text: Shoot-outs have been used to settle six Football League Cup finals to date. The first was in 2001 when Liverpool beat Birmingham City 5–4 on penalties after a 1–1 draw after extra time in the match. The second was the 2009 final between Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur ended goalless and was won 4–1 on penalties by Manchester United. Then the 2012 final between Liverpool and Cardiff City finished 2–2 after extra time, Liverpool winning 3–2 on penalties. The 2016 final was won by Manchester City beating Liverpool 3–1 on penalties, after a 1–1 draw. Manchester City also won the 2019 final 4–3 on penalties after a 0–0 draw with Chelsea. Chelsea then went on to lose the 2022 final 11–10 on penalties to Liverpool.


title: Penalty shoot-out (association football)

text: Penalty shoot-outs have been used for many years to settle drawn games in the earlier rounds of the Football League Cup, the earliest example being August 1976 when Doncaster Rovers beat Lincoln City 3–2 on penalties after three drawn games in a row (1–1, 1–1, 2–2) in a first round match. Shoot-outs tend to be quite rare in the semi-finals due to the away goals rule applying after extra time. However, a shoot-out was used in the 2013–14 semi-final between Sunderland and Manchester United after both teams finished level over two legs; Sunderland won the shoot-out 2–1.


text: The Community Shield is also settled using penalties, following the normal 90 minutes of play, but no extra time. Manchester United have won the shield three times via a shoot-out, beating Arsenal in 2003, Chelsea in 2007, and Portsmouth in 2008. Manchester United lost the 2009 match on penalties to Chelsea.


text: In 2008, the Turkish Cup Final featured two clubs outside of Istanbul's Top Three for the first time in two decades, but penalty kicks decided the winner between Gençlerbirliği and Kayserispor, the latter having reached the final for the first time ever. After a scoreless 120 minutes, 28 penalty kicks were needed to decide the outcome, and Kayserispor, thanks to the goal scoring and goal saving heroics of Dimitar Ivankov, won its first Turkish Cup 11–10.


text: In the 2008–09 Greek Cup final AEK took a 3–2 lead at 89' with a goal by Scocco; however Olympiacos came back from the dead at the dying seconds of stoppage time (90'+6) with a goal by Derbyshire, to force an overtime. While Olympiacos took a 4–3 lead in overtime with a goal by Galletti, the scorer was sent off with a second yellow card for taking his shirt off while celebrating. Later on, Avraam Papadopoulos also got a second yellow leaving Olympiacos with 9 players. AEK managed to tie the game at 4–4 forcing a penalty shoot out.


text: AEK was shooting first. Both AEK and Olympiacos scored in the first 4 penalties. Majstorovic of AEK hit the horizontal crossbar in the 5th penalty giving the chance to Djordjevic (for whom it was the closing game of his career) to seal the victory for Olympiacos. However, his shot was blocked by AEK's Argentinian goalkeeper Saja. Hence, the shooting continued. Both teams scored their 6th and 7th penalties. Center-back Antzas was slotted to hit the 8th penalty for Olympiacos, but keeper Nikopolidis took the initiative and took the penalty instead tying the score to 7–7. Nikopolidis blocked the subsequent (9th) penalty by Georgeas for AEK but Antzas missed the penalty for Olympiacos (saved by Saha) and failed to finish the shoot-out.


text: Since Olympiacos had only 9 players in the field, the shooters had to rotate, going back to those that shoot the very first penalties. All 7 subsequent penalty takers for both teams scored, leading to a penalty shoot out that was at 14–14 with 32 penalty shots having been taken. However, Pelletieri of AEK had a bad penalty shot that was easily deflected by Nikopolidis, who then took the 34th penalty shot against the other goalkeeper, Saja, scoring, and ending this saga with a 15–14 win for Olympiacos in penalty shoot out and an overall score of 19–18. (2008–09 Greek Cup).


text: The first penalty shoot-out in a European Cup final occurred in the 1984 European Cup Final as Liverpool defeated Roma. The match is best known for the antics of Liverpool keeper Bruce Grobbelaar. As Roma's Bruno Conti prepared to take his kick, Grobbelaar walked towards the goal smiling confidently at the cameras lined-up behind, then proceeded to bite the back of the net, in imitation of eating spaghetti. Conti sent his spot kick over the bar. Grobbelaar then produced a similar performance before Francesco Graziani took his kick, famously wobbling his legs in mock terror. Graziani duly missed and Liverpool went on to win the shootout 4–2.


text: In the 1986 European Cup Final between Steaua București and Barcelona, Steaua keeper Helmuth Duckadam saved all four of Barca's penalties, for which he was dubbed "the hero of Seville". Steaua also missed two, but still prevailed 2–0 in the shoot-out to become the only Romanian club side to win the title.


text: In the 2003 UEFA Champions League Final the penalty-shoot out has caused controversy among many fans as replays showed that Milan goalkeeper Dida was off his goal line when saving penalties from Trezeguet, Zalayeta and Montero. Juventus keeper Buffon was also off his goal line when saving penalties from Seedorf and Kaladze.


text: In the 2005 UEFA Champions League Final between Milan and Liverpool, Liverpool keeper Jerzy Dudek used tactics similar to Bruce Grobbelaar in 1984 (known as the "Dudek dance" in 2005) to distract the Milan shootout takers which resulted in a victory for his team.


text: The 2008 UEFA Champions League Final between Manchester United and Chelsea went to penalties, when John Terry missed a penalty which would have won Chelsea the match (and the Champions League). His standing leg slipped as he took his kick, and the ball hit the post. Chelsea lost the shoot-out 6–5, to which Terry reacted by breaking down in tears. Terry was not originally the penalty taker, however, striker Didier Drogba had been sent off shortly before extra time ended.


text: In the semi-finals of the UEFA Champions League between Real Madrid and Bayern Munich, Iker Casillas and Manuel Neuer each saved two spot kicks. Neuer kept out penalties from Cristiano Ronaldo (£80 million) and Kaká (£56 million), then the most expensive footballers in history from their transfer fees.


text: On 19 May 2012, Chelsea defeated Bayern Munich 4–3 on penalties in the 2012 UEFA Champions League Final. Chelsea had never previously won a shoot-out in the competition, and had lost the 2008 final and 2007 semi-final on penalties. Bayern had never lost a shoot-out in Europe; their wins included the 2001 final against Valencia and the 2012 semi-final against Real Madrid. Didier Drogba dispatched the winning penalty, having been unable to take the fifth kick (missed by Terry) in the 2008 final due to a red card in extra time. The following day, many British newspapers made reference to the fact that an English team had finally beaten a German team on penalties.


text: On 26 May 2021, Villarreal defeated Manchester United 11–10 on penalties in the 2021 UEFA Europa League Final, after the game ended 1–1 after extra time. Every player on the pitch took penalties – Manchester United goalkeeper David De Gea was the only one to miss, with his shot being saved by Gerónimo Rulli to hand Villarreal its first major title. The 21 penalties converted was a record for a shoot-out in a major UEFA tournament match.


text: The world record for the most penalties scored consecutively in a shoot out stands at 29, in a Hampshire Senior Cup second-round game between Brockenhurst and Andover Town on 9 October 2013, in which the 30th penalty was saved, enabling Brockenhurst to win 15–14. This beat the previous record of 27, in a Football League Trophy first round match between Leyton Orient and Dagenham & Redbridge on 7 September 2011, in which the 28th penalty was saved, enabling Dagenham to win the shootout.


text: During the final of the 1992 African Cup of Nations played in Senegal, Ivory Coast won the penalty shootout 11–10. After the second set of five penalty kicks still being tied at 10–10, it went to sudden death, where the last penalty was missed by Anthony Baffoe, the stand-in Ghanaian captain. This is the most penalties in the final match of a major international tournament, and the last time a second set of five kicks was implemented in the rules. The penalty shootout was significant in that it was the first in the final of a major international tournament that every player on the pitch took a penalty.


text: Fourteen years later, the Ivory Coast and Cameroon needed 24 penalties to decide who would advance to the semi-finals of the 2006 African Cup of Nations. The Ivory Coast advanced by winning 12–11 after Samuel Eto'o missed his second attempt, as his was the only miss of the penalty shootout.


text: The world record for the longest penalty shoot-out in a first class match is 48 penalties during the 2005 Namibian Cup when KK Palace beat Civics 17–16.


text: The record was then broken on 9 March 2022 when two non-league English sides, Washington and Bedlington Terriers took a remarkable 54 penalties after a 3–3 draw in the Ernest Armstrong Memorial Cup, which ended 25–24 in Washington's favour. Five penalties were missed.


text: However, the record for the highest score in a penalty shoot out was set in the 1988 Argentine Championship, when Argentinos Juniors beat Racing Club 20–19 after 44 penalties.


text: On 3 June 2015, Sundsøre IF beat Nykøbing Mors 20–19 in a penalty shoot out in a preliminary round of the Danish FA Cup.


text: On 11 December 2012, Bradford City set the record for most consecutive penalty shootout wins. They won 9 penalty shootouts since 2009 and that included wins against Arsenal and local rivals Huddersfield Town.


text: The shortest possible penalty shootout consists of three kicks by each team, with one team scoring all its kicks and the other team failing to score any. An example of this occurred in the semi-final of the 2017 FIFA Confederations Cup, with Chile beating Portugal 3–0.


text: The NCAA womens college record number of penalties occurred on 30 October 2022 when the San Diego State Aztecs beat the Utah State Aggies 19-18 during the Mountain West Tournament after 22 rounds of penalties.


text: A shoot-out is usually considered for statistical purposes to be separate from the match which preceded it. In the case of a two-legged fixture, the two matches are still considered either as two draws or as one win and one loss; in the case of a single match, it is still considered as a draw. This contrasts with a fixture won in extra time, where the score at the end of normal time is superseded. Converted shoot-out penalties are not considered as goals scored by a player for the purposes of their individual records, or for "golden boot" competitions.


text: The NCAA rules book, which governs most college soccer in the United States, takes a similar approach. With the exception of the national championship game, if the score of any game remains tied following the sudden death overtime (or golden goal), the game is recorded as a tie, regardless of the result of the shoot-out tiebreaker. In a national championship game, the result of the shoot-out tiebreaker also determines the result of the game for statistical purposes. Until 2001, all NCAA games in which the shoot-out tiebreaker was used to determine advancement or a champion were recorded as a tie. In 2002, the rule was modified such that all games in which the shoot-out tiebreaker was used would also decide the winner of the game for statistical purposes. The rule was again changed in 2003 to match the pre-2002 rule with the newly added exception that a shoot-out tiebreaker in a national championship game would be decisive for all purposes, including the record.


