Sun Ra is best known for the extensive archive of recordings he made with his Arkestra, and most Ra enthusiasts are probably first attracted to his work by the sui generis imagination he brought to ...

Avant-garde jazz icon Sun Ra is being celebrated not for his other-worldly musical compositions, but for his poetry. In a new album from Omni Sound, titled My Words Are Music: A Celebration of Sun ...

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 ...

Marshall Allen (left), age 99, leads the Sun Ra Arkestra, keeping alive the avant-garde jazz stylings of the late Sun Ra. He is considered a pioneer of afrofuturism, exploring the intersection of ...

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 ...

For the previous entry in the Red Hot and Ra series, the long-running AIDS activist group Red Hot Organization tapped bassist Meshell Ndegeocello to craft a gripping ...

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 ...

Hugh Ragin, as brilliant a trumpeter as he is a dedicated educator, greeted me at Englewood’s Colorado Jazz Workshop on a Saturday afternoon in January. He had just finished a day’s worth of ...

The iconic Dew Drop Inn Hotel & Lounge, recently restored to its former glory, announces its programming for the upcoming New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. The Dew Drop will introduce its first ...

To make sense of Sun Ra's teeming discography would require a forensic sensibility. The Alabaman's output was vast, reissues on multiple labels numerous, and the provenance of much of his studio work- ...