I'm not sure if I came to Sun Ra too late. I bought my first album of his in 1999, sound unheard — I just kept reading about him, hearing people in the Sheffield improv scene talk about him, and feeling clueless because I'd never heard any of his music. Needless to say, it was never on the radio.
I got this album four years later — just a fiver from Fopp, and, as always with the Impulse label, a very nice digipack package, with booklet. Since getting this, I've seen the Space is the Place film, seen the Sun Ra Arkestra play live, and seen the Brother from Another Planet documentary about him on TV.
When I saw the Space is the Place film, a couple of the film-makers were present and did a Q&A session. I was quite surprised that they were fairly straight (in the Jonathan Richman sense; I can't vouch for their sexuality) white guys. Not that there's anything especially odd or wrong about that. it's just not what I would have predicted from the content and spirit of the film.
Anyway, notwithstanding this background contextual stuff, I still feel that there's something about Sun Ra that remains beyond by grasp, that I'm still feeling my way into his music and the way it veers between straightforward jazz and the more avant-garde noise experiments. Maybe I'm just a straight white guy with less imagination than others of my kind.
 MusicBrainz entry for this album
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