My Words Are Music

Ars Nova Workshop is excited to present My Words Are Music, a new all-star project exploring the poetry of iconic bandleader/composer Sun Ra, at Solar Myth on Thursday, January 18. 

Released in August 2023 by Omni Sound, My Words Are Music: A Celebration of Sun Ra’s Poetry is a project developed in conjunction with Living Sky, the all-instrumental Sun Ra Arkestra album released in 2022. These two bodies of work aim to offer an opportunity to follow Sun Ra into a better future, through sound and poetry. Sun Ra is better known to most as a musician than a poet, but he identified equally as both. My Words Are Music provides direct access to the sentiments of a poet who never called Earth home. The spoken word album hosts an inspired array of artists — The Arkestra’s Marshall Allen & Knoel Scott, experimental vocalist/multi-instrumentalist L’Rain, poet and singer-songwriter Saul Williams, TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adibempe, and others — who personally chose their favorite Sun Ra poems to recite, performing them like instruments newly invented for the occasion. Freed from the page, his poetry acquires an unexpected simplicity and poignance it possessed all along

This performance will feature Marshall Allen’s Ghost Horizons — anchored by Marshall on saxophone and EVI and DMHotep on guitar and electronics — plus an all-star cast of musicians and vocalists.