text: In the calculation of UEFA coefficients, shoot-outs are ignored for club coefficients, but not national team coefficients, where the shoot-out winner gets 20,000 points: more than the shoot-out loser, who gets 10,000 (the same as for a draw) but less than the 30,000 points for winning a match outright. In the FIFA World Rankings, the base value of a win is three points; a win on penalties is two; a draw and a loss on penalties are one; a loss is zero. The more complicated ranking system FIFA used from 1999 to 2006 gave a shoot-out winner the same points as for a normal win and a shoot-out loser the same points as for a draw; goals in the match proper, but not the shoot-out, were factored into the calculation.


text: As a way to decide a football match, shoot-outs have been seen variously as a thrilling climax or as an unsatisfactory cop-out.


text: Paul Doyle describes shoot-outs as "exciting and suspense-filled" and the 2008 UEFA Champions League Final shoot-out as "the perfect way to end a wonderful ... final". Richard Williams compares the spectacle to "a public flogging in the market square".


text: The result is often seen as a lottery rather than a test of skill; managers Luiz Felipe Scolari and Roberto Donadoni described them as such after their teams had respectively won and lost shoot-outs. Others disagree. Mitch Phillips called it "the ultimate test of nerve and technique". Paul Doyle emphasised the psychological element.


text: Only a small subset of a footballer's skills is tested by a shoot-out. Ian Thomsen likened deciding the 1994 World Cup using a penalty shoot-out to deciding the Masters golf tournament via a minigolf game. The shoot-out is a test of individuals which may be considered inappropriate in a team sport; Sepp Blatter has said "Football is a team sport and penalties is not a team, it is the individual".


text: Inferior teams are tempted to play for a scoreless draw, calculating that a shoot-out offers their best hope of victory. Red Star Belgrade's performance beating Olympique Marseille in the 1991 European Cup Final is often condemned for having "played for penalties" from the kick-off; a tactic coach Ljupko Petrović freely admitted to. On the other hand, the increased opportunity for giant-killing may also be seen as an advantage, increasing the romance of a competition like the FA Cup. Some teams have regarded, or been accused of regarding, a loss on penalties as an honourable result or "no defeat at all".


text: "The Economist" reported on the advantage of the team kicking first usually winning and on the players aiming higher usually scoring a goal.


text: Ignacio Palacios-Huerta has suggested that the alternating kick sequence gives an unfair advantage to the team kicking first, with statistical evidence showing that the team kicking first wins in 60% of the cases, probably because the team kicking second is under more pressure when trailing in the shoot-out. As a remedy, he proposed using the Thue–Morse sequence to determine the kicking order. Another, more comprehensive, analysis by InStat looked at over 2,000 penalty kick shootouts the first to go won 51.48% of the time. However, in the academic literature, empirical support for the existence of such a first-mover advantage is ambiguous.


text: As part of a trial to reduce a potential first-mover advantage, the IFAB sanctioned in March 2017 to test a different sequence of taking penalties, known as "ABBA", that mirrors the serving sequence in a tennis tiebreak (team A kicks first, team B kicks second):


text: The trial was initially scheduled at the 2017 UEFA European Under-17 Championship and the 2017 UEFA Women's Under-17 Championship in May 2017 if a penalty shoot-out would be needed. The trial was extended in June 2017 to include the 2017 UEFA European Under-19 Championship and the 2017 UEFA Women's Under-19 Championship.


text: The penalty shoot-out in the Women's Under-17 Championship semi-final between Germany and Norway was the first ever to implement this new system. It was also used in the 2017 FA Community Shield on 6 August 2017.


text: During IFAB's 133rd Annual Business Meeting in Glasgow, Scotland on 22 November 2018, it was agreed that due to the lack of strong support mainly because of its complexity, the ABBA option would no longer be used in future competitions.


text: Association football used the "touch down" (similar to a try in rugby) between 1866 and 1867. The touch-down was related to similar tie-breakers used in non-association football codes, such as the "rouge" in the Eton field game (and, from 1862 to 1868, in Sheffield Rules). In rugby itself, the try served as a tie-breaker between 1875 and 1886.


text: A drawn result may be allowed to stand, unless the fixture determines which team qualifies for a later round. Before 1993 (except in 1974) the FA Charity Shield was shared if the match was drawn. When the third place playoff of the 1972 Olympic tournament between the Soviets and East Germany ended 2–2 after extra time, the bronze medal was shared by the two teams.


text: During the qualification process for the 1962 World Cup, Morocco and Tunisia formed a two-team group. They both won 2–1 at home, so they played the third match at a neutral location. When this ended in a 1–1 draw after extra time, Morocco advanced on a coin toss to the next round of qualification. This scenario was repeated during the qualification process for the 1970 World Cup, when the same two teams were tied after three matches and extra time. Again, Morocco advanced on a coin toss. Tunisia did have better luck with the coin toss in the intervening years; during the 1965 African Cup of Nations, they reached the final at the expense of Senegal by winning a coin toss after three group matches had left Tunisia and Senegal tied with a win (over Ethiopia) and a draw (against each other).


text: Alternatives include replaying a match that has ended in a draw. This still occurs in the fifth (last sixteen) round and earlier rounds of the English FA Cup. Until 1991, any number of replays were permitted, with a record of five. (Since then, a draw in the [first] replay has been resolved by a penalty-shoot-out.) Only once, in 1974, did the European Cup final go to a replay.


text: Other suggestions have included using elements of match play such as most shots on goal, most corner kicks awarded, fewest cautions and sendings-off, or having ongoing extra time with teams compelled to remove players at progressive intervals (similar to regular season play in the National Hockey League, where players play 3-on-3 in the extra time). These proposals have not yet been authorised by the International Football Association Board. However, after the 2006 World Cup, Sepp Blatter stated that he wants no more penalty shoot-outs in the Final of the World Cup, tentatively suggesting either a replay or "Maybe to take players away and play golden goal".


text: Henry Birtles' "Advantage" proposal is for the shoot-out to be held before extra-time, and only acting as a tiebreak if the game remains a draw after the full 120 minutes. Proponents of this idea state that it would lead to a more offensive extra-time as one of the teams would know they have to score and there would never be a match in which both teams are simply waiting for penalties. Another advantage is that players who have missed would have a chance to redeem themselves in extra-time. The obvious flaw is that the team that wins the penalty shoot-out would be inclined to play defensively in extra time in the knowledge that a draw would put them through. However, this flaw is not so clear because a single goal makes the difference between winning and losing, as opposed to a team that defends a single-goal lead more comfortably because a conceded goal is the difference between winning and drawing.


text: Another alternative is Attacker Defender Goalkeeper (ADG), which features a series of ten contests, in which an attacker kicks off from 32 yards and has 20 seconds to score a goal against a defender and goalkeeper. At the completion of the ten contests, the team with the most goals is the winner.


text: The North American Soccer League (NASL) in the 1970s and 1980s, then Major League Soccer (MLS) for its first four seasons (1996–1999) experimented with a variation of the shoot-out procedure.


text: Instead of a straight penalty kick, the shoot-out started from the goal and having five seconds to attempt a shot. The player could make as many moves as he could in a breakaway situation in the five seconds, then attempt a shot. This procedure is similar to that used in an ice hockey penalty shot. As with a standard shoot-out, this variation used a best-of-five-kicks model, and if the score was still level, the tiebreaker would head to an extra round of one attempt per team.


text: This format rewarded player skills, as players were able to attempt to deceive goalkeepers and play the ball in an attempt to make the shot, as in a one-on-one skills contest, and goalkeepers could take on the attackers without restrictions that are normally implemented in penalty shootouts. Soccer Bowl '81, the NASL's 1981 championship final, was decided by this format.


text: From its inception in 1968, the NASL used an unconventional point system in determining the league standings. Teams were awarded six points for a win and three points for a draw. In addition, teams earned one bonus point for each goal scored in a game up to a maximum of three per game. Thus, a team that lost 5–3 would earn three points. However, a team that lost 1–0 would earn no points. Also, a team that won 5–4 would earn nine points (the same as a 3–0 win). But a team that won 2–0 would earn only eight points. In the league's second season (1969), the Kansas City Spurs were the league champions with 10 wins, 2 losses and 4 ties even though the Atlanta Chiefs had 11 wins, 2 losses and 3 ties, because Kansas City earned more bonus points. Starting with 1971 postseason playoff matches, the NASL used a golden goal rule, and every match had a winner decided from the run of play. Extra-time sessions were 15 minutes long before a brief break and change of ends. Game 1 of the 1971 NASL semifinal series between the Rochester Lancers and the Dallas Tornado went six extra-time periods with Rochester scoring the game-winning goal in the 176th minute. Game 3 of that same series went four extra time periods with Dallas scoring in the 148th minute to win the match and the series. In 1975, the NASL adopted a conventional penalty-kick shootout system for all regular-season and postseason playoff matches, and there were no longer any NASL matches that ended in ties. In the standings, a team that won in regulation time was awarded six points. A team that won in a penalty-kick shootout was awarded one point. Bonus points continued to be awarded for each goal scored up to a maximum of three per game. In 1977, the NASL adopted the experimental North American shootout procedure described above. If a match was tied after 90 minutes, a maximum of two golden goal extra time periods of 7.5 minutes each were played. If neither team scored, the shootout was held to determine the winner of the match. In the standings, a team that won was awarded six points whether the win came in regulation time, extra time or by shootout. Bonus points continued to be awarded for each goal scored up to a maximum of three per game. No bonus points were awarded for goals scored in extra time. Postseason playoff games were decided in the same manner. In 1981, the number of points awarded to a team that won a game in a shootout was reduced from six to four. This remained the system until the NASL's final season in 1984.


text: From its inception in 1996, MLS used the shootout system that had been used by the NASL to determine winners of matches. No regular-season or postseason playoff games ended in a tie. In general, no extra time was played; the shootout commenced immediately after 90 minutes had been played. The only exception was in the MLS Cup Final in which a match tied after 90 minutes would be followed by a maximum of two 15-minute extra time sessions on a golden goal basis. In the regular-season standings, a team that won a match in regulation was awarded three points. A team that won a match in a shootout was awarded one point. There were no bonus points or points awarded to teams that lost whether in regulation time or a shootout. In the playoffs, the conference semifinals and conference finals were organised as best-of-three matches series. A shootout win counted as a win. Thus, a team could win two of the three matches by shootout and lose the other match in regulation and still advance to the next round. This was inconsistent with how the teams were rewarded during the regular season when the team with one win would have earned three points, and the team with two wins would have earned only two points. In 1999, a maximum of two 15-minute golden goal extra time periods were added for matches that were tied after 90 minutes of regulation play. If neither team scored during extra time, the match was decided by a shootout. MLS abandoned the North American style shootout starting with the 2000 season. If penalties are required to determine a winner during the playoffs, MLS now uses the shoot-out procedure specified by the International Football Association Board.


