There was nothing surprising about [Sun Ra's] mysticism per se: scratch any musician and you find a crypto-Pythagorean. Scratch music history and you find a line which stretches back at least as far as Marsilio Ficino in the 15th century and his belief that music is formed of the same substance as spirit, that it has the power to bring individuals into line with the heavens; or to Henry Cornelus Agrippa, who thought music had the power to raise the spirits of the dead. Sun Ra was in a long line of composer-mystics which included Ives, Schoenberg and Stockhausen, to name only a few moderns; and Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and Anthony Braxon within the jazz tradition.
        Sun Ra's ideas might seem strange, sometimes silly, but much of what he said seems to have parallels with the Gnostics, particularly those of the 12th-century Catharist religion practiced by a series of ascetic and heretical groups in the South of France, a group incidentally which had great influence on the troubadours of that era; but since some elements of it could also be found in various branches of African-American religion, his ideas lie perhaps in some even older spiritual teachings. If he had located his synthesis of these ideas strictly in the past (as he did with Egypt), he could have slipped by as a run-of-the-mill mystic. But when he positioned it in the ultramodern, in technology, in space travel, the warning signals went up....
        ...In cosmos drama and the Gesanmtrkunstwerk of his shows it was hard to dismiss him lightly. He assembled elements of music, dance, and art which had never been witnessed together, and yet at the same time seemed to distantly allude to tent shows, dance halls, and country churches, as well as to real or forgotten empires. And he did it with a level of intention and seriousness which seemed no longer possible. 
        A finely tuned if tortured moral sensibility pervaded all of his work, and his myth-ritual statements could wake you to the void in our lives even where it was impossible to accept his solution. "Sun Ra's consistent statement," Baraka said, "musically and spoken is that this is a primitve world. Its practices, beliefs, religions, are uneducated, unenlightened, savage, destructive, already in the past... That's why Sun Ra returned only to say he left. Into the Future. Into Space."

The artist and teacher Geoffrey Bardon, right, in the central Australian settlement of Papunya in 1971 with Old Tom Onion, an aborigine elder. 

From the May 12 New York Times:

Geoffrey Bardon, Advocate of Aboriginal Art, Dies at 63
By JOHN SHAW

SYDNEY, Australia, May 11 — Geoffrey Bardon, the painter and teacher credited with inspiring Australian aborigines to depict their ancient culture in ways that could be shown and sold to the world, died Tuesday in Taree, a coastal town 235 miles north of here where he lived. He was 63.
       Family members said he had suffered from cancer for six months.
       Mr. Bardon encouraged tribal artists of the desert peoples of central Australia to transfer their vivid images of ancestral times from sand and rock drawings and body decoration to paintings in acrylics on hardboard and canvas, thus making them permanent and portable.
      This collaboration in the 1970's in Papunya, a remote settlement of 1,400 dispossessed aborigines, was the catalyst for the evolution of a thriving, Australia-wide indigenous art movement. The art has won international recognition and now commands high prices from leading galleries and private collectors and investors, many of them in the United States.
      When Mr. Bardon, a 30-year-old artist and elementary school teacher, was assigned in 1970 to Papunya, a government barracks for blacks 150 miles west of the railhead of Alice Springs in central Australia, it was, he wrote later, "like a hidden place, unknown on maps, considered by officials as a problem place."
      Papunya, established in 1960 as an official "assimilation" center for tribes forced from their traditional lands, was, wrote Mr. Bardon, "a community in distress, oppressed by exile, a place of emotional loss and waste."
        Learning the local language and winning the confidence of his pupils, and then their parents, he made it a cradle for the preservation and promotion of indigenous art.
      In interviews at a definitive exhibition of Papunya painting in Sydney two years ago, Mr. Bardon recalled asking his pupils to transfer images of the honey-ant, a tribal totem, from sand drawings to a school wall, using paints and brushes he donated.
       The children found the mural project too large for them, but elders came forward to complete it. Over the next two years Papunya artists produced 500 paintings, selling them through a cooperative organized by Mr. Bardon and owned by the painters.
      He noted the "intensive level of intuitive concentration" and "a tremulous illusion" in the styles of the painters, notably those of the Tjapaltjarri, Tjupurrula and Tjungurrayi families who later became the best known of the desert painters.
     Anthropologists had long studied Australia's past indigenous art. Mr. Bardon kindled its revival, particularly in depicting narratives of "the Dreaming," a legendary era comparable to the creation and genesis stories in other beliefs.
      He left Papunya in 1972 but maintained close contact, writing books and making film documentaries about the artistic movement he helped create. 
       At his death he had just completed a major book on his years at Papunya, which is to be published next year.
      He is survived by his wife, Dorn, and their sons, Michael and James.

