Duke Ellington on Acid

The Sun Ra Arkestra performed at UCONN last Friday, hosted by WHUS. Amazing and outrageous concert. Orchestrated chaos, 18 piece band, jazz, voice, strange instrumentation, costumes, acrobatics, interplanetary travel. Sun Ra passed away over a decade ago, but the music lives on under the direction of Marshall Allen.

From the Sun Ra website:
Eclectic, outrageous, sometimes mystifying but always imbued with a powerful jazz consciousness, the music of Sun Ra has withstood its skeptics and detractors for nearly three generations. Sun Ra was the first jazz musician to perform on electronic keyboards (56), the first to pursue full-scale collective improvisation in a big band setting, and his preoccupation with space travel as a compositional subject predated bands like Weather Report by about 15 years.All this from someone who refuses to even cite the earth as his home planet and prefers to have arrived from Saturn. As Sun Ra once explained it, "I never wanted to be a part of planet Earth, but I am compelled to be here, so anything I do for this planet is because the Master-Creator of the Universe is making me do it. I am of another dimension. I am on this planet because people need me".
Catch the Sun Ra Arkestra, but you gotta see them live.