Eddie Prévost on Sun Ra

Eddie Prévost on Sun Ra:

Jazz has often been in an unwittingly innocent postmodern state due to its references to the past--by way of the popular song--and unprepossessing self-referencing "quoting." Much of what I have heard of the New York based Lincoln Center project, curated and produced by Wynton Marsalis, falls into a more self-conscious category. This initiative is aggressively postmodern, suggesting a self-satisfied stasis happy to consolidate the innovative gains of the "jazz masters."

Contrast this with the wildly confident, uninhibited, unconventional output of Sun Ra: cod-Egyptology and fantastic sci-fi interwoven with joyous popular song; shades of free music together with big band jazz in a circus extravaganza; an -ism-busting complex whose archness audaciously defied categorization; an otherworldly postmodernism unconcerned with market motives. With extravagant costumes and fantastic ideology as soul-preserving strategies, the Arkestra remained firmly outside of the newly emerging black, middle class aspirational nexus. Sun Ra proved to be an exceptional exception. The general ethos of jazz now fully embraces the need to be understood and popular: it measures success by how well it commands the market. (Eddie Prévost, "Confronting a Darkening World: AMM at 50 years--An Aesthetic Memorandum," in Critical Studies in Improvisation, 11:1-2 (2017), pp. 6-7.