text: In the MLS Next Pro development league, all draws are followed by a penalty shoot out. While both teams receive 1 match point for the draw, the team winning the penalty shootout gets an additional match point, resulting in draws giving 1 point to the loser of the shootout and 2 to the winner.


title: Mark Spitz

text: Mark Andrew Spitz (born February 10, 1950) is an American former competitive swimmer and nine-time Olympic champion. He was the most successful athlete at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, winning seven gold medals, each in world-record time. This achievement lasted for 36 years, until it was surpassed by fellow American Michael Phelps, who won eight golds at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.


title: Mark Spitz

text: Between 1968 and 1972, Spitz won nine Olympic golds, a silver, and a bronze, in addition to five Pan American golds, 31 Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) titles, and eight National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) titles. During those years he set 35 world records, two of which were in trials and unofficial. "Swimming World Magazine" named him World Swimmer of the Year in 1969, 1971, and 1972. He was the third athlete to win nine Olympic gold medals.


title: Mark Spitz

text: Spitz was born on February 10, 1950, in Modesto, California, the first of three children of Lenore Sylvia (Smith) and Arnold Spitz. His family is Jewish; his father's family was from Hungary and his mother's, originally surnamed "Sklotkovick", were from Russia. When Spitz was two years old, his family moved to Honolulu, Hawaii, where he swam at Waikiki beach every day. "You should have seen that little boy dash into the ocean. He'd run like he was trying to commit suicide," Lenore Spitz told a reporter for "Time" in 1968. At age six, his family returned to Sacramento, California, and he began to compete at his local swim club. At age nine, he was training at Arden Hills Swim Club in Sacramento with swimming coach Sherm Chavoor, who mentored six additional Olympic medal winners.


title: Mark Spitz

text: Spitz held one world age-group record and 17 national records at the age of 10. When Spitz was 14, his family moved to Santa Clara, where he joined the Santa Clara Swim Club and was trained by coach George F. Haines. From 1964 to 1968, Mark trained with Haines at SCSC and Santa Clara High School. During his four years there, Mark held national high school records in every stroke and in every distance. In 1966 at age 16, he won the 100-meter butterfly at the AAU national championships, the first of his 24 total AAU titles. The following year, Spitz emerged on the world swimming stage when he set his first world record at a small California meet with a time of 4:10.60 in the 400-meter freestyle.


title: Mark Spitz

text: Spitz swam in his first international competition at the 1965 Maccabiah Games in Israel. At age 15 and weighing 130 pounds, he won four gold medals in Tel Aviv—the 400 m freestyle, the 1,500 freestyle, the 400 m individual medley, and the 800 m freestyle relay, and was named the most outstanding athlete of the Games.


title: Mark Spitz

text: He returned to Israel in 1969 following the Mexico Olympics to again compete, at the 1969 Maccabiah Games. This time, he won six gold medals. He was again named outstanding athlete of the Games.


title: Mark Spitz

text: In 2005, he was a member of the U.S. delegation at the 2005 Maccabiah Games. He spoke at the JCC Maccabiah Games Opening Ceremonies, which was held in Richmond, Virginia. The Weinstein JCC in Richmond was one of the Host JCC's for the 2005 games, with over 1,000 teenagers participating in various sports, including swimming.


title: Mark Spitz

text: He won five gold medals at the 1967 Pan American Games, setting a record that lasted until 2007 when Brazilian swimmer, Thiago Pereira, won six golds at the XV Pan American Games in Rio de Janeiro.


title: Mark Spitz

text: Spitz was already the holder of ten world records, and he brashly predicted that he would win six gold medals at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. However, he won only two team golds: the 4×100-meter freestyle relay in 3:31.70, and the 4×200-meter freestyle relay in 7:52.33. In addition, Spitz finished second to fellow American Doug Russell in the 100-meter butterfly. He lost to Russell by a half second, despite holding the world record and having beaten Russell the previous ten times they had swum against each other that year. Russell did briefly match Spitz's world record in late August 1967, holding the record equally with Spitz for five days before Spitz regained it solely on October 2, 1967. As a result of being beaten by Russell, Spitz did not get to swim in the 4×100-meter medley relay, which gave Russell his second gold medal and the USA team another world record performance.


title: Mark Spitz

text: Spitz was disappointed in his 1968 Olympic performance. in January 1969, he decided to attend Indiana University to train with legendary Indiana Hoosiers swimming coach Doc Counsilman, who was also his Olympic coach in Mexico City. He called choosing Indiana and Counsilman "the biggest decision of my life (and) the best." While at Indiana, Spitz won eight individual NCAA titles. In 1971, he won the James E. Sullivan Award as the top amateur athlete in the United States. Spitz also set a number of world records during the U.S. Olympic Swim Trials held in Chicago's Portage Park in 1972.


title: Mark Spitz

text: At the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, Spitz was back to repeat his quest for the six gold medals. He did even better, winning seven Olympic gold medals. Furthermore, Spitz set a new world record in each of the seven events – 100-meter freestyle (51.22), 200-meter freestyle (1:52.78), 100-meter butterfly (54.27), 200-meter butterfly (2:00.70), 4×100-meter freestyle relay (3:26.42), 4×200-meter freestyle relay (7:35.78), and 4×100-meter medley relay (3:48.16). Spitz was originally reluctant to swim the 100-meter freestyle, fearing that he would not win the gold medal. Minutes before the race, he confessed on the pool deck to ABC's Donna de Varona, "I know I say I don't want to swim before every event, but this time I'm serious. If I swim six and win six, I'll be a hero. If I swim seven and win six, I'll be a failure." Spitz won by half a stroke in a world-record time of 51.22 seconds.


title: Mark Spitz

text: Spitz is one of five Olympians to win nine or more career gold medals: Larisa Latynina, Paavo Nurmi, and Carl Lewis also have nine; only Phelps has won more with 23. Spitz's record of seven gold medals in a single Olympics was not surpassed until Phelps broke the record at the 2008 Summer Olympics.


title: Mark Spitz

text: After he had completed his events, Spitz left Munich early as a result of the Munich Massacre, where eleven Israeli athletes were taken hostage and later murdered by Palestinian terrorists. Being Jewish himself, there was concern among the Olympic authorities that Spitz would become a likely target for the Palestinians and he was escorted to London for his own safety. It is believed that he was escorted out of the country by US Marines stationed in West Germany.


title: Mark Spitz

text: At age 41, Spitz attempted a comeback for the 1992 Summer Olympics after filmmaker Bud Greenspan offered him a million dollars if he succeeded in qualifying. Spitz's comeback attempt made the cover of "Parade" and was also reported on in "Sports Illustrated" and "Esquire". Filmed by Greenspan's cameras, Spitz was two seconds slower than the Olympic standard and failed to qualify.


title: Mark Spitz

text: In 1999, Spitz ranked No. 33 on "ESPN SportsCentury 50 Greatest Athletes", the only aquatic athlete to make the list.


title: Mark Spitz

text: After Spitz retired from competitive swimming at age 22, he was managed by the William Morris Agency, which tried to get him into show business while he was still a household name due to his athletic success.


title: Mark Spitz

text: A poster featuring Spitz wearing his swimsuit and seven gold medals made him the hottest pin-up since Betty Grable.


title: Mark Spitz

text: In Spitz's TV debut, he appeared as himself in a skit as a dentist on a Bob Hope special that aired October 5, 1972. In 1973–74, Spitz appeared on TV's "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson" and "The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour". On the TV drama "Emergency!", he portrayed Pete Barlow, whose wife (played by Spitz's wife, Suzy) is accidentally shot by a handgun in an overfull drawer. He also appeared briefly on "The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast" of California Governor Ronald Reagan in September 1973.


title: Mark Spitz

text: Spitz went to work for ABC Sports in 1976 and worked on many sports presentations, including coverage of the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal and the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. In 1985 he appeared as a TV announcer in "Challenge of a Lifetime". He continued as a broadcaster for some time, but within a few years, he was hardly seen as a public figure except perhaps as a commentator for swimming events like the 2004 Summer Olympics. Instead Spitz focused on his real estate company in Beverly Hills and hobbies such as sailing.


title: Mark Spitz

text: Spitz narrated "Freedom's Fury", a 2006 Hungarian documentary about the Olympic water polo team's Blood in the Water match against the Soviet Union during the Revolution of 1956—considered among the most famous water polo matches. The film was executive produced by Quentin Tarantino and Lucy Liu, and made its debut at the Tribeca Film Festival.


title: Mark Spitz

text: He appeared in an advertisement for the California Milk Advisory Board. One of his print advertisements featured the caption "I always drink it-is something I like to do. I want to be loved by the mothers."


title: Mark Spitz

text: In 1974, he was in a number of Schick razors commercials. In 1998 he appeared with Evel Knievel in a TV commercial for PlayStation.


title: Mark Spitz

text: In 2004, he appeared in a TV commercial for Sprint PCS. Then in November 2007, Spitz made a cameo appearance on Amanda Beard's first television commercial (for GoDaddy) featuring her own seven Olympic medals (won between 1996 and 2004). The ad was entitled "Shock". Also, in 2007 he appeared in the infomercial for the "Orbitrek Elite" fitness workout.


title: Mark Spitz

text: When Spitz returned from the Olympics, he began dating Suzy Weiner, a UCLA theater student and part-time model, who also was the daughter of one of his father's business acquaintances. Less than a year after the Munich Olympics, they were married on May 6, 1973, in a traditional Jewish service at the Beverly Hills Hotel. They have two sons, Matthew (born October 1981) and Justin (born September 1991). Justin was a member of the Stanford swim team. Spitz and his wife reside in Los Angeles, California.


title: Mark Spitz

text: At Indiana University from 1968 to 1972, Spitz was a pre-dental student and member of Phi Kappa Psi fraternity. "Time" magazine asked him if he wanted to return to dental school after the Olympics. "I always wanted to be a dentist from the time I was in high school, and I was accepted to dental school in the spring of 1972. I was planning to go, but after the Olympics there were other opportunities. I did some television and speaking engagements, and things just went from there." Spitz graduated from Indiana University in 1972.


title: Mark Spitz

text: After Spitz's return to the United States following the 1972 Olympics, he landed several lucrative corporate endorsement contracts. He earned about $7 million in a two-year period. "A million dollars in 1972 would be equivalent to more than $10 million today," Spitz said in 2007. "I did very well, thank you very much." Spitz added, "I would say I was a pioneer. There wasn't anyone who'd gone to the Olympics before me who capitalized the same way on opportunity. It depends on timing, it depends on hype, it depends on the economy, and most importantly, it depends on looks. I mean, I've never seen a magazine of uglies. That's our society. I'm not saying it's right. That's just the facts." Spitz went on to start a real estate company.


