Sun Ra’s body of work ranges from big band jazz and bebop to cosmic meditations. In the mid-1950s, he founded the Sun Ra Arkestra, an experimental big band that, now under the guidance of Marshall Allen, continues to tour the world. With his free-wheeling style and philosophical undertones, Sun Ra became a frontrunner of free, modal, and spiritual jazz. And with his self-mythology as an alien entity from Saturn, he laid the ground for the Afrofuturist movement that inspires artists to this day.