June Tyson: On Erasure and Relevance
Meghan Gilhespy
June Tyson (1936–92) was the first vocalist, and first female member of the well-known and extensively researched Sun Ra Arkestra.1 Before joining the Arkestra, Tyson worked as a dancer and singer in a series of outdoor Broadway musicals in New York. In 1968, the Arkestra’s manager Lem Roebuck saw Tyson perform, and consequently introduced her to notorious bandleader and pillar of Afrofuturism, Sun Ra. She began rehearsing with the ensemble and soon was a member, working with the Arkestra from 1968 until her death in 1992.2
Drawing on feminist jazz scholarship that examines the marginalization of women within jazz practice, this case study continues the critique and revision of jazz historiography begun by scholars such as Lara Pellegrinelli, Sherrie Tucker, and Tracy McMullen by exploring essential contributions of vocalist June Tyson.3 In this study, I first provide theoretic frameworks to understand Tyson’s unique position in the Arkestra. Next, I describe the Arkestra and its leader in order to demonstrate Tyson’s essential role(s) in the ensemble. I finish by detailing some of her experiences in the ensemble. Throughout, I not only ask “who was June Tyson?” but I also explore reasons why many people, including jazz scholars and fans, are not aware of her.4
Tyson’s musical, emotional, logistical, and domestic labor made her essential to the functioning of an ensemble that, although it was outside of the mass market, still aimed to obtain profit and capital. Her musical work included playing violin and composing, and her distinctive singing voice was an unmistakeable and crucial part of the Arkestra’s sound palate. Her emotional work took form within her relationship with Ra. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild initially defines emotional labor as expressing a given emotional state in order to perform the requirements of a job, while also noting that the term encompasses varying types of work, including acting as listener, confidant, or counselor.5 Indeed, Tyson acted as Ra’s advisor on personal matters, and while she had to maintain a certain demeanor in order to work with the Arkestra, Tyson also advised and listened to Ra in ways that supported him, enabling him to focus on music and running his ensemble. Her logistical work included setting stage routines, clothing choices, and organizing finances.6 Finally, her domestic work included housing and feeding members of the ensemble and, as Cat Celebrezze outlines in her liner notes to a recent compilation album of Tyson’s work, being “a cosmic sister-mother who… provided a place for rehearsals and late-night crashing.”7
Perhaps domestic labor is the most curious form of work Tyson performed in the context of the musical ensemble. Her work was different than anyone else’s, and, importantly, was imposed on her as a woman. Such work, according to Marxist feminist Silvia Federici, is imposed on women as, “a natural attribute of our female physique and personality, an internal need, an aspiration, supposedly coming from the depth of our female character. Housework was transformed into a natural attribute, rather than being recognized as work, because it was destined to be unwaged.”8 Celebrezzee’s framing of Tyson as a Mother is notable, particularly as it relates to her work in an ensemble that gained capital. Federici states, “housework is already money for capital, that capital has made and makes money out of our cooking, smiling, fucking. At the same time, it shows that we have cooked, smiled, fucked throughout the years not because it was easier for us than for anybody else, but because we did not have any other choice…. We are housemaids, prostitutes, nurses, shrinks; this is the essence of the ‘heroic’ spouse who is celebrated on ‘Mother’s Day.’”9
While Federici’s Marxist feminist angle provides insight into the naturalization of Tyson’s feminized labor, Saidiya V. Hartman’s work Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self Making in Nineteenth Century America sheds light on how Tyson’s relationship with Sun Ra fits within a longer history of the gendered division of labor and Black women’s domesticity within the legacy of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Hartman notes that Black men in America have faced relentless pressures to “make a man of yourself” or “show thyself a man,” and Sun Ra demonstrated similar gendered hierarchies in terms of creative labor.10 Hartman states, “The discourse on self-improvement asserted that neither race nor the badge of slavery need impede the possibilities for success or advancement… it also placed the burden of self-advancement solely upon the individual.”11 Hartman continues,
