Pictured is U.S. pianist and composer Sun Ra at the Bologna Jazz Festival, founded in 1959 by producer and manager Alberto Alberti together with Cicci Foresti
He was an innovative as well as unconventional musician within the American jazz scene for incorporating elements of traditional jazz, swing, bebop, soul, free improvisation, African and Asian music, atonality, dissonant harmonies, electronic sounds, elements of fusion music, sonic paroxysm into his music, made with the large ensemble L’Arkestra, in which tenor saxophonist John Gilmore was a member
Ra is considered one of the pioneers of the cultural current of Afrofuturism; in fact, aesthetic and formal elements derived from cosmology, science fiction literature, philosophical forms and ancestral rituals, psychedelia and, above all, ad litteram use of synthesizers for the production of sounds never before produced can be traced in his artistic production
Contribution shared by Claudio Pungetti
