A fascinating biography of the most magnificently bizarre musician of our time.When Sun Ra died in 1993 at the age of seventy-nine, the New York Times called him one of the great big-band leaders, pianists, and surrealists of jazz; Rolling Stone has described him as the missing link between Duke Ellington and Public Enemy. From peripatetic beginnings in the South -- he spent years as a rehearsal pianist for nightclub reviews and swing bands -- Sun Ra grew into one of the great avant-garde musicians of this century. His life was as much about his music as it was about his passionate, often wildly unorthodox views on the galaxy, black people, and spiritual matters. With the various incarnations of his inimitable Intergalactic Arkestra, his repertoire ranged from boogie-woogie to swing to be-bop to free-form to fusion to New Age, and his influence extended throughout the jazz and pop worlds.While Sun Ra made a lifelong effort to obscure many of the facts of his early years, he did acknowledge that he was born on the planet Saturn. John Szwed has succeeded brilliantly in delving into and evoking the life and work of this extraordinary artist.