The music lineup for November’s Sun Ra symposium, Traveling the Spaceways, has been announced. It will take place at the Hyde Park Art Center, which is also hosting Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn & Chicago’s Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954-68, a major exhibition of art and ephemera from Sun Ra’s Chicago days. (My piece for the Reader on the exhibition is here.) At the symposium, short performances will be sandwiched in between various discussion panels. On Saturday, November 11, cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm and his trio will play Sun Ra tunes; later in the day saxophonist David Boykin and his group Expanse will perform his “The Solar Suite,” which is dedicated to Sun Ra. The following day reedist Ken Vandermark will debut his Sun Ra Composer Quartet (with him and Dave Rempis on baritone saxophones, and Frank Rosaly and Mike Reed on drums), and flutist Nicole Mitchell leads her group.
On Friday, November 10, before the symposium starts, Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore will play in a quartet with pianist Jim Baker, Sun Ra alum and bassist Rollo Radford, and drummer Avreeyal Ra at the Hideout. My Barbarian, a troupe of artists and musicans from LA that includes art curator Malik Gaines (who is speaking at the symposium), opens.