The keyboard has no clear origin. Atonal and bizarre, it comes together more as a delicate dance of mashing fingers. Rich and fuzzy notes see-saw up and down, starting soft and then gaining in intensity, playing against the haunting, sustained chords of woodwinds and brass. It’s a solo in a jazz performance, with bluesy accents and fragments of a swinging beat eventually coming into provide an anchor. But it could just as well be the malfunctioning navigation system of an alien space ship. 

Sun Ra plays this uncanny keyboard solo in the opening minutes of “Space Loneliness No. 2,” a 13-minute space-jazz odyssey released on the 1972 album Nidhamu (Live in Egypt, Vol. II). The recording captures Sun Ra and his Arkestra (credited on the record as the Astro-Intergalactic-Infinity Arkestra) in a live performance a year earlier at the Balloon Theater in the Agouza neighborhood of Cairo, Egypt. Sun Ra at that point in his career had been immersed in jazz for decades, and Egyptology played a central role in his greater philosophy of Afrofuturistic reinvention.

The composer, who also went by the name Le Sony'r Ra, was born in Birmingham, Alabama. But he claimed to have come from Saturn. And just as the eerie and unpredictable music on “Space Loneliness No. 2” suggests, Sun Ra (his alias nods to the ancient Egyptian sun deity, Ra) did not come to Earth with a set itinerary in mind. In the 1950s and ’60s, he spent years gigging in Chicago and New York, sometimes switching locales as if on a whim. As he gained in global renown, he embarked on multiple world tours throughout the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. In 1971, he and the Arkestra essentially crash-landed in Egypt after taking a detour from Denmark. As Jon Szwed writes in his 1997 biography, Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra, they arrived at the gates of Cairo International Airport with little cash and even less preparation: 

“Sun Ra sold some concert tape to Black Lion Records to pay for the tickets and they left on December 7, not knowing anyone in Egypt and not sure of where they would stay or how they would pay for it. When they landed they were held up at Egyptian customs because of the unlikelihood of an entire orchestra arriving as tourists and because of the name on Sun Ra’s passport. To be named after the sun god twice was really a bit too much.”

Sun Ra went onto visit Egypt several times over the coming years. There, he and his cosmos-traveling cohorts performed numerous concerts, recorded several albums’ worth of material, and collaborated with one of Egypt’s most celebrated jazz musicians, the drummer and bandleader Salah Ragab. The fruits of their first trip are now captured in Egypt 1971, a 5-LP box set (including three albums you can order individually) released last November on UK label Strut Records. 

What drew Sun Ra to Egypt in the first place? Why did this Black artist from America (or from space, as the legend goes) drop a pin on Egypt as a must-see destination and source of inspiration? Sun Ra’s fascination with the country has to do with his own American origins and the influence of Egyptian mythology in Black history. As he formed his own vision of cosmic existence, outside the modern bounds of human oppression and frailty, he looked towards a country that (during his heyday especially) was a renowned hub for archeological study, pan-African politics, and revolutionary art.

Much as it is today, the United States was undergoing radical changes in the 1950s and 1960s. The Civil Rights movement was making remarkable progress in the face of violent backlash from white mobs and racist leadership in cities like Birmingham, Alabama—nicknamed “Bombingham” at the time because of the string of terrorist bombings perpetrated by members of the Ku Klux Klan against local desegretation efforts. 

As the fight for racial and social justice raged on in America, decolonization and anti-imperialist movements were going strong in Africa, the Middle East, and other parts of the Global South. In the spirit of solidarity, many Black Americans—including W. E. B. Dubois, Malcolm X, and members of the Black Panther Party—turned to countries like Ghana, Algeria, and Egypt for political support, spiritual guidance, and sanctuary from the unbearable reality of American racism. Meanwhile, jazz music was also turning eastward: along with Sun Ra, artists like Pharoah Sanders, John Coltrane, and Archie Shepp were drawing heavily from African sounds and Islamic iconography as they formed the sounds of free-jazz and spiritual jazz. 

