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 bebop 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 about his early years, he did acknowledge that he was born on the planet Saturn. Space in The Place is the first ever biography of this iconoclastic and elusive musician. In it John Szwed has succeeded in delving into and evoking the life of this extraordinary artist.

JOHN F SZWED is Musser Professor of Anthropology, Afro-American Studies, Music, and American Studies at Yale University. He has written about music for many publications, including the New York Times, Musician, and the Boston Phoenix.

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