Calling Planet Earth: Close Encounters with Sun Ra – Bob Mielke

Calling Planet Earth: Close Encounters with Sun Ra pulls us into the quirky world of the jazz
musician known first as Herman Blount, then as Sun Ra (1914-1993), the Arkestra leader
who claimed for most of his life to have come from Saturn. The book opens with an
introduction to Ra’s “sub-underground” music, a sound which fascinated the author and
turned him into a fan almost fifty years ago. Introductory sections set up key questions, like,
“But is it Jazz?” and “Where is Sun Ra Coming From, Besides Saturn?” How did a black kid
from Birmingham, Alabama, wind up proclaiming himself a Pharoah? After the introduction
comes Mielke’s play, Discipline 27-II: A Cosmo-Drama in Two Acts. That’s followed by a
thorough analysis of an enormous number of recordings, starting in the 1930s and continuing
for the rest of his life. Posthumous releases form a separate chapter. (Most of the
introductory material and analysis of recordings originally appeared in Mielke’s 2013
Adventures in Avant Pop, though it has been updated.)