Sun Ra's Chicago

"William T. Sites details the life of visionary musician Sun Ra in Chicago, from 1946 until 1961. Sun Ra's South Side was a site of unorthodox religious and cultural activism where 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 styles circulated and mashed together in clubs and community dancehalls. Sun Ra drew from a vast array of intellectual sources (radical nationalism, antinomian Christianity, black mythology, and science fiction) and from multiple musical traditions (swing, jazz, blues, Latin dance music, "space-age pop," and other exotica) to promulgate visions of the city that did not conform to the orthodoxies of metropolitan elites, black or white"--