mythology around Saturn, outer space and Afrofuturism. His orchestras explored free jazz, electronic instruments and collective improvisation.

MusicRoots documents 1 artist who influenced Sun Ra and 5 artists Sun Ra influenced in turn. Every connection cites a published source.

Who influenced Sun Ra?

• Fletcher Henderson — Sun Ra played piano and arranged for Fletcher Henderson's band in 1946–47 — the swing discipline beneath the Arkestra's cosmos.

Which artists did Sun Ra influence?

• Sergey Kuryokhin — Pop-Mekhanika stood in the line of Sun Ra's Arkestra — a large, theatrical, costumed improvising collective staging music as spectacle.
• MC5 — Sun Ra showed MC5 that music could be total revolution — artistic and political simultaneously.
• Madlib — Sun Ra is among the names Madlib gives for his own listening, and the model for a musician who works under invented identities.
• Flying Lotus — Sun Ra's cosmology and his willingness to let a band come apart are part of what Cosmogramma is made from.
• Pharoah Sanders — Sanders joined Sun Ra's Arkestra a year after reaching New York, and it was Sun Ra who gave him the name Pharoah.