February is Black History Month, and each week all month, World Cafe correspondent John Morrison is joining us to talk about a different trailblazer of Black music. These mavericks took musical risks ...

Pianist, bandleader, arranger and Afro-Futurist Sun Ra was thought to be a decidedly non-mainstream figure in the jazz world as he directed his Arkestra throughout the last half of the 20th Century.

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 ...

Sun Ra, an Alabama native and pioneering force in jazz music, will be honored in his home state with a new, multi-day festival. Organizer Lee Shook has raised more than $21,000 for the May festival ...

The Great American Music Hall has long served as an anchor of San Francisco's music scene. As jazz bookings here are infrequent, it was great news when the venue welcomed back the Sun Ra Arkestra for ...

Have pity on the poor Sun Ra music collector. You see, those who “do research" on a single artist like Duke Ellington, Sonny Blount, or John Coltrane spend years and countless dollars chasing one ...

And in the case of 100-year-old Marshall Allen, leader of the unique Sun Ra Arkestra, fun means continuing to do what he’s done for most of his life — making music.

I have been listening to the music of Sun Ra since the mid-1970s. His Arkestra performed somewhere in Washington, DC right around that time. I didn’t attend the show (I was broke), but a few friends ...

Few musicians have been as delightfully and fascinatingly weird as Sun Ra. He was born Herman Poole Blount, changed his name to honor the Egyptian god of the sun, believed he was an angelic being from ...

While working on her new documentary about composer, pianist, and poet Sun Ra, Christine Turner kept words of wisdom from the visionary bandleader close at hand. “I kept these quotes on my wall above ...

Legendary Afrofuturist bandleader, composer, and musician Sun Ra had an eye on the cosmos. Though he passed away in 1993, the members of his 13-person musical ensemble, the Sun Ra Arkestra, have since ...