Cosmic Jazz

Cosmic jazz is the strain of jazz, named in the wake of *Sun Ra*, that treats outer space as both subject and method: chant-like themes, African percussion, electronics and extended improvisation aimed at transcendence rather than entertainment. Ra's Arkestra built the template from the 1950s, declaring its music a mythology for the space age, and *Alice Coltrane* and *Pharoah Sanders* fused it with devotional practice in the late 1960s. The term gathered the music's spiritual and Afrofuturist wings, and a twenty-first-century revival led by *Kamasi Washington* and *The Comet Is Coming* returned its ecstatic, cosmos-facing sound to festival stages.