When Sun Ra was growing up, Egyptology was massively popular across the United States. According to Space Is the Place, he was eight years old when King Tutankhamun’s tomb in Luxor’s Valley of the Kings was opened by English archaeologist Howard Carter in November 1922. Over in his home of Birmingham, the young Ra, born Herman Blount, was transfixed by media coverage of the event. And he later pored over tales of the “mummy’s curse” that was said to have felled Lord Carnarvon, who sponsored the tomb’s excavation. 

Sun Ra’s fascination with Egypt would stay with him throughout his life. Living in Chicago in the 1950s, he immersed himself in museum exhibits and library books about Egyptology in between his regular gigs and hours-long rehearsals with the Arkestra. He learned to read hieroglyphics and memorized the names and details of various deities from the pharaonic period. After moving to New York, he incorporated his own take on Ra-ian sun worship into the artwork and credits of his 1965 album, The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, Vol. 1. In it, he’s backed by his “Solar Arkestra” (as the Arkestra is credited in the liner notes), including longtime collaborators Marshall Allen and Ronnie Boykins, who drift far away from Earthbound jazz conventions and set a new solar orbit with fidgety percussion, freeform solos, and mournful, blaring horns.

In Space Is the Place, Szwed describes Sun Ra as a “secret agent of the Creator,” using jazz to chart a path for a new and better existence. Philosophically, he drew in part from a body of discourse that sought to frame Black American history within a much longer trajectory, dating back to ancient Ethiopia and Egypt. Books like The Ruins, or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires: and the Law of Nature—published in 1791 and written by the French abolitionist Count Augustine Volney—invoked psychedelic visions and historical evidence to argue that Africans were the world’s original founders of civilization, religion, law, and art. More recent books, like 1939’s God Wills the Negro by Theodore P. Ford, pointed out that the first humans originated in Africa and that ancient Egyptian peoples were distant ancestors of Black Americans. 

During the horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, white Europeans and Americans rewrote the history books to leave out Black peoples’ positive impact on the world. And so Sun Ra pushed back by infusing his own music with a post-modern imprint of lost legacies and secret knowledge. As the leader of the Arkestra, he drew a throughline from ancient past to intergalactic future, filling live performances with unconventional harmonies, spectacular costumes, and dances, all of it mixing elements of Egyptian iconography, big-band, exotica, gospel, Black cabaret, and science fiction. 

Sun Ra makes his Afrofuturistic vision clear in the 1974 sci-fi film Space Is the Place (not to be mistaken with Szwed’s book of the same name). The film shows him traveling space and time as he battles for the fate of Black people and seeks recruits for a new Black settlement on a distant planet. “The music is different here. The vibrations are different. Not like Planet Earth. Planet Earth sounds of guns, anger, frustration,” he declares in the beginning of the film. In a nod to mythical roots and solar vibrations, he overlooks the tropical outer-space paradise while dressed in a golden, black-striped helmet modeled on the Mask of Tutankhamun, with a giant sphere affixed to the top. 

Of course, Egypt was a much different place from the one that fed into Sun Ra’s aesthetic — a fact that no doubt became clear when he and the Arkestra visited in 1971. Although many Americans regard Egypt (and still do) with Orientalist stereotypes of pharaonic myth and mystery, the country’s ancient history sat side by side with very modern politics and revolutionary movements. Then President Gamal Abdel Nasser was an icon of anti-imperialism and Arab nationalism, and Al-Azhar University was attracting Black expatriates eager to study Islam; including Malcolm X, who had met with Al-Azhar officials on a visit to Cairo in 1964. 

