Sun Ra brought to life with two concerts in Les Ateliers Claus

Twenty four years after his passing, Sun Ra is still sending cosmic rays down to earth. Thanks to his otherworldly version of jazz and saxophonist Marshall Allen, who keeps The Arkestra in orbit.

"People who are somehow in the in-between are the ones I find most fascinating," the Canadian electronica musician Dan Snaith told us a few years ago, after he and his band Caribou had been jamming with the legendary jazz ensemble The Arkestra. Its founder and inspirer, Sun Ra, was always in between. Although he consciously sought to place himself in the margins.

Sun Ra was born Herman Poole Blount in 1914 in Birmingham, Alabama, which was still entirely segregated at the time. Throughout his whole life, he wrestled with black emancipation and his association with the Black Power movement. In the 1930s, Blount went to study composition, orchestration, and music theory at the Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University, but he quit after a year when he was… abducted by aliens and taken to Saturn.

They told him that through his music, he was to create order in the chaos that the world would become. This changed everything. Blount dedicated himself completely to his music, took the example of Leonardo da Vinci to sleep very little, and turned his house into a studio for himself and his followers. After WWII and a prison term for conscientious objection, he moved to Chicago.

In imitation of Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, he changed his name to Le Sony'r Ra, and a little later to Sun Ra, after the Egyptian sun god Ra. It was in this period that he also founded The Arkestra, after which Sun Ra and his entourage started dressing as Egyptian pharaohs from outer space, with the wackiest headdresses. It was a way of marking his "origins", but also a way of mocking the avant-garde scene, which took itself far too seriously.

In the 1960s, Sun Ra was embraced by the Black Panther movement, Beat Poets, and hippies who loved the long psychedelic jams of the Grateful Dead. He moved to New York and eventually ended up in Philadelphia. In the early 1970s, he was even briefly an artist-in-residence at the University of California, Berkeley, teaching a course called "The Black Man in the Cosmos", in which he discussed things like the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and African American folklore.

The mythology that Sun Ra constructed around his life was a big part of his appeal, but more than anything it was his music that made him and his Arkestra, that is still led by the now 92 year old Marshall Allen, unique. Sun Ra evolved from big band, bebop, and hard-bop to spiritual free jazz and pioneering synth and cosmic jazz. In 1973, this culminated in the total freak-out of the album Space Is the Place and the film of the same name. On the title track, a choir sings "There is no limit to the things you can do."

No words better represent the jazz guru who has been dwelling in the cosmos since 1993.

> Sun Ra Arkestra under the direction of Marshall Allen. 25/03 & 26/3, 20.00, Les Ateliers Claus, Sint-Gillis