Essential Bay Area jazz albums: Sun Ra

July 9, 4:29 PMBay Area Jazz ExaminerDavid Becker

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While keyboardist, bandleader, composer and all-around eccentric Sun Ra mostly divided his time between Chicago and the East Coast, he had multiple connections to the Bay Area, too. (Perhaps inevitable for someone whose cosmology included quantum mechanics and periodic visits to Saturn.)

A number of Bay Areas musicians struggling to find a common ground between psychedelia and jazz in the 1960s naturally gravitated to Sun Ra's intergalactic style. The musician was a guest educator at UC-Berkeley for a while. KQED produced a 90-minute documentary on his wild muse.

That Bay Area period is nicely documented on "Space is the Place," a companion album to the KQED film that documents a 1972 performance at the Bayview Opera House in San Francisco. Sun Ra and a large crew of musicians mix up everything from James Brown-style funk to musique concrète as they work through a set that reminds us that genius seldom comes in a tidy package.