title: Mark Spitz

text: Per his official website, Spitz is self-employed as a corporate spokesperson and motivational speaker. However, Sports Yahoo! lists his occupation as a stock broker and motivational speaker. According to one interview, "Spitz became a stockbroker in 2002 and has since moved into private equity. He is now also dabbling in the 'water business', as he calls it, and is in negotiations to build a water-bottling facility on aquifer-rich land that he and a business partner own."


title: Mark Spitz

text: Spitz has pursued various entrepreneurial projects with former NBA player Rick Barry. He travels the world, delivering about 25 lectures a year. His biography, "The Extraordinary Life of An Olympic Champion" by Richard J. Foster, was released in July 2008.


title: Mark Spitz

text: In July 2012, he endorsed Istanbul's bid to host the 2020 Summer Olympics, but the award went to Tokyo.


title: Mark Spitz

text: In an era when other swimmers, male and female, were shaving body hair, he swam with a moustache. When asked why he initially grew one he stated "I grew the moustache because a coach in college said I couldn't grow one." Spitz said he originally grew the moustache as a form of rebellion against the clean-cut look imposed on him in college. "It took a long time to grow," he said. It took four months to grow, but Spitz was proud of it, he decided the moustache was a "good-luck piece".


title: Mark Spitz

text: Mark Spitz is quoted as saying, "When I went to the Olympics, I had every intention of shaving the moustache off, but I realized I was getting so many comments about it—and everybody was talking about it—that I decided to keep it. I had some fun with a Russian coach who asked me if my moustache slowed me down. I said, 'No, as a matter of fact, it deflects water away from my mouth, allows my rear end to rise and make me bullet-shaped in the water, and that's what had allowed me to swim so great.'


title: Mark Spitz

text: According to a "Sports Illustrated" article, on February 14, 1988, after talking about shaving off his moustache for a year, he finally did. "He looked great with it, don't get me wrong," explained his wife Suzy, "but he looks so handsome without it."


title: Mark Spitz

text: When he was asked why he shaved it off he responded "well, one, I'm not swimming anymore; two, it started to turn gray; and three, my wife had never seen me, nor my family, without the moustache ... I'm happy [without it]." He also commented on his moustache in a live, in-studio interview with KCRA host Mike TeSelle on June 14, 2008, Spitz stating that he no longer maintains his iconic moustache because it had become "too gray",


title: Mark Spitz

text: After retirement, Spitz was diagnosed with acid reflux disease, a condition from which his physician thinks he suffered throughout his career. "During my Olympic training, I attributed the symptoms [of acid reflux] to an overexposure to chlorine and eating too soon before and after swimming," says Spitz. "It wasn't until the symptoms began to get in the way of my 1976 Olympic broadcasting career in Montreal, which was four years after retirement that I suspected something more serious must be happening."


title: Mark Spitz

text: He has also reported having high cholesterol and other chronic health issues. "People don't believe that I have high cholesterol, but it's a fact," said Spitz. "I take medication every day because my doctor told me that diet and exercise are not enough to keep my cholesterol down." He is a paid spokesperson for Medco, a pharmacy benefit management company.


title: Mark Spitz

text: In 1972, Spitz was accused of product placement during the medal ceremony. Following his victory in the 200-meter freestyle, Spitz carried his shoes and arrived barefoot to obtain his gold medal. He put them down as the American national anthem, "The Star-Spangled Banner" was played. After the anthem, he picked up his shoes and waved to the crowd. The Soviets saw this as product placement. When questioned by the IOC, Spitz explained that the gesture was innocent, the shoes were old and he was not paid. The IOC cleared him of any wrongdoing.


title: Mark Spitz

text: Spitz has said that he felt snubbed by not being asked to attend the 2008 Summer Olympics to watch Michael Phelps attempt to break his seven-gold-medal record: "I never got invited. You don't go to the Olympics just to say, I am going to go. Especially because of who I am. ... I am going to sit there and watch Michael Phelps break my record anonymously? That's almost demeaning to me. It is not almost—it is." Spitz added, "They voted me one of the top five Olympians of all time. Some of them are dead. But they invited the other ones to go to the Olympics, but not me," he said. "Yes, I am a bit upset about it." Spitz has stated that he has no hard feelings towards Phelps.


title: Mark Spitz

text: However, on August 14, 2008, Spitz appeared on NBC's "Today Show" where he clarified his statement and his pride in Michael Phelps:


title: Mark Spitz

text: Also on August 14, 2008, in an interview aired on Los Angeles KNBC-4's morning news show, "Today in L.A.", Spitz was quoted saying he does believe that "Michael Phelps is the greatest Olympic athlete ever."


title: Mark Spitz

text: On August 15, 2008, as part of an interview on NBC, Spitz said that he felt Phelps's performance in the 100 fly in Beijing was "epic". Spitz paid this compliment to Phelps just two hours after his record-tying seventh gold medal during a live joint interview with Bob Costas:


title: Mark Spitz

text: In 2015, Spitz allegedly claimed that he had seen an email from Omega, the official timekeeper, that Phelps had lost the closely contested 100m butterfly final in 2008. He later claimed that his quote had been "misconstrued".


title: Mark Spitz

text: Mark Spitz has been consistent in his criticism of the two swimming world bodies, FINA and the IOC, in their incomplete attempts to keep drugs out of the sport. He has felt that not enough has been done to monitor and encourage drug-free participation. In 1998 he criticized FINA for its "embarrassing" attempts to stamp out drug abuse, urging them to test for all known drugs. In September 1999 Spitz said the IOC had the technology to test for a plethora of drugs but was refusing to do so because of some IOC member protests.


title: Mark Spitz

text: During a radio interview in Australia, Spitz was quoted as saying "They don't want to test for everything because there's tremendous pressure from the television networks because they want the television to have athletic competitions with the world record holders there for the finals. They want the medals not to be tainted in their value of accomplishment by winning them, and it's all about ratings and commercial selling of time and about money. And an International Olympic Committee has got their hand in the pockets of the network television people, so there's a tremendous conflict of interest in what they should do and what they're doing."


title: Mark Spitz

text: In August 2008, the "Los Angeles Times" reported that Spitz continued to discuss drug testing and was saying "the IOC has sponsors who demand a good show. Television pays the IOC for the rights to that good show, and its sponsors want that too. Drug news and drug distractions are not a good show. People are not going to tune in to see athletes have their medals taken away from them."


title: Bengali alphabet

text: The Bengali script or Bangla alphabet (, "Bangla bôrṇômala") is the alphabet used to write the Bengali language based on the Bengali-Assamese script, and has historically been used to write Sanskrit within Bengal. It is one of the most widely adopted writing systems in the world (used by over 265 million people).


title: Bengali alphabet

text: From a classificatory point of view, the Bengali writing system is an abugida, i.e. its vowel graphemes are mainly realised not as independent letters, but as diacritics modifying the vowel inherent in the base letter they are added to. The Bengali writing system is written from left to right and uses a single letter case, which makes it a unicameral script, as opposed to a bicameral one like the Latin script. It is recognisable, as are some other Brahmic scripts, by a distinctive horizontal line known as a "mātrā" () running along the tops of the letters that links them together. The Bengali writing system is less blocky, however, and presents a more sinuous shape than the Devanagari script.


title: Bengali alphabet

text: The Bengali script can be divided into vowels and vowel diacritics, consonants and consonant conjuncts, diacritical and other symbols, digits and punctuation marks. Vowels and consonants are used as letters and also as diacritical marks.


title: Bengali alphabet

text: The Bengali script has a total of 9 vowel graphemes, each of which is called a "swôrôbôrnô" "vowel letter". The "swôrôbôrnô"s represent six of the seven main vowel sounds of Bengali, along with two vowel diphthongs. All of them are used in both Bengali and Assamese languages.


title: Bengali alphabet

text: The table below shows the vowels present in the modern (since the late nineteenth century) inventory of the Bengali alphabet:


title: Bengali alphabet

text: Consonant letters are called "bænjônbôrnô" "consonant letter" in Bengali. The names of the letters are typically just the consonant sound plus the inherent vowel "ô". Since the inherent vowel is assumed and not written, most letters' names look identical to the letter itself (the name of the letter is itself "ghô", not "gh").


title: Bengali alphabet

text: Clusters of up to four consonants can be orthographically represented as a typographic ligature called a consonant conjunct ( "juktakkhôr"/"juktôbôrnô" or more specifically ). Typically, the first consonant in the conjunct is shown above and/or to the left of the following consonants. Many consonants appear in an abbreviated or compressed form when serving as part of a conjunct. Others simply take exceptional forms in conjuncts, bearing little or no resemblance to the base character.


title: Bengali alphabet

text: Often, consonant conjuncts are not actually pronounced as would be implied by the pronunciation of the individual components. For example, adding "lô" underneath "shô" in Bengali creates the conjunct , which is not pronounced "shlô" but "slô" in Bengali. Many conjuncts represent Sanskrit sounds that were lost centuries before modern Bengali was ever spoken as in . It is a combination of ǰô and ñô but it is not pronounced "ǰñô" or "jnô". Instead, it is pronounced "ggô" in modern Bengali. Thus, as conjuncts often represent (combinations of) sounds that cannot be easily understood from the components, the following descriptions are concerned only with the construction of the conjunct, and not the resulting pronunciation.


title: Bengali alphabet

text: Some consonants fuse in such a way that one stroke of the first consonant also serves as a stroke of the next.


title: Bengali alphabet

text: Some consonants are written closer to one another simply to indicate that they are in a conjunct together.


title: Bengali alphabet

text: Some consonants are compressed (and often simplified) when appearing as the first member of a conjunct.


title: Bengali alphabet

text: These are mainly the Brahmi-Sanskrit diacritics, phones and punctuation marks present in languages with Sanskrit influence or Brahmi-derived scripts.


title: Bengali alphabet

text: The Bengali script has ten numerical digits (graphemes or symbols indicating the numbers from 0 to 9). Bengali numerals have no horizontal headstroke or মাত্রা "matra".


title: Bengali alphabet

text: Numbers larger than 9 are written in Bengali using a positional base 10 numeral system (the decimal system). A period or dot is used to denote the decimal separator, which separates the integral and the fractional parts of a decimal number. When writing large numbers with many digits, commas are used as delimiters to group digits, indicating the thousand (হাজার "hazar"), the hundred thousand or lakh (লাখ "lakh" or লক্ষ "lôkkhô"), and the ten million or hundred lakh or crore (কোটি "koti") units. In other words, leftwards from the decimal separator, the first grouping consists of three digits, and the subsequent groupings always consist of two digits.