Obituaries

Ted Joans, 74; Beat Poet's Work Reflected Jazz and African Culture
By Dennis McLellan, Times Staff Writer

Ted Joans, an expatriate Beat generation poet whose work reflected a strong black consciousness, a surrealistic sense of humor and the rhythms of avant-garde jazz, has died. He was 74.
    Joans, who for many years divided his time between Paris and Timbuktu, a city in the West African nation of Mali, was found dead Wednesday in his apartment in Vancouver, British Columbia. Police in Vancouver, where Joans made his home in recent years, determined that he died April 25 of complications of diabetes, said his daughter, Daline Jones-Weber.
       The self-described "jazz poet" came of literary age in Greenwich Village in the 1950s, the heyday of fellow beat writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.
      Joans' "irreverent writings" are characterized by "celebrations of sexuality, jazz music, African culture and social revolution," according to "Dictionary of Literary Biography: Afro-American Poets Since 1955."
       "I think he's got a place in several genres," said Gerald Nicosia, author of the Kerouac biography "Memory Babe," who edited "Teducation," a 1999 collection of Joans' poems.
      "He was absolutely an important member of the beat generation and the Surrealist group," Nicosia said. 
        "The French Surrealists always considered him an absolute peer."
      Indeed, Andre Breton, a French poet known as the leader of the modern movement in literature that attempts to portray the workings of the unconscious mind, once hailed Joans as "the only Afro-American Surrealist."
      Joans is also considered an important writer of the black experience, Nicosia said.
      "A lot of his poems deal with racism, the problems of being black in a white society," he said. 
       "Ted very consciously made an effort to connect the dots between the African experience itself with the African American experience."
      Nicosia said that poet Langston Hughes, Joans' Greenwich Village mentor, "was a great encourager not only in his personal life, but Hughes' poetry gave him encouragement in terms of writing about the dignity of being black and also being able to mine the richness of his black heritage." 
      Joans was born Theodore Jones on July 4, 1928, in Cairo, Ill. According to some biographical accounts, his father, a riverboat musician, gave him a trumpet at age 12 and let him off the boat in Memphis to go on his own. 
       An amused Jones-Weber said Monday she had never heard that story before her father died, and, if true, she wondered how long he could have been on his own because he graduated from high school and went on to college.
      Joans — he changed the spelling of his last name in the 1950s to set himself apart — earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from Indiana University in 1951. Then he moved to Greenwich Village.
    At one point, Village Voice photographer Fred McDarrah ran a Rent a Beatnik ad as a joke and found himself getting requests for the service. So, McDarrah recruited his friend Joans, who earned rent money reading his poems at parties.
      After his friend, jazz legend Charlie "Bird" Parker, died in 1955, Joans took credit for scrawling "Bird Lives" graffiti around the city. 
      Though best known for his poetry, Joans' abstract portrait of Parker, "Bird Lives," hangs in the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco.
      Joans explained his decision to leave the United States in his 1961 book "All of Ted Joans and No More": "I hate cold weather, and they will not let me live democratically in the warm states of the United States, so I'm splitting and letting America perish."
      Joans had about 30 books published by small presses, including "Jazz Poems" (1959), "The Hipsters" (1961), "Afrodisia: New Poems" (1970), "A Black Manifesto in Jazz Poetry and Prose" (1971), "Black Pow-Wow: Jazz Poems" (1969) and "Our Thang" (2001), a collection of his poems and paintings by his longtime companion Laura Corsiglia.
     But most of his published works were chapbooks, small, inexpensively produced books of 20 to 30 pages.
      Joans was never interested in submitting his poems to major magazines and publishing houses.
    "As a poet, I cannot cash in on the system because I'm not interested in being a part of the system," he told the Seattle Times in 1990.
      In 1998, the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley purchased the first batch of Joans' papers: 24 boxes of manuscripts, correspondence, notes and clippings.
      The income was welcomed by Joans, who supported himself primarily with his writing.
      To describe it even as a modest living, his daughter said, is a stretch.
    "He lived a Bohemian life," Jones-Weber said. "He was never destitute; he always had a place to live, although some of what he called his nests [in Paris] were truly nests: tiny, tiny places — 200 square feet — but filled to the brim with nothing but books, old jazz albums, paintings and some artifacts and things he collected on his travels. 
       "He didn't own furniture or material things other than his clothing. But he was rich in other ways. That sounds corny, but he was blessed with many friends and fans all over the world."
      In addition to Jones-Weber of San Leandro, he is survived by nine other children: Ted Jones of Santa Monica; Teresa Jordan of Whittier; Jeanne Marie Jones of Rialto; Robert Jones of Long Beach; Lars Jones and Tor Jones of Oslo, Norway; Russell Jones of Scotland; Sylvia Jones-Johnson of Louisville, Ky., and Yvette Jones-Johnson of Stafford, Va.; and 12 grandchildren.
   At Joans' request, there will be no memorial service.