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 History. He has taught radical black music, sound art and critical theory at the University of Maryland and George Mason University.