title: Bengali alphabet

text: Bengali punctuation marks, apart from the downstroke দাড়ি "dari" (।), the Bengali equivalent of a full stop, have been adopted from western scripts and their usage is similar: Commas, semicolons, colons, quotation marks, etc. are the same as in English. Capital letters are absent in the Bengali script so proper names are unmarked.An apostrophe, known in Bengali as ঊর্ধ্বকমা "urdhbôkôma" "upper comma", is sometimes used to distinguish between homographs, as in পাটা "pata" "plank" and পাʼটা "pa'ta" "the leg". Sometimes, a hyphen is used for the same purpose (as in পা-টা, an alternative of পাʼটা).


title: Bengali alphabet

text: Bengali text is written and read horizontally, from left to right. The consonant graphemes and the full form of vowel graphemes fit into an imaginary rectangle of uniform size (uniform width and height). The size of a consonant conjunct, regardless of its complexity, is deliberately maintained the same as that of a single consonant grapheme, so that diacritic vowel forms can be attached to it without any distortion. In a typical Bengali text, orthographic words, words as they are written, can be seen as being separated from each other by an even spacing. Graphemes within a word are also evenly spaced, but that spacing is much narrower than the spacing between words.


title: Bengali alphabet

text: Unlike in western scripts (Latin, Cyrillic, etc.) for which the letter-forms stand on an invisible baseline, the Bengali letter-forms instead hang from a visible horizontal left-to-right headstroke called মাত্রা "matra". The presence and absence of this matra can be important. For example, the letter ত "tô" and the numeral ৩ "3" are distinguishable only by the presence or absence of the "matra", as is the case between the consonant cluster ত্র "trô" and the independent vowel এ "e". The letter-forms also employ the concepts of letter-width and letter-height (the vertical space between the visible matra and an invisible baseline).


title: Bengali alphabet

text: According to Bengali linguist Munier Chowdhury, there are about nine graphemes that are the most frequent in Bengali texts, shown with its percentage of appearance in the adjacent table.


title: Bengali alphabet

text: In the script, clusters of consonants are represented by different and sometimes quite irregular forms; thus, learning to read is complicated by the sheer size of the full set of letters and letter combinations, numbering about 350. While efforts at standardising the alphabet for the Bengali language continue in such notable centres as the Bangla Academy at Dhaka (Bangladesh) and the Pôshchimbônggô Bangla Akademi at Kolkata (West Bengal, India), it is still not quite uniform yet, as many people continue to use various archaic forms of letters, resulting in concurrent forms for the same sounds.


title: Bengali alphabet

text: Romanization of Bengali is the representation of the Bengali language in the Latin script. There are various ways of Romanization systems of Bengali, created in recent years but failed to represent the true Bengali phonetic sound. While different standards for romanisation have been proposed for Bengali, they have not been adopted with the degree of uniformity seen in languages such as Japanese or Sanskrit. The Bengali alphabet has often been included with the group of Brahmic scripts for romanisation in which the true phonetic value of Bengali is never represented. Some of them are the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration or "IAST system" "Indian languages Transliteration" or ITRANS (uses upper case alphabets suited for ASCII keyboards), and the extension of IAST intended for non-Sanskrit languages of the Indian region called the National Library at Kolkata romanisation.


title: Sun Ra

text: Le Sony'r Ra (born Herman Poole Blount, May 22, 1914 – May 30, 1993), better known as Sun Ra, was an American jazz composer, bandleader, piano and synthesizer player, and poet known for his experimental music, "cosmic" philosophy, prolific output, and theatrical performances. For much of his career, Ra led "The Arkestra", an ensemble with an ever-changing name and flexible line-up.


title: Sun Ra

text: Born and raised in Alabama, Blount became involved in the Chicago jazz scene during the late 1940s. He soon abandoned his birth name, taking the name Le Sony'r Ra, shortened to Sun Ra (after Ra, the Egyptian god of the Sun). Claiming to be an alien from Saturn on a mission to preach peace, he developed a mythical persona and an idiosyncratic credo that made him a pioneer of Afrofuturism. Throughout his life he denied ties to his prior identity saying, "Any name that I use other than Ra is a pseudonym."


title: Sun Ra

text: His widely eclectic and avant-garde music echoed the entire history of jazz, from ragtime and early New Orleans hot jazz, to swing music, bebop, free jazz and fusion. His compositions ranged from keyboard solos to works for big bands of over 30 musicians, along with electronic excursions, songs, chants, percussion pieces, and anthems. From the mid-1950s until his death, Ra led the musical collective The Arkestra (which featured artists such as Marshall Allen, John Gilmore and June Tyson throughout its various iterations). Its performances often included dancers and musicians dressed in elaborate, futuristic costumes inspired by ancient Egyptian attire and the Space Age. Following Ra's illness-forced retirement in 1992, the band remained active as The Sun Ra Arkestra, and, as of 2022, continues performing under the leadership of veteran Ra sideman Marshall Allen.


title: Sun Ra

text: Though his mainstream success was limited, Sun Ra was a prolific recording artist and frequent live performer, and remained influential throughout his life for his music and persona. He is now widely considered an innovator; among his distinctions are his pioneering work in free improvisation and modal jazz and his early use of electronic keyboards and synthesizers. Over the course of his career, he recorded dozens of singles and over one hundred full-length albums, comprising well over 1,000 songs, making him one of the most prolific recording artists of the 20th century.


title: Sun Ra

text: He was born Herman Blount on May 22, 1914, in Birmingham, Alabama, as discovered by his biographer, John F. Szwed, and published in his 1998 book. He was named after the popular vaudeville stage magician Black Herman, who had deeply impressed his mother. He was nicknamed "Sonny" from his childhood, had an older sister and half-brother, and was doted upon by his mother and grandmother.


title: Sun Ra

text: For decades, very little was known about Sun Ra's early life, and he contributed to its mystique. As a self-invented person, he routinely gave evasive, contradictory or seemingly nonsensical answers to personal questions, and denied his birth name. He speculated, only half in jest, that he was distantly related to Elijah Poole, later known as Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam. His birthday for years remained unknown, as his claims ranged from 1910 to 1918. Only a few years before his death, the date of Sun Ra's birth was still a mystery. Jim Macnie's notes for "Blue Delight" (1989) said that Sun Ra was believed to be about 75 years old. But Szwed was able to uncover a wealth of information about his early life and confirmed a birth date of May 22, 1914.


title: Sun Ra

text: As a child, Blount was a skilled pianist. By the age of 11 or 12, he was composing and sight reading music. Birmingham was an important stop for touring musicians and he saw prominent musicians such as Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, and Fats Waller, and others now forgotten. Sun Ra once said, "The world let down a lot of good musicians".


title: Sun Ra

text: In his teenage years, Blount demonstrated prodigious musical talent: many times, according to acquaintances, he went to big band performances and then produced full transcriptions of the bands' songs from memory. By his mid-teens, Blount was performing semi-professionally as a solo pianist, or as a member of various "ad hoc" jazz and R&B groups. He attended Birmingham's segregated Industrial High School (now known as Parker High School), where he studied under music teacher John T. "Fess" Whatley, a demanding disciplinarian who was widely respected and whose classes produced many professional musicians.


title: Sun Ra

text: Though deeply religious, his family was not formally associated with any Christian church or sect. Blount had few or no close friends in high school but was remembered as kind-natured and quiet, an honor roll student, and a voracious reader. He took advantage of the Black Masonic Lodge as one of the few places in Birmingham where African Americans had unlimited access to books. Its collection on Freemasonry and other esoteric concepts made a strong impression on him.


title: Sun Ra

text: By his teens, Blount suffered from cryptorchidism. It left him with a nearly constant discomfort that sometimes flared into severe pain. Szwed suggests that Blount felt shame about it and the condition contributed to his isolation.


title: Sun Ra

text: In 1934, Blount was offered his first full-time musical job by Ethel Harper, his biology teacher from the high school, who had organized a band to pursue a career as a singer. Blount joined a musicians' trade union and toured with Harper's group through the US Southeast and Midwest. When Harper left the group mid-tour to move to New York (she later was a member of the modestly successful singing group the Ginger Snaps), Blount took over leadership of the group, renaming it the Sonny Blount Orchestra. They continued touring for several months before dissolving as unprofitable. Though the first edition of the Sonny Blount Orchestra was not financially successful, they earned positive notice from fans and other musicians. Blount afterward found steady employment as a musician in Birmingham.


title: Sun Ra

text: Birmingham clubs often featured exotic trappings, such as vivid lighting and murals with tropical or oasis scenes. Some believe these influenced the elements Sun Ra incorporated in his later stage shows. Playing for the big bands gave black musicians a sense of pride and togetherness, and they were highly regarded in the black community. They were expected to be disciplined and presentable, and in the segregated South, black musicians had wide acceptance in white society. They often played for elite white society audiences (though they were typically forbidden from associating with the audience).


title: Sun Ra

text: In 1936, Whatley's intercession led to Blount's being awarded a scholarship at Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University. He was a music education major, studying composition, orchestration, and music theory. He dropped out after a year.


title: Sun Ra

text: Blount left college because, he claimed, he had a visionary experience as a college student that had a major, long-term influence on him. In 1936 or 1937, in the midst of deep religious concentration, Sun Ra claimed that a bright light appeared around him, and, as he later said:


title: Sun Ra

text: Blount claimed that this experience occurred in 1936 or 1937. According to Szwed, the musician's closest associates cannot date the story any earlier than 1952. (Blount also said that the incident happened when he was living in Chicago, where he did not settle until the late 1940s). Sun Ra discussed the vision, with no substantive variation, to the end of his life. His trip to Saturn allegedly occurred a full decade before flying saucers entered public consciousness with the 1947 encounter of Kenneth Arnold. It was earlier than other public accounts: about 15 years before George Adamski wrote about contact with benevolent beings; and almost 20 years before the 1961 case of Barney and Betty Hill, who recounted sinister UFO abductions. Szwed says that, "even if this story is revisionist autobiography... Sonny was pulling together several strains of his life. He was both prophesizing his future and explaining his past with a single act of personal mythology."


title: Sun Ra

text: After leaving college, Blount became known as the most singularly devoted musician in Birmingham. He rarely slept, citing Thomas Edison, Leonardo da Vinci, and Napoleon as fellow highly productive cat-nappers. He transformed the first floor of his family's home into a conservatory-workshop, where he wrote songs, transcribed recordings, rehearsed with the many musicians who drifted in and out, and discussed Biblical and esoteric concepts with whoever was interested.