If the emphasis on individual responsibility, reliance, and self-making inevitably attributed the wretched condition of blacks to their shortcomings, the remedy invariably suggested was ‘showing thyself a man’ … The equation of man and laborer conflates self-cultivation with the extensive capacities of the laboring body; that is, it establishes the isomorphism of making the self and making objects by likening distinct forms of production and, notably, by effacing the presence of women within the discourse of freedom, thereby restricting the act of making to masculinity.12
Hartman’s conceptualization of “self-making” here equally applies to the art making and development of musical originality that took place in the Sun Ra Arkestra, which often excluded the presence of Black women, relegating them to the social reproduction of labor. Indeed, as Carmen Teeple Hopkins states, “black feminists show that unpaid labor began during the transatlantic slave trade… at a general level, reproductive labor is devalued; for racialized women, however, it is even further devalued.13
Sun Ra was a composer, street corner preacher, bandleader, and self-proclaimed extra-terrestrial.14 Described as one of the most radical forces in creative music, Sun Ra was highly regarded and well known for leading the Sun Ra Arkestra from 1961 until he became ill in 1992.15 The Arkestra was a ground-breaking large ensemble that was extremely prolific and recognized for creating music that consistently pushed boundaries. Sun Ra is cited as being part of Afrofuturism’s “foundational pyramid,” along with writers Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler, and musician George Clinton.16
Although Sun Ra saw jazz as having an intrinsically political function and asserted that, “it can and should actively intervene in the production and distribution of knowledge in ways that counter oppression and injustice,” he was particularly reluctant to work with women.17 Many scholars frame Sun Ra as specifically against oppression, when in fact he was diligently oppressive towards women.18 Although he worked to dismantle anti-Black racism, he deeply feared the power of women and attempted to exclude them from his musical spaces. Tyson’s contributions to and labor within the ensemble must be understood within this broader context. Fully grasping her role requires an acknowledgment of the underlying tension: it is not merely that she engaged in extensive labor and, through it, helped shape a canonical ensemble, but that she did so under conditions made more difficult by a leader who, while positioned in narratives as an advocate for equity, engaged in practices that were, in fact, inequitable toward her.
Perhaps nothing presented more difficult challenges for Tyson than working with Sun Ra himself as he perpetuated a dominating, controlling style of band leadership. As noted by John Szwed, Tyson, along with all women, were seen as a threat in the eyes of Sun Ra.19 Ra saw women as bearers of supernatural forces that suggested they carried otherworldly powers. They were frightening and needed to be controlled by whatever means he had available. He believed that, for example, women had special powers that hindered male members’ capabilities to perform, stating, “I can’t create with women in my environment,” when things were not going well in the recording studio.20 Ra’s chauvinism extended to gatekeeping, and the marginalization of women outside the Arkestra as well. In his examination of gender and sexuality in the Jazz Composers Guild, musicologist Benjamin Piekut quotes composer and trumpeter Bill Dixon as stating, “They didn’t want Carla (Bley) in the group, because of Sun Ra. Sun Ra was against it.”21 In an interview, Carla Bley confirmed: “In 1964, they let me be in the Jazz Composers Guild even though I was a woman. Sun Ra objected. He said, any ship with a woman onboard is going to sink. I felt again like a fly on the wall. If I ever said anything, it wasn’t taken seriously.”22
Ra’s fear of women meant that his inclusion of Tyson in the Arkestra was unusual for him, and he went to great lengths to rationalize it. Szwed notes, “Sun Ra viewed women as potentially dangerous, as distractions from the divine purpose.”23 This led to certain machinations on Ra’s part when it came to Tyson. Tyrone Hill, trombonist and vocalist with the Arkestra since 1979, remembers that Ra did not necessarily consider Tyson a woman at all. In an interview, Hill recalls Ra believing Tyson was “another order of being… kind of childlike… kind of innocent.”24 Considering the attitudes in the band toward Tyson that saddled her with duties conventionally gendered female, as well as the (feminized) emotional support Tyson provided Ra, it is very contradictory that he would ever suggest that she was anything but a woman. Moreover, I assert that his infantilization of Tyson allows him to sidestep that contradiction, as does considering her to not be a woman, and enables him to get past his fear of women and gender-based fear of the body.
