Sun Ra and his Arkestra perform with a steel sculpture on September 23, 1978, at Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor, Michigan. (Leni Sinclair/Getty Images) The Sun Ra Arkestra comes to San Francisco this ...

Bandleader Knoell Scott leads the Sun Ra Arkestra, performing at SFJazz on July 31, 2025. Photo by Frankie Solinsky Duryea. The Sun Ra Arkestra began the first of four San Francisco shows at SFJazz’s ...

Without the jazz musician, poet, and bandleader Sun Ra, the music industry would look and sound somewhat different. Countless mainstream artists have been inspired by his boundlessness and his ability ...

Over the decades, music venues in San Francisco have come and gone, but one constant remains: Great American Music Hall. A house of ill repute when it first opened in 1907, the building has gone ...

In pre- and inter-performance comments, a plea pervaded pianist Sullivan Fortner’s Friday show at the University of Chicago: Can we be anywhere but here? Thank goodness Sun Ra and his music mastered ...

As one would hope from a release claiming certified lineage to the source, Music for the 21st Century finds the Sun Ra Arkestra still playing swing mechanique, angular outside freestyle, comet tail ...

A documentary covering the life and work of Alabama’s most singular musician will have a national debut next year. “Sun Ra: Do the Impossible,” will premiere on PBS Feb. 20 as part of its “American ...

AIDS-awareness nonprofit Red Hot has announced a new tribute album honoring Sun Ra. Nuclear War, due out May 26, is the first volume in a new Red Hot & Ra series. Listen to the lead single, “Nuke’s ...

Sun Ra, the trailblazing jazz musician, poet, and pioneer of the Afrofuturism movement, was also a utopian—both in outer space and here on earth. Known for a persona that mixed cosmic references, ...

Red Hot, a non-profit organization “dedicated to fighting AIDS through pop culture,” has announced the third volume of its Red Hot + Ra series of albums paying tribute to free jazz cosmonaut Sun Ra, ...

"Sun Ra: Art on Saturn" features a vast quantity of album covers that were handcrafted by Ra and his bandmates. A handmade Sun Ra album cover, from Sun Ra: Art on Saturn. Photo: Courtesy of ...