title: Sun Ra

text: Blount became a regular at Birmingham's Forbes Piano Company, a white-owned company. Blount visited the Forbes building almost daily to play music, swap ideas with staff and customers, or copy sheet music into his notebooks. He formed a new band, and like his old teacher Whatley, insisted on rigorous daily rehearsals. The new Sonny Blount Orchestra earned a reputation as an impressive, disciplined band that could play in a wide variety of styles with equal skill.


title: Sun Ra

text: In October 1942, Blount received a selective service notification that he had been drafted into the Military of the United States. He quickly declared himself a conscientious objector, citing religious objections to war and killing, his financial support of his great-aunt Ida, and his chronic hernia. The local draft board rejected his claim. In an appeal to the national draft board, Blount wrote that the lack of black men on the draft appeal board "smacks of Hitlerism." Sonny's refusal to join the military deeply embarrassed his family, and many relatives ostracized him. He was eventually approved for alternate service at Civilian Public Service camp in Pennsylvania, but he did not appear at the camp as required on December 8, 1942. Shortly after, he was arrested in Alabama.


title: Sun Ra

text: In court, Blount said that alternate service was unacceptable; he debated the judge on points of law and Biblical interpretation. The judge ruled that Blount was violating the law and was at risk for being drafted into the U.S. military. Blount responded that if inducted, he would use military weapons and training to kill the first high-ranking military officer possible. The judge sentenced Blount to jail (pending draft board and CPS rulings), and then said, "I've never seen a nigger like you before." Blount replied, "No, and you never will again."


title: Sun Ra

text: In January 1943, Blount wrote to the United States Marshals Service from the Walker County, Alabama jail in Jasper. He said he was facing a nervous breakdown from the stress of imprisonment, that he was suicidal, and that he was in constant fear of sexual assault. When his conscientious objector status was reaffirmed in February 1943, he was escorted to Pennsylvania. He did forestry work as assigned during the day and was allowed to play piano at night. Psychiatrists there described him as "a psychopathic personality [and] sexually perverted," but also as "a well-educated colored intellectual."


title: Sun Ra

text: In March 1943, the draft board reclassified Blount as 4-F because of his hernia, and he returned to Birmingham, embittered and angered. He formed a new band and soon was playing professionally. After his beloved great-aunt Ida died in 1945, Blount felt no reason to stay in Birmingham. He dissolved the band, and moved to Chicago—part of the Second Great Migration, southern African Americans who moved north during and after World War II.


title: Sun Ra

text: In Chicago, Blount quickly found work, notably with blues singer Wynonie Harris, with whom he made his recording debut on two 1946 singles, "Dig This Boogie"/"Lightning Struck the Poorhouse", and "My Baby's Barrelhouse"/"Drinking By Myself". "Dig This Boogie" was also Blount's first recorded piano solo. He performed with the locally successful Lil Green band and played bump-and-grind music for months in Calumet City strip clubs.


title: Sun Ra

text: In August 1946, Blount earned a lengthy engagement at the Club DeLisa under bandleader and composer Fletcher Henderson. Blount had long admired Henderson, but Henderson's fortunes had declined (his band was now made of up middling musicians rather than the stars of earlier years) in large part because of his instability, due to Henderson's long-term injuries from a car accident. Henderson hired Blount as pianist and arranger, replacing Marl Young. Blount's arrangements initially showed a degree of bebop influence, but the band members resisted the new music, despite Henderson's encouragement.


title: Sun Ra

text: In 1948, Blount performed briefly in a trio with saxophonist Coleman Hawkins and violinist Stuff Smith, both preeminent musicians. There are no known recordings of this trio, but a home recording of a Blount-Smith duet from 1953 appears on "Sound Sun Pleasure", and one of Sun Ra's final recordings in 1992 was a rare sideman appearance on violinist Billy Bang's "Tribute to Stuff Smith".


title: Sun Ra

text: In addition to enabling professional advancement, what he encountered in Chicago changed Blount's personal outlook. The city was a center of African-American political activism and fringe movements, with Black Muslims, Black Hebrews, and others proselytizing, debating, and printing leaflets or books. Blount absorbed it all and was fascinated with the city's many ancient Egyptian-styled buildings and monuments. He read books such as George G.M. James's "Stolen Legacy" (which argued that classical Greek philosophy had its roots in ancient Egypt). Blount concluded that the accomplishments and history of Africans had been systematically suppressed and denied by European cultures.


title: Sun Ra

text: By 1952, Blount was leading the Space Trio with drummer Tommy "Bugs" Hunter and saxophonist Pat Patrick, two of the most accomplished musicians he had known. They performed regularly, and Sun Ra began writing more advanced songs.


title: Sun Ra

text: On October 20, 1952, Blount legally changed his name to Le Sony'r Ra. Sun Ra claimed to have always been uncomfortable with his birth name of Blount. He considered it a slave name, from a family that was not his. David Martinelli suggested that his change was similar to "Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali... [dropping] their slave names in the process of attaining a new self-awareness and self-esteem".


title: Sun Ra

text: Patrick left the group to move to Florida with his new wife. His friend John Gilmore (tenor sax) joined the group, and Marshall Allen (alto sax) soon followed. Patrick was in and out of the group until the end of his life, but Allen and Gilmore were the two most devoted members of the Arkestra. In fact, Gilmore is often criticized for staying with Sun Ra for over forty years when he could have been a strong leader in his own right. Saxophonist James Spaulding and trombonist Julian Priester also recorded with Sun Ra in Chicago, and both went on to careers of their own. The Chicago tenor Von Freeman also did a short stint with the band of the early 1950s.


title: Sun Ra

text: In Chicago, Sun Ra met Alton Abraham, a precociously intelligent teenager and something of a kindred spirit. He became the Arkestra's biggest booster and one of Sun Ra's closest friends. Both men felt like outsiders and shared an interest in esoterica. Abraham's strengths balanced Ra's shortcomings: though he was a disciplined bandleader, Sun Ra was somewhat introverted and lacked business sense (a trait that haunted his entire career). Abraham was outgoing, well-connected, and practical. Though still a teenager, Abraham eventually became Sun Ra's "de facto" business manager: he booked performances, suggested musicians for the Arkestra, and introduced several popular songs into the group's repertoire. Ra, Abraham and others formed a sort of book club to trade ideas and discuss the offbeat topics that so intrigued them. This group printed a number of pamphlets and broadsides explaining their conclusions and ideas. Some of these were collected by critic John Corbett and Anthony Elms as "The Wisdom of Sun Ra: Sun Ra's Polemical Broadsheets and Streetcorner Leaflets" (2006).


title: Sun Ra

text: In the mid-1950s, Sun Ra and Abraham formed an independent record label that was generally known as El Saturn Records. (It had several name variations.) Initially focused on 45 rpm singles by Sun Ra and artists related to him, Saturn Records issued two full-length albums during the 1950s: "Super-Sonic Jazz" (1957) and "Jazz In Silhouette" (1959). Producer Tom Wilson was the first to release a Sun Ra album, through his independent label Transition Records in 1957, entitled "Jazz by Sun Ra". During this era, Sun Ra recorded the first of dozens of singles as a band-for-hire backing a range of doo wop and R&B singers; several dozen of these were reissued in a two-CD set, "The Singles", by Evidence Records.


title: Sun Ra

text: In the late 1950s, Sun Ra and his band began to wear outlandish, Egyptian-styled or science fiction-themed costumes and headdresses. These costumes had multiple purposes: they expressed Sun Ra's fascination with ancient Egypt and the space age, they provided a recognizable uniform for the Arkestra, they provided a new identity for the band onstage, and comic relief. (Sun Ra thought "avant garde" musicians typically took themselves far too seriously.)


title: Sun Ra

text: Sun Ra and the Arkestra moved to New York City in the fall of 1961. To save money, Sun Ra and his band members lived communally. This enabled Sun Ra to request rehearsals spontaneously and at any time, which was his established habit. It was during this time in New York that Sun Ra recorded the album "The Futuristic Sound of Sun Ra."


title: Sun Ra

text: In March 1966, the Arkestra secured a regular Monday night gig at Slug's Saloon. This was a breakthrough to new audiences and recognition. Sun Ra's popularity reached an early peak during this period, as the beat generation and early followers of psychedelia embraced him. Regularly for the next year and a half (and intermittently for another half-decade afterwards), Sun Ra and company performed at Slug's for audiences that eventually came to include music critics and leading jazz musicians. Opinions of Sun Ra's music were divided (and hecklers were not uncommon).


title: Sun Ra

text: High praise, however, came from two of the architects of bebop. Trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie offered encouragement, once stating, "Keep it up, Sonny, they tried to do the same shit to me," and pianist Thelonious Monk chided someone who said Sun Ra was "too far out" by responding, "Yeah, but it "swings"."


title: Sun Ra

text: Also in 1966, Sun Ra, with members of the Arkestra and Al Kooper's Blues Project, recorded the album "Batman and Robin" under the pseudonym, The Sensational Guitars of Dan and Dale. The album consisted primarily of instrumental variations on the Batman Theme and public domain classical music, with an uncredited female vocalist singing the "Robin Theme."


title: Sun Ra

text: Despite their planned management of money, the costs of New York eventually became too high and motivated the group to move to Philadelphia.


title: Sun Ra

text: In 1968, when the New York building they were renting was put up for sale, Sun Ra and the Arkestra relocated to the Germantown section of Philadelphia. Sun Ra moved into a house on Morton Street that became the Arkestra's base of operations until his death. It eventually became known as the Arkestral Institute of Sun Ra. Apart from occasional complaints about the noise of rehearsals, they were soon regarded as good neighbors because of their friendliness, drug-free living, and rapport with youngsters. The saxophonist Danny Ray Thompson owned and operated the Pharaoh's Den, a convenience store in the neighborhood. When lightning struck a tree on their street, Sun Ra took it as a good omen. James Jacson fashioned the Cosmic Infinity Drum from the scorched tree trunk. They commuted via railroad to New York for the Monday night gig at Slug's and for other engagements.


title: Sun Ra

text: Sun Ra became a fixture in Philadelphia, appearing semi-regularly on WXPN radio, giving lectures to community groups, or visiting the city's libraries. In the mid-1970s, the Arkestra sometimes played free Saturday afternoon concerts in a Germantown park near their home. At their mid-1970s shows in Philadelphia nightclubs, someone stood at the back of the room, selling stacks of unmarked LPs in plain white sleeves, pressed from recordings of the band's live performances.