Tyson’s brilliant vocal performance is exemplified in everything she was allowed to take part in. Her work on the song “Enlightenment,” live from Coney Island in 1986 with Sun Ra and John Cage, demonstrates her ability to improvise in response to less than ideal conditions—the on-site amplification was patchy and suddenly cut in and out during this perfromance. Tyson’s singing on “If You Are Not a Myth: Strange Worlds in My Mind,” included on the 2019 album June Tyson: Saturnian Queen of the Sun Ra Arkestra (a re-release of various works on which appears with liner notes by Cat Celebrezze, mentioned above) features shrieking, yodeling, and pitched speech. Additionally, Tyson’s ability to improvise melodies when the only information provided to her was lyrics whispered in her ear also actively contributed to the band’s overall sound. In an interview with Peter Hinds in 1986, Tyson recalls, “[Ra] would whisper the lines to me on stage, and I’d have to sing it.” To this the interviewer states, “Wow talk about improvisation like spur of the moment!” Tyson responds, “You’re just doing as told, you might think about it later, but you’re just doing as told… I never know just what I’m going to sing or when… it’s always different.”25 Whether pre-planned or even done as told, June Tyson’s improvised melodies were essential to the music the Arkestra produced, providing memorable melodic material that lingers with the listener. Because there are no videos that demonstrate this, only Tyson stating it happened in an interview, this practice likely took place at the beginning of the Arkestra’s career, before they filmed their performances. Consequently, this suggests that Tyson’s improvisations may have formed many of the melodies that are now seen as standards or anthems of the Sun Ra Arkestra. Early key live recordings that feature Tyson singing include Nuits de la Fonation Maeght (1971), It’s After the End of the World (1970), and Black Myth/Out in Space (recorded 1970, released 1998).
June Tyson took on many non-musical roles in the Arkestra that were, nevertheless, key to its members’ ability to make music. As mentioned, her home was the meeting place and living space of many individuals in the group, yet such contributions were taken for granted and seen simply as what a woman, and particularly a Black woman, should do. Following musicologist Farah Jasmine Griffin’s interrogation of the role of the Black woman singer, Tyson, a figure in the ensemble who was to sing rather than speak, was also “a figure that serves the unit, who heals and nurtures it but has no rights or privileges within it—more mammy than mother.”26 She continues, “this figure of the singing Black woman is often similar to the uses of Black women’s bodies as nurturing, healing, life and love giving for the majority culture.”27 Indeed, even Szwed, who stands out for discussing Tyson at all still describes her as Ra’s “handmaiden” and his “shadow.”28
Importantly, the labor Tyson performed was not always valued by members of the band either, based on interviews with other musicians of the Arkestra.29 Tyson is adjacent to a historical pattern of jazzmen’s wives performing labor that enabled their husband’s careers. These women, like Celia Zaentz, who helped shape Debut records along with her husband Charles Mingus, subverted gendered limitations within jazz culture.30 Nellie Monk supported Thelonious Monk in his career as his personal manager, his musical consultant, the mother to his children, and sometimes the only wage earner in the family.31 Gladys Hampton managed Lionel Hampton’s band, and Lorraine Gillespie handled Dizzy Gillespie’s finances, while Anita Evans wrote grant applications and booked gigs for Gil Evans.32 More specifically, Tyson follows a long tradition of women, often men’s partners, sewing for them: Moki Cherry sewed trumpeter Don Cherry’s creative backdrops and hangings, as well as his clothing. Carmen Lowe, married to drummer Rashied Ali, made wall hangings for him. Tyson differs from many of these examples, however, because she was not married to Sun Ra, but rather was a musician in the ensemble. Nevertheless, many of Tyson’s tasks, such as sewing, cleaning, and cooking for the ensemble, were not recognized, let alone celebrated. Not only were they seen as natural obligations, but they were viewed as her price of entry into the otherwise male space of the Arkestra.