Sun Ra found his kindred spirits in the country. During their two-week stay, he and the Arkestra donned their flowing robes to dance at the Giza pyramids, shopped and hitchhiked around Cairo, and performed several live engagements. According to Szwed’s biography, they set up their shows with the help of Hartmut Geerken, a German free-jazz musician who was working at the local branch of the Goethe-Institute. Some of the Arkestra’s instruments were still locked up in customs, so they borrowed replacements from Salah Ragab, an army officer and jazz drummer who at the time led the country’s first big-band jazz orchestra. 

Strut’s Egypt 1971 boxed set captures the magic that went down when the Arkestra played a concert at Geerken’s house in the suburb of Heliopolis. Arkestra percussionist and sound engineer Thomas “Bugs” Hunter recorded about 90 minutes of the performance, which finds the group spiraling through lively chants, free-form improvisations, Latin-tinged grooves, and slow, space-age harmonies. All the while, they held up colorful banners and danced in robes and capes, eventually marching in a procession through the house and adjoining garden. 

“He played for about three hours, with a very, very energetic power, an unbelievable power,” Geerken, now 82, recalls in a phone interview. “It was a real multimedia performance, with  music and lyrics and some theater and recitations and rituals.” Before flying back to America, Sun Ra gave Geerken his Sun harp as a gift in exchange for covering the Arkestra’s hotel bills. 

As for Sun Ra and Ragab, they would continue to cross paths in the coming years as Sun Ra made more pilgrimages to Egypt. The Arkestra performed for troops in the Sinai Peninsula—presumably with Ragab’s endorsement, though exactly how they ended up there is unclear—during a longer trip to the country in 1976. And in 1983, Sun Ra got together with Ragab again to record The Sun Ra Arkestra Meets Salah Ragab in Egypt, a five-track feat of Egyptian jazz ingenuity that reworks local folk melodies and the sounds of the musaharati, the person tasked with walking through local neighborhoods to wake up fellow Muslims for their pre-dawn suhoor meal during the holy month of Ramadan. 

In “Ramadan,” the sleepy-eyed incantation takes off into the Milky Way with a deep resonant chorus before the band launches into a film noir-esque groove of blaring horns and high tension. Another album cut, “Dawn,” finds Ragab joining on congas alongside a dense rhythm laid down by three drummers. Sun Ra levitates across the top with a synthesizer that sounds like a flute while Arkestra sax players Marshall Allen, Danny Thompson, and John Gilmore vamp on a hypnotic refrain. Around the same time the record came out, Ragab joined the Arkestra on a brief tour in which they presented their confident meeting-of-minds at performances in Egypt, Greece, France, and Spain. 

Sun Ra passed away in 1993, leaving behind a legacy that would go onto inform the Afrofuturist themes of countless writers and artists, including sci-fi novelist Octavia Butler and Detroit techno duo Drexciya. Marshall Allen, now in his 90s, has meanwhile carried the mantle for the Sun Ra Arkestra, leading the group in decades of spectacular costumed performances and continuum-bending recordings—including their latest record, Swirling, which dropped in October 2020. 

Ultimately, Sun Ra’s vision had less to do with the specifics Egyptian archaeology, politics or history and more to do with American conceptions of Black liberation, which incorporated elements of ancient Egypt into a much larger narrative. In some ways, it’s concerning to see a foreigner—even one of his esteemed stature—fixating on exotic mythology for his own purposes. 

Still, he made valuable contributions to the Egyptian jazz canon: His collaborations with Salah Ragab still sound fresh today, being much more muscular, funky, and innovative compared to many other conceptions of East-West “fusion.” His influence also shows through in the powerful work of contemporary experimentalists like the Dwarves of East Agouza and Cairo’s Maurice Louca, who on his 2019 album, Elephantine, explores the sonic crossroads of Nubia, Egypt, and free jazz. And of course, Sun Ra made a more philosophical, global impact, too: Rather than perpetuate Orientalist stereotypes or cliches, he drew from Egypt as part of an effort to transcend oppressive narratives, helping listeners the world over remap the lines of musical understanding and develop new ways of thinking about the universe.