title: Sun Ra

text: In late 1968, Sun Ra and the Arkestra made their first tour of the US West Coast. Reactions were mixed. Hippies accustomed to long-form psychedelia like the Grateful Dead were often bewildered by the Arkestra. By this time, the performance included 20–30 musicians, dancers, singers, fire-eaters, and elaborate lighting. John Burks of "Rolling Stone" wrote a positive review of a San Jose State College concert. Sun Ra was featured on the April 19, 1969 cover of "Rolling Stone" magazine, which introduced his inscrutable gaze to millions. During this tour, Damon Choice, then an art student at San Jose, joined the Arkestra and became its vibraphonist.


title: Sun Ra

text: Starting with concerts in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom in 1970, the Arkestra began to tour internationally. They played to audiences who had known his music only through records. Sun Ra continued playing in Europe almost to the end of his life. The saxophonist Danny Ray Thompson became a "de facto" tour and business manager during this era, specializing in what he called "no bullshit C.O.D.," preferring to take cash before performing or delivering records.


title: Sun Ra

text: In early 1971, Sun Ra was appointed as artist-in-residence at University of California, Berkeley, teaching a course called "The Black Man In the Cosmos". Few students enrolled, but his classes were often full of curious people from the surrounding community. One half-hour of each class was devoted to a lecture (complete with handouts and homework assignments), the other half-hour to an Arkestra performance or Sun Ra keyboard solo. Reading lists included the works of Madame Blavatsky and Henry Dumas, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Alexander Hislop's "The Two Babylons", The Book of Oahspe, and assorted volumes concerning Egyptian hieroglyphs, African American folklore, and other topics.


title: Sun Ra

text: In 1971, Sun Ra traveled throughout Egypt with the Arkestra at the invitation of the drummer Salah Ragab. He returned to Egypt in 1983 and 1984, when he recorded with Ragab. Recordings made in Egypt were released as "Live in Egypt", "Nidhamu", "Sun Ra Meets Salah Ragab", "Egypt Strut" and "Horizon".


title: Sun Ra

text: In 1972, San Francisco public TV station KQED producer John Coney, producer Jim Newman, and screenwriter Joshua Smith worked with Sun Ra to produce an 85-minute feature film, entitled "Space Is the Place", with Sun Ra's Arkestra and an ensemble of actors assembled by the production team. It was filmed in Oakland and San Francisco. A 1975 show concert by the Arkestra in Cleveland featured an early lineup of Devo as the opening act. On May 20, 1978, Sun Ra and the Arkestra appeared on the TV show "Saturday Night Live" (S3 E20).


title: Sun Ra

text: In New York City in the fall of 1979, Sun Ra and the Arkestra played as the "house band" at the Squat Theatre on 23rd Street, which was the performance venue of the avant-garde Hungarian theater troupe. Janos, their manager, transformed the theater into a nightclub while most of the troupe was away that season performing in Europe. Debbie Harry, The Velvet Underground's John Cale and Nico (from Andy Warhol's Factory days), John Lurie and The Lounge Lizards, and other pop and avant-garde musicians were regulars. Sun Ra was disciplined and drank only club soda at the gigs, but did not impose his strict code on his musicians. They respected his discipline and authority. Soft-spoken and charismatic, Sun Ra turned Squat Theater into a universe of big band "space" jazz backed by a floor show of sexy Jupiterettes. He directed while playing three synthesizers at the same time. In those days, "Space Is The Place" was the space at Squat.


title: Sun Ra

text: Sun Ra had a stroke in 1990, but kept composing, performing, and leading the Arkestra. Late in his career, he opened a few concerts for the New York–based rock group Sonic Youth. When too ill to perform and tour, Sun Ra appointed Gilmore to lead the Arkestra. (Gilmore was frail from emphysema; after his death in 1995, Allen took over leadership of the Arkestra.)


title: Sun Ra

text: In late 1992, Sun Ra returned to his birth city of Birmingham to live with his older sister, Mary Jenkins, who (along with various Blount cousins) became his caretaker. In January, he was admitted to Princeton Baptist Medical Center, suffering from congestive heart failure, respiratory failure, strokes, circulatory problems, and other serious maladies. He died in the hospital on May 30, 1993, and was buried at the Elmwood Cemetery. The footstone reads "Herman Sonny Blount aka Le Sony'r Ra".


title: Sun Ra

text: Following Sun Ra's death, the Arkestra was led by tenor saxophonist John Gilmore and later performed under the direction of alto saxophonist Marshall Allen. A 1999 album led by Allen, "Song for the Sun", featured Jimmy Hopps and Dick Griffin. In the summer of 2004 the Arkestra became the first American jazz band to perform in Tuva, in southern Siberia, where they played five sets at the Ustuu-Huree Festival.


title: Sun Ra

text: As of July 2019, the Arkestra continues to tour and perform. In September 2008 they played for 7 days in a row at the ZXZW festival, each day emphasizing different aspects of the musical legacy of Sun Ra. In 2009, they performed at Philadelphia's Institute of Contemporary Art in conjunction with an exhibition that explored the intersection of the Arkestra's performing legacy and the practice of contemporary art. In 2011, they ventured to Australia for the first time, for the 2011 Melbourne International Jazz Festival and MONA (Museum of Old and New Art) in Tasmania. In 2017, the Arkestra performed at the 31st Lowell Folk Festival in Lowell Massachusetts. In 2019, it was announced that the Arkestra would perform at Portland, Oregon's Hollywood Theater for three nights on July 14, 15, and 16. On October 22, 2021, they performed at the BRIC JazzFest in Downtown Brooklyn.


title: Sun Ra

text: Sun Ra's piano technique touched on many styles: his youthful fascination with boogie woogie, stride piano and blues, a sometimes refined touch reminiscent of Count Basie or Ahmad Jamal, and angular phrases in the style of Thelonious Monk or brutal, percussive attacks like Cecil Taylor. Often overlooked is the range of influences from classical music – Sun Ra cited Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Schoenberg and Shostakovich as his favorite composers for the piano.


title: Sun Ra

text: Sun Ra's music can be roughly divided into three phases, but his records and performances were full of surprises and the following categories should be regarded only as approximations.


title: Sun Ra

text: The first period occurred in the 1950s when Sun Ra's music evolved from big band swing into the outer-space-themed "cosmic jazz" for which he was best known. Music critics and jazz historians say some of his best work was recorded during this period and it is also some of his most accessible music. Sun Ra's music in this era was often tightly arranged and sometimes reminiscent of Duke Ellington's, Count Basie's, or other important swing music ensembles. However, there was a strong influence from post-swing styles like bebop, hard bop, and modal jazz, and touches of the exotic and hints of the experimentalism that dominated his later music. Notable Sun Ra albums from the 1950s include "Sun Ra Visits Planet Earth", "Interstellar Low Ways", "Super-Sonic Jazz", "We Travel the Space Ways", "The Nubians of Plutonia" and "Jazz In Silhouette".


title: Sun Ra

text: Ronnie Boykins, Sun Ra's bassist, has been described as "the pivot around which much of Sun Ra's music revolved for eight years." This is especially pronounced on the key recordings from 1965 ("The Magic City", "The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, Volume One", and "The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, Volume Two") where the intertwining lines of Boykins' bass and Ra's electronic keyboards provide cohesion.


title: Sun Ra

text: After the move to New York, Sun Ra and company plunged headlong into the experimentalism that they had only hinted at in Chicago. The music was often extremely loud and the Arkestra grew to include multiple drummers and percussionists. In recordings of this era, Ra began to use new technologies—such as extensive use of tape delay—to assemble spatial sound pieces that were far removed from earlier compositions such as "Saturn". Recordings and live performances often featured passages for unusual instrumental combinations, and passages of collective playing that incorporated free improvisation. It is often difficult to tell where compositions end and improvisations begin.


title: Sun Ra

text: In this era, Sun Ra began conducting using hand and body gestures. This system inspired cornetist Butch Morris, who later developed his own more highly refined way to conduct improvisers.


title: Sun Ra

text: Though often associated with avant-garde jazz, Sun Ra did not believe his work could be classified as "free music": "I have to make sure that every note, every nuance, is correct... If you want to call it that, spell it "p-h-r-e", because "ph" is a definite article and "re" is the name of the sun. So I play "phre" music – music of the sun."


title: Sun Ra

text: Seeking to broaden his compositional possibilities, Sun Ra insisted all band members double on various percussion instruments – predating world music by drawing on various ethnic musical forms – and most saxophonists became multireedists, adding instruments such as flutes, oboes, or clarinets to their arsenals. In this era, Sun Ra was among the first of any musicians to make extensive and pioneering use of synthesizers and other various electronic keyboards; he was given a prototype Minimoog by its inventor, Robert Moog. According to the Bob Moog Foundation: "Sun Ra first met Robert Moog after "Downbeat" journalist and Sun Ra acquaintance Tam Fiofori arranged for a visit to Moog’s factory in Trumansburg in the Fall of 1969...it was during this visit that Moog loaned Sun Ra a prototype Minimoog (Model B), several months before the commercial instrument (Model D) was introduced in March 1970. Ra immediately added the instrument to his repertoire of keyboards, later acquired a second, and featured the Minimoog prominently on many of his recordings of the early 1970s."


title: Sun Ra

text: Notable titles from this period include "The Magic City", "Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy", "When Sun Comes Out", "The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, Volume One", "Atlantis", "Secrets of the Sun" and "Other Planes of There".


title: Sun Ra

text: During their third period, beginning in the 1970s, Sun Ra and the Arkestra settled down into a relatively conventional sound, often incorporating swing standards, although their records and concerts were still highly eclectic and energetic, and typically included at least one lengthy, semi-improvised percussion jam. Sun Ra was explicitly asserting a continuity with the ignored jazz tradition: "They tried to fool you, now I got to school you, about jazz, about jazz" he chanted in concerts, framing the inclusion of pieces by Fletcher Henderson and Jelly Roll Morton.


title: Sun Ra

text: In the 1970s Sun Ra took a liking to the films of Walt Disney. He incorporated smatterings of Disney musical numbers into many of his performances from then on. In the late 1980s the Arkestra performed a concert at Walt Disney World. The Arkestra's version of "Pink Elephants on Parade" is available on "Stay Awake", a tribute album of Disney tunes played by various artists and produced by Hal Willner. A number of Sun Ra's 1970s concerts are available on CD, but none have received a wide release in comparison to his earlier music. In 1978–1980 performances, Sun Ra added a large electronic creation, the Outerspace Visual Communicator, which produced images rather than sounds; this was performed at a keyboard by its inventor, Bill Sebastian. During concerts, the OVC usually was positioned at center stage behind the Arkestra while Sebastian sat on stage with the musicians.


