PHILADELPHIA
The late jazz musician and band leader Sun Ra told of having a mystical experience in his youth in which he was transported to Saturn and instructed to speak to the world in troubled times to come.
For the rest of his life, Sun Ra’s avant garde jazz, outlandish dress and sometimes obscure pronouncements confounded the music establishment and many listeners. A decade and a half after his death, he is credited with having been a forerunner of the Afrofuturist movement that uses technology and science fiction to re-imagine the Black experience.
Sun Ra’s work is being celebrated in “Pathways to Unknown Worlds” at the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute of Contemporary Art. The exhibit, which runs through Aug. 2, was first shown at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago and has now come to the city where Sun Ra lived for the last quarter-century of his career.
