Fragments of the Alter-Future: Sun Ra Meets Napoleon

Sun Ra (1914-1993), among the most unusual composers in the history of jazz, was born Herman "Sonny" Blount in Birmingham, Alabama in 1914. Though he began recording in the late '40s, Ra's career didn't take off until the early '50s, when Blount adopted his now-famous moniker ("Le Sony'ra") and began claiming he came from Saturn. Infatuated with ancient Egypt, outer space and New Age mysticism, Ra formed a Chicago-based group called the Arkestra, which played an intriguing mix of bop, free jazz, and proto-electronic music. In 1956 he founded his own label, Saturn Records, and five years later relocated to New York, where he established himself as one of the more eccentric performers, releasing bizarre recordings which foreshadowed jazz fusion and ambient music by blending traditional jazz instruments with electric keyboard and unconventional song structures. In 1970 Sun Ra moved to Philadelphia, where he continued recording and performing for a small but loyal jazz and rock audience until his death in May 1993. In recent years an orchestrated effort by music historians to catalogue Ra's sidemen and recording sessions has been undertaken, resulting in the release of the discography The Earthly Recordings Of Sun Ra. The Sun Ra Arkestra continues to tour and record under the directon of the Arkestra's longtime alto player, Marshall Allen.

Jean-Francois Champollion (1790-1832) is widely acknowledged as the father of modern Egyptology. At the College de France, Champollion specialized in languages of the Orient, and was familiar with languages including Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Chaldean, Chinese, Coptic, Ethiopic, Sanskrit, Pahlevi, and Persian. He was appointed the conservator of the Louvre Museum's Egyptian Collection in 1826. He is best known for deciphering the hieroglyphics contained on the Rosetta Stone, laying the foundations for Egyptian Archaeology. The Rosetta Stone was inscribed with a law made in 196 BCE, written in two forms of hieroglyphics and in ancient Greek. Champollion translated the Egyptian writing into Greek after more than 20 years of work; he concluded that hieroglyphics had originally been pictographs, and stood for sounds in later times. His discoveries made it possible to understand hieroglyphics, and by extension ancient Egyptian civilization.

Giovanni Battista Belzoni (1778-1823), an Italian showman, engineer and explorer of Egyptian antiquities, was born in Padua, Italy. His quest for adventure brought him to England in 1803 and by means of his gigantic physique, earned a living in circuses in England, Spain and Portugal and where he was billed as "The Great Belzoni". In 1815 he went to Cairo to offer to Mohammed Ali Pasha, the founder of modern Egypt, a hydraulic machine he had invented, which worked extremely well. While in Egypt he met the British Consul General, Henry Salt, who engaged him to travel to Thebes to remove the colossal stone head of Rameses II (The Young Memnon) to be delivered to the British Museum. His success prompted Henry Salt to further Belzoni's expeditions to the temple of Edfu, Philae and Elephantine, where he cleared the great temple of Rameses II at Abu Simbel, excavated at Karnak, and in 1817 discovered the tomb of the pharaoh Seti I, in the Valley of the Kings. Belzoni was the first person to penetrate into the second pyramid of Giza (1818) by using his engineering genius to locate the entrance to the inner chambers, and the first European to visit the oasis of Siwah, and identify the ruined city of Berenice on the Red Sea. He returned to England in 1819 and a year later published his "Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries Within the Pyramids, Temples, Tombs and Excavations, in Egypt and Nubia" (2 vol., atlas of plates, 3rd ed., 1822). In 1825 his widow exhibited in Paris and London his drawings and models of the royal tombs of Thebes.