title: Sun Ra

text: Dozens of musicians—perhaps hundreds—passed through Sun Ra's bands over the years. Some stayed with him for decades, while others played on only a few recordings or performances.


title: Sun Ra

text: Sun Ra was personally responsible for the vast majority of the constant changes in the Arkestra's lineup. According to contrabassist Jiunie Booth, a member of the Arkestra, Sun Ra did not confront any musician whose performance he was unsatisfied with. Instead, he would simply gather the entire Arkestra minus the offending musician, and skip town—leaving the fired musician stranded.


title: Sun Ra

text: The following is a partial list of musical collaborators, and the eras when they played with Sun Ra or the Arkestra:


title: Sun Ra

text: The Outer Space Visual Communicator was a giant machine that was played with hands and feet to create light designs, similar to how musicians create and sound with their instruments. The name of the instrument arose from Bill Sebastian's collaboration with Sun Ra, who incorporated the OVC into the Arkestra from 1978 to 1980 and experimented on video applications from 1981 to 1987.


title: Sun Ra

text: Sun Ra's world view was often described as a philosophy, but he rejected this term, describing his own manner as an "equation" and saying that while philosophy was based on theories and abstract reasoning, his method was based on logic and pragmatism. Many of the Arkestra cite Sun Ra's teachings as pivotal and for inspiring such long-term devotion to the music that they knew would never make them much money. His equation was rarely (if ever) explained as a whole; instead, it was related in bits and pieces over many years, leading some to doubt that he had a coherent message. However, Martinelli argues that, when considered as a whole, one can discern a unified world view that draws upon many sources, but is also unique to Sun Ra, writing:


title: Sun Ra

text: He drew on sources as diverse as the Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism, channeling, numerology, Freemasonry, Ancient Egyptian Mysticism, and Black nationalism. Sun Ra's system had distinct Gnostic leanings, arguing that the god of most monotheistic religions was not the creator god, not the ultimate god, but a lesser, evil being. Sun Ra was wary of the Bible, knowing that it had been used to justify slavery. He often re-arranged and re-worded Biblical passages (and re-worked many other words, names, or phrases) in an attempt to uncover "hidden" meanings. The most obvious evidence of this system was Ra's practice of renaming many of the musicians who played with him.


title: Sun Ra

text: Bassoonist/multireedist James Jacson had studied Zen Buddhism before joining Sun Ra and identified strong similarities between Zen teachings and practices (particularly Zen koans) and Ra's use of "non sequiturs" and seemingly absurd replies to questions. Drummer Art Jenkins admitted that Sun Ra's "nonsense" sometimes troubled his thoughts for days until inspiring a sort of paradigm shift, or profound change in outlook. Drummer Andrew Cyrille said Sun Ra's comments were "very interesting stuff... whether you believed it or not. And a lot of times it was humorous, and a lot of times it was ridiculous, and a lot of times it was right on the money."


title: Sun Ra

text: Sun Ra's philosophy can be further understood in viewing his film "Space is the Place." The film opens with Sun Ra on a distant planet, where the music and vibrations are much different from Earth where the air is filled with the sounds of “guns, anger and frustration.” A colony is erected on this planet specifically for black people because only on a distant planet will the black race be free to return to their natural vibrations and live in harmony. This will give rise to an “altered destiny.” The film also discloses Sun Ra's ideas on how to get his people to another planet. This can be accomplished through, “isotopic teleportation, trans-molecularization, or better still – teleport the whole planet here through music.”


title: Sun Ra

text: According to Szwed, Sun Ra's view of his relationship to black people and black cultures "changed drastically" over time. Initially, Sun Ra identified closely with broader struggles for black power, black political influence, and black identity, and saw his own music as a key element in educating and liberating blacks. But by the heyday of Black Power radicalism in the 1960s, Sun Ra was expressing disillusionment with these aims. He denied feeling closely connected to any race. In 1970 he said:


title: Sun Ra

text: I couldn't approach black people with the truth because they like lies. They live lies... At one time I felt that white people were to blame for everything, but then I found out that they were just puppets and pawns of some greater force, which has been using them... Some force is having a good time [manipulating black and white people] and looking, enjoying itself up in a reserved seat, wondering, "I wonder when they're going to wake up."


title: Sun Ra

text: Sun Ra is considered to be an early pioneer of the Afrofuturism movement due to his music, writings and other works.


title: Sun Ra

text: The influence of Sun Ra can be seen throughout many aspects of black music. He grounded his practice of Afrofuturism in a musical tradition of performing blackness that remains relevant today. Sun Ra lived out his beliefs of Afrofuturism in his daily life by embodying the movement not only in his music, but also in his clothes and actions. This embodiment of the narrative allowed him to demonstrate black nationalism as a counternarrative to the present culture.


title: Sun Ra

text: It was in Chicago, as well, in the mid-fifties, that Ra began experimenting with extraterrestriality in his stage show, sometimes playing regular cocktail lounges dressed in space suits and ancient Egyptian regalia. By placing his band and performances in space and extraterrestrial environments Sun Ra built a world that was his own view of how the African diaspora connected.


title: Sun Ra

text: Many of Sun Ra's innovations remain important and groundbreaking. Ra was one of the first jazz leaders to use two double basses, to employ the electric bass, to play electronic keyboards, to use extensive percussion and polyrhythms, to explore modal music and to pioneer solo and group freeform improvisations. In addition, he made his mark in the wider cultural context: he proclaimed the African origins of jazz, reaffirmed pride in black history and reasserted the spiritual and mystical dimensions of music, all important factors in the black cultural/political renaissance of the 1960s.


title: Sun Ra

text: NRBQ recorded "Rocket #9" in 1968 for their debut album on Columbia. Sun Ra had given NRBQ's Terry Adams a copy of the song on 45 and told him, "This is especially for you," which Adams reported inspired him to reform the band after a period of inactivity. The band still includes Sun Ra's compositions in their performances, and besides "Rocket #9" have released recordings of "We Travel the Spaceways" and "Love in Outer Space." Several members of the Arkestra have toured with NRBQ over the years, including Pat Patrick, Marshall Allen, Knoel Scott, Tyrone Hill and Danny Thompson. Adams has joined the Arkestra as their pianist on several tours, most recently during a February 2016 tour of cities in the US southeast.


title: Sun Ra

text: Detroit's MC5 played a handful of shows with Sun Ra and were influenced by his works immensely. One of their songs from their premiere album "Kick Out the Jams" (1969) featured a track called "Starship", which was based on a poem by Ra.


title: Sun Ra

text: The "Sun Ra Repatriation Project" was started in 2008 with the aim of using interplanetary communication with a view to facilitating Sun Ra's return to planet Earth.


title: Sun Ra

text: Filmmaker and visual artist Cauleen Smith has heavily researched the life and legacy of Sun Ra. Her 2013 exhibition "17" "arises out of [her] research into the legacy of Sun Ra, who was himself a student of numerology and achieved a kind of cultural immortality the number 17 might be said to refer to". Her project "The Solar Flare Arkestral Marching Band" includes several components related to Sun Ra. "One component (2010) of the project is the production of five flash mob street performances involving a marching band inspired by Sun Ra's Arkestra. The second component of the project... is a full-length video that chronicles the urban legends of Sun Ra’s time in Chicago as well as the contemporary artists who live and work in this city".


title: Sun Ra

text: The "Sun Ra Revival Post-Krautrock Archestra", formed in Australia during 2014, paid tribute to Sun Ra's philosophies and musical ideas within their albums "Realm Beyond Realm" and "Sun Ra Kills the World".


title: Sun Ra

text: The Spatial AKA Orchestra, formed in 2006 by Jerry Dammers (the main songwriter of British ska revival band The Specials), was originally created as a tribute to Sun Ra, borrowing many of the ideas, themes and tropes from Sun Ra's own performances.


title: Sun Ra

text: In 2022, a building at 5626 Morton Street known as the Arkestral Institute of Sun Ra was listed as a historic landmark in the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places. One of its inhabitants, Marshall Allen, known for his work with The Sun Ra Arkestra, began living there in 1968.


title: Sun Ra

text: The University of Chicago has an extensive collection of Sun Ra's works and personal items in the Special Collections Research Center at the Regenstein Library. The collection was assembled by Ra's business manager Alton Abraham and is open to the public upon request. The Special Collections Research Center has also repeatedly exhibited Sun Ra's work.


title: Sun Ra

text: "Space Is the Place" (1974) is a feature-length film that stars Sun Ra and his band as themselves. The soundtrack, also by Sun Ra, is available on CD. The film follows Sun Ra after he returns to Chicago from many years of space travel with his Arkestra. In a meeting with "the Overseer" – a devil-like figure stationed in the desert – Sun Ra agrees to play a game of cards to "win" the black community. Sun Ra's goal is to transport the American black community to a new planet he discovered while on his journey, and that he hopes to use as a home for an entirely black population. The artist's mission is to "teleport the whole planet through music", but his attempts are often misunderstood by his supposed converts.


title: Sun Ra

text: Sun Ra and his Arkestra were the subject of a few documentary films, including Robert Mugge's "" (1980). It interspersed passages of performances and rehearsals with Sun Ra's commentary on various subjects ranging from today's youth to his own place in the cosmos. More recently, Don Letts' "Sun Ra – Brother from Another Planet" (2005) incorporated some of Mugge's material, and includes some additional interviews. "Points on a Space Age" (2009) is a documentary by Ephrahaim Asili. "It's a 60-minute doc along the lines of the talking-head-intercut-with performance clips style."


title: Sun Ra

text: Sun Ra wrote an enormous number of songs and material regarding his spiritual beliefs and music. A magazine titled "Sun Ra Research" was published irregularly for many years, providing extensive documentation of Sun Ra's perspectives on many issues. Sun Ra's collected poetry and prose is available as a book, published May 2005, entitled "Sun Ra, The Immeasurable Equation". Another book of over 260 of Sun Ra's poems, "Sun Ra: Collected Works Vol. 1: Immeasurable Equation" was published by Phaelos Books in November 2005. "The Wisdom of Sun Ra: Sun Ra's Polemical Broadsheets and Streetcorner Leaflets", was published in book form in 2005, by WhiteWalls. A collection of Sun Ra's poetry, "This Planet Is Doomed", was published by Kicks Books in 2011.


title: Catherine (video game)

text: Catherine is a puzzle video game developed by Atlus. The game was released for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in Japan and North America in 2011, in PAL regions by Deep Silver in 2012, and for Microsoft Windows by Sega in 2019. A re-release with additional content, titled Catherine: Full Body, was released in 2019 for the PlayStation 4 worldwide and for the PlayStation Vita only in Japan, and a Nintendo Switch version released worldwide in 2020.