"This is not my home. This planet, to me, is like a railroad station. People are here today and gone tomorrow."
– Sun Ra (1914-1993)

In the age of the X-Files, space stations, and Roswell nostalgia, it seems appropriate to revisit the musician for whom space was the place.

Composer, keyboardist, bandleader, and philosopher, Sun Ra believed the cosmos to be the birthplace of knowledge, music, and himself. Though official records list his birthplace as Birmingham, AL, Sun Ra claimed he originated from Saturn – as if jazz musicians don’t have enough of a reputation for being odd. Nonetheless, Sun Ra’s otherworldly origin is as good an explanation as any for the sounds he created during his 40-plus-year career.

He was one of the first musicians in any genre to experiment with electronic keyboards, fiddling around with these then-futuristic instruments in the late ’30s. With his Arkestra members and dancers decked out in Afro-extraterrestrial costumes, his use of light shows in concerts, and as one who wore his political beliefs and philosophies on his sleeve, Sun Ra prefigured a wide range of avant-garde musicians with a surrealist bent.

Without Sun Ra, Frank Zappa’s wonderfully loony and abstract stage shows would have had no context; the Grateful Dead’s "space" interlude in each of their concerts were as much a direct nod to Sun Ra as they were an occasion for their fans to sit back and enjoy that recently swallowed hit of acid; and it’s hard to imagine that George Clinton’s Mothership ever would have landed without Sun Ra first blazing the trail.

Sun Ra’s music could be confounding, but that was nothing compared to the obfuscations that shrouded the man himself. Anyone looking for answers to the Sun Ra mystery shouldn’t expect to find them in any of his interviews. Sun Ra considered himself a "spiritual being" rather than a human, and often claimed he wasn’t "born" in the traditional sense.

"I’m not part of history – I’m more a part of the mystery, which is my story," Sun Ra says in the 1980 documentary "Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise". "Every song I write tells a story – a story that humanity needs to know about. No two songs tell the same story. My story is different than history."

Though he was a dexterous piano stylist in the order of Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk, Sun Ra would relentlessly – and restlessly – experiment with sounds. Sun Ra’s Arkestra typically featured no less than seven reed players. The players sounded as if they were transcending their instruments, as if they were exploring the infinite possibilities of the sounds a saxophone could make.

Sun Ra, according to his biographer, John F. Szwed, called his Arkestra members "tone scientists" rather than musicians and taught them that there were an infinite number of notes between C and D, as if sound, like space, was always expanding.

Perhaps that’s why even after more than a hundred albums (most of which are out of print and nearly impossible to find), Sun Ra is rarely heard on jazz stations. His name is rarely mentioned alongside such heavyweights as John Coltrane or Charles Mingus, although his more traditional compositions (such as "Images" from Space Is The Place) can be favorably compared with a typical Mingus number.

His polyphonic compositions often eschewed traditional structures. Sun Ra wrote songs in what he called the "space key," which was really no key at all. A Sun Ra piece would often start in one place and end somewhere completely different. In fact, one would often get the sense that the songs never really ended, that they just kept moving, that the notes and melodies themselves belonged to space and, as such, could never actually reach an end.

Though he made many fine recordings that have since become underground classics, it’s the 1972 album Space Is The Place that best embodies Sun Ra.

Sun Ra believed people (that is, us lowly humans) needed to know the unknown in order to survive. Such knowledge, he pointed out in Joyful Noise, could only come from space:

"Somewhere else on the other side of nowhere, there is another place in space, beyond what you know as time – where the gods of mythology dwell. Gods that are not real to you. Gods who have created the illusion that they do not exist to the people of Earth."