" data-original-title="" title="">Sun Ra was near the apogee of his earthly transit. Having led his transformative iterations of his Arkestra around the globe for an unlikely if not unimaginable four decades, the visionary composer, keyboardist, conceptualist and cosmologist was, even though in recovery from a stroke, at the peak of his powers, two years from breaking free of his local orbit entirely.

He had arrived on our planet in Birmingham, Alabama in 1914, named Herman Poole Blount by his mother after a vaudeville magician billed as Black Herman who had deeply impressed her. The boy's family called him "Sonny." He showed musical promise as a pre-teen, teaching himself piano, composition and sight-reading. Soon Sonny Blount was playing semi-professionally in rhythm and blues and pickup groups. After hearing performances by touring big bands, he would transcribe their arrangements from memory.

At Birmingham's racially segregated Industrial High School Sonny took music classes from the well-respected disciplinarian John T. "Fess" Whatley. Although socially remote, perhaps due in part to his painful and embarrassing cryptorchidism, Sonny was an honor roll student. He found his way to the library kept by the local Black Masonic Lodge, where he read about the tenets of Freemasonry, among other esoteric, arcane texts. Fascinating details of Sun Ra's upbringing, education and early career which he had obscured are revealed in John Szwed's wonderful 1998 biography Space Is The Place, including stories about the sympathetic teacher who took him under her wing, his first orchestra, the dramatic costumes and scenery typically used in Birmingham's black entertainment venues, and his travails as a conscientious objector in World War II, which included his incarceration, near mental breakdown, assignment as a forester, estrangement from his family and eventual reclassification as unfit for service.

Perhaps most significantly to Ra himself was the experience he claimed to have had in the late 1930s of being swept off to Saturn by extraterrestrials. He evidently didn't share this story until a decade or so later, but even then UFO abduction was not a common trope. Of course, there was never anything commonplace about L'Sony Ra, the name he took legally in 1952, seven years after leaving Alabama for the music-rich South Side of Chicago, a capitol of African-American culture. It was from that environment, and the apprenticeship he served at the Club DeLisa under the great though then-failing Swing Era composer-arranger