Sun Ra, Sung Anew: Jimetta Rose’s MettaSun

Jimetta Rose sings like somebody who learned music as a communal act, because she did.

A South Central Los Angeles native, she came up singing in church choirs and carries that formation into everything she makes. She founded and directs the Voices of Creation, a community choir rooted in healing, joy and communal transformation, and serves as its lead vocalist, songwriter, arranger and producer. She came out of the spiritual-jazz community around Dwight Trible and Build an Ark in Leimert Park, and her list of collaborators tells the same story: Georgia Anne Muldrow, Sa-Ra Creative Partners, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Noname, Shafiq Husayn, Saul Williams, Angel Bat Dawid and saxophonist Isaiah Collier.

Her new album, MettaSun, turns that community toward one of jazz’s great visionaries. Across the record she reimagines Sun Ra’s music through her own lens and pays homage to June Tyson, the Arkestra’s longtime vocalist. The seed of the idea was planted by the late Ras G. Five of the album’s eight tracks are Sun Ra songs, among them “Somebody Else’s Idea,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “I’ll Wait For You,” “Springtime Again” and a reworked “Nuclear War,” and she brings her own words to several of them.

The most telling moment is “I’ll Wait For You,” which folds Sun Ra’s song into “What a Wonderful World” and asks, plainly, where that wonderful world is. It’s the whole album in one gesture: reverence for the source, and a refusal to treat it as a museum piece. She isn’t covering Sun Ra. She’s continuing a conversation he started, in a voice that is entirely her own.

Most of the album was recorded in three days, and you can hear why. The aim was to carry the live energy of the room onto the record, and the performances have that unrepeatable quality: a choir and a band listening to each other, led by a singer who knows the song belongs to everybody in the room.

MettaSun isn’t a tribute album in the usual sense. It’s a working singer taking the music that raised her, and the community that raised her alongside it, and showing what both still have to say.