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 ...

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 ...

Patrons of South Side jazz clubs in the 1950s might have noticed something a bit different about pianist Sun Ra’s big band — slowly at first, then all at once. Their sounds became more far-out, the ...

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 ...

Questlove, Dawn Richard and a range of other musicians, writers and critics share their favorites from the experimental pianist, organist and bandleader’s wide-ranging catalog. By Marcus J. Moore ...

Do not expect The Criterion Collection to reissue the 1974 film Space Is The Place anytime soon. It is though, a cult classic in the truest sense of the word. Sun Ra and his Arkestra had been at the ...

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 ...

Sun Ra’s statement, musically and spoken, is that this is a primitive world. Its practices, beliefs, religions, are uneducated, unenlightened, savage, destructive, already in the past. That’s why Sun ...

Ra Ra Riot's latest album was 2019's Superbloom, though they shared a live LP and a 10th anniversary edition of The Orchard the following year. Other than that, the indie-pop veterans have been quiet, ...

Most people know RA (real name: Ryan Abeo) as half of the hip-hop group Common Market. But in one condo building on Capitol Hill, he’s known as the maintenance guy. Once a resident paid RA $200 to ...