The Execution of Sun Ra books (Thomas Stanley)

"One thing I learned from Sun Ra is that you take him lightly at your own peril. He spoke of serious things, and needs to be taken seriously. The time is right for a new book on Ra, and Thomas Stanley’s is the right book. You can never be certain with Sun Ra, but I’m betting he’d have loved it."-John Szwed, author of Space is the The Lives and Times of Sun Ra"Sun Ra has an intrinsic instinct of music as language…there is a sense of language being transmitted as code – and this also translates from a trans-African type of construct to something that could be construed as signals being sent in outer space…he turns everything upside down in a gnostic type of way, and his synthesis is one of the few and unique blends of jazz and mysticism." Matthew Shipp, pianist, composer, bandleader. Thomas Stanley is a writer, audio activist and scholar. He received his doctorate for research documenting the unique compositional strategies of Butch Morris. He is coauthor of George Clinton and An Oral Hi