Tyson’s role as confidant for Sun Ra further points to the feminized emotional and logistical labor she provided him. In this case, that emotional work took form within Tyson and Ra’s relationship—Tyson acted as Ra’s advisor on personal matters, and her logistical expertise was used to plan stage routines, clothing choice, and finances.33 And while Tyson had to maintain a certain agreeable demeanor in order to work with the Arkestra, she also advised and listened to Ra in ways that supported him, enabling him to do his labor.
Tyson’s work for the Sun Ra Arkestra effectively operated at the intersection of formal and informal labor. At the core of this liminality was the pressure she faced to negotiate gender inequality in the ensemble, while often being framed as doing her job. For instance, Arkestra saxophonist Knoel Scott recalls that members of the Arkestra, “would bunk up in June’s crib even sleeping in the kitchen. There was always a hot meal and a place to rest at June’s.”34 This domestic labor extended to emotional work—Scott remembers how Tyson would provide counsel to Arkestra members who “would seek her out after burning themselves out in extra-curricular activities.”35 Commonly, her emotional labor is not mentioned by jazz historians.
As a Black woman who performs Black experimental music, Tyson is a marginalized voice in a marginalized art form. Following arguments laid out by Benjamin Piekut, scholar Chris Tonelli argues that certain jazz practices do not fall within commonly accepted notions of experimental music due to the latter’s “white configuration” and the former’s Black mapping.36 Tonelli adds that while experimental jazz vocal practices significantly contributed to the body of practices most scholars and musicians accept as “singing,” “experimental music,” and “jazz,” the combination of said practices continue to be excluded from most scholarly accounts. George Lewis’s framing of Black improvised music as Afrological (rather than Eurological) is useful here, too, as Tyson existed within a different musical and improvisatory “logic” as a producer of Black cultural expression situated in dominant white American culture.37 As a singer in Sun Ra’s experimental Arkestra, Tyson has been deeply affected by this phenomenon.
More broadly, a common erasure in jazz is the ongoing neglect of the body. Scholar and journalist Lara Pellegrinelli argues that jazz scholars have primarily focused on instrumentalists due to vocalists’ association with femininity, entertainment, the body, and a presumed lack of intellect. This critique holds true even in feminist jazz scholarship in which there are numerous discussions concerning women instrumentalists but extremely few that discuss vocalists. Indeed, vocal jazz is situated as adjacent to “real jazz” and is a body-based practice that is deemed uncerebral.38 Even a cursory glance at jazz scenes past and present reveals how vocalization is often viewed as less important than instrumental performance, which has particularly significant implications for women, who have often been constrained to perform as singers. To be sure, this mapping has provided some women with power in certain experimental performance settings. However, combined with the marginalized spaces of experimental (sub)scenes, this mapping also informs women’s active exclusion from aspects of the broader jazz scene and historiography.
In this context, it is significant that Tyson was also a violinist. Yet the historical evidence suggests that she was not taken seriously as an instrumentalist. For example, when discussing an instance when the Arkestra worked with a Western art music orchestra, Szwed notes that she was treated poorly. He writes, “when she seated herself in the violin section for a rehearsal in Paris, it was obvious to the classical players that she was not a trained musician. When she began to read another violinist’s music, he pulled the music stand away from her, saying it was ‘his music.’”39 And, based on her treatment by members of the Arkestra and jazz scholars, her instrumental ability did not earn her respect in jazz worlds either.
Another key contributing factor to Tyson’s erasure is that she was often uncredited on the records Sun Ra sold that many listeners purchased and collected; these records are an important basis for understandings of jazz and especially its history. For example, on Sun Ra’s 1969 record Atlantis (and its reissues by Saturn and Impulse!) Tyson receives no mention at all. And while some reviewers caught the mistake—a review by Robert Innapollo in CadenceMagazine lists Tyson’s name as “uncredited” at the very end of the list of contributors—the error was never rectified and her name does not appear on the physical copy to this day.40 Such is part of a broader trend that limits Tyson’s contributions and place in jazz historiography. As noted by DeVeaux (1991), much of jazz history is written based on recordings.41 Yet he notes that they can, nevertheless, be poor representations of reality, which, to be sure, is the case here.
