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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Discoveries of lost tapes are often trumpeted as legendary or revelatory, but in the case of the greatly expanded Nuits De La Fondation Maeght, the hype feels entirely warranted. The release offers a ...

At SFJazz on Thursday night, 15 musicians and one dancer slowly filed onstage wearing uniforms that sparkled like the Milky Way: bejeweled robes, pharaoh headdresses, wraparound neon sunglasses. As ...