Sonny Blount’s catalogue is home to a vast array of intriguing and unique music, visited by Andrew Male.
BACK IN 1935, whilst training in music education at A&M college in Huntsville, Alabama, 21-yearold Herman Poole Blount was abducted by aliens. In his retelling, Blount was taken to Saturn on a beam of light where he was informed of Earth’s impending annihilation and made a spokesperson for survival, free to impart messages of enlightenment for a doomed planet. Now, whether or not you believe Blount was truly spirited away by extraterrestrials, it’s important you believe that Blount believed. For without that visionary encounter Blount would not have devoted himself to music. Between 1935 and 1943 he transformed his 13-piece swing outfit, the Sonny Blount Orchestra, into the top jazz band in Alabama before moving to Chicago where he recorded with Wynonie Harris, Fletcher Henderson, and Coleman Hawkins, absorbed ideas of African-American self-esteem and, in 1952, legally changed his name to Le Sony’r Ra. As Sonny changed, so did his music, morphing into a kind of mutant hard-swinging bop, defined by the swirling tenor sax of John Gilmore. “They had a little chaos going on,” Ra alumnus Marshall Allen told me in 2020. “Rhythm against rhythm. I didn’t know what was going on but everyone was confident in all this chaos.”
By 1961 the Arkestra were based in New York, rehearsing and recording constantly. “Play what you don’t know,” Ra would tell his musicians. By the mid ’60s they’d picked up a hipper crowd of followers through albums such as 1965 ESP release, The H