My initial investigation posits Tyson’s voice as a site for (limited) agency. While she was consistently constrained as a Black woman in the employ of a dictatorial bandleader, she nevertheless found ways to be heard and even shape her circumstances and the sound of the ensemble through her experimental vocalizations. While she was required to take on unpaid, often unrecognized, and gendered labor for the band that was far beyond what its male members did, her contributions were crucial to the successes of the ensemble. Ra’s active denigration of such labor should be treated as an invitation to ask more questions about the gendered silences within jazz historiography. Thus, engaging with Tyson’s sound and experiences points to factors that informed the rise of a canonic jazz ensemble.
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About the Contributor
Dr. Meghan Gilhespy (she/they) is an experimental vocalist and jazz scholar specializing in gender-critical jazz historiography. She researches the cultural politics of experimental jazz singing and is the first woman in Canada to obtain a Doctorate of Musical Arts in Jazz Studies. In addition to a long history of conventional jazz performance—including her own published album Vive Le Tour (2016), Gilhespy has done studio work for Netflix and The National Film Board of Canada, and presented multiple improvised performances with dancers, expanding her skills as an experimental vocal improviser. She is an Assistant Professor and the Coordinator of Jazz Studies at Concordia University and has been a faculty member at the Creative Music Workshop since 2024.
Notes
1 The Arkestra had worked with a woman trombone player in Chicago, but she was not hired as a full-time member. There was a world of difference between actual members and individuals who simply performed with the ensemble.
2 Philip Freeman, “Sun Ra Arkestra’s June Tyson Was the Queen of Afrofuturism,” Bandcamp Daily, November 26, 2019, https://daily.bandcamp.com/features/sun-ra-arkestras-june-tyson-was-the-queen-of-afrofuturism.
3 Lara Pellegrinelli, “Separated at ‘Birth’: Singing and the History of Jazz,” in Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies, ed. Nicole T. Rustin and Sherrie Tucker (Duke University Press, 2008), 32–47; Tracy McMullen, Haunthenticity: Musical Replay and the Fear of the Real (Wesleyan University Press, 2019); Sherrie Tucker, “Deconstructing the Jazz Tradition: The 'Subjectless Subject' of New Jazz Studies,” in Jazz/Not Jazz, ed. David Ake, Charles Hiroshi Garrett, and Daniel Ira Goldmark (University of California Press, 2012), 264–84.
4 Although extensive research has been carried out on Sun Ra, writing on Tyson has been mostly restricted to limited examinations of the lyrics she sang, which Sun Ra wrote, or offhand Eurocentric mentions of her voice. See Griffith J. Rollefson, “The ‘Robot Voodoo Power’ Thesis: Afrofuturism and Anti-Anti-Essentialism from Sun Ra to Kool Keith,” Black Music Research Journal 28, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 83–109; Anthony Reed, “Close-Up: Afrosurrealism After the End of the World: Sun Ra and the Grammar of Utopia,” Black Camera: The Newsletter of the Black Film Center/Archives 5, no. 1 (2013): 118–39. In the last five to ten years, Tyson has, however, received some attention in popular and other non-typical scholarly venues (See Adam Lore, “June Tyson: Sometimes I’m Happy” Elbow Room 1, no. 2 (2020): 202, http://www.50milesofelbowroom.com/articles/353-june-tyson.html; Harmony Holiday, “Somebody Else’s World,” Oxford American: A Magazine of the South, no. 103 (Winter 2018). https://www.oxfordamerican.org/magazine/item/1643-somebody-elses-world; Cat Celebrezze, “June Tyson: Illuminating the Eye of the Cosmic Needle,” Perfect Sound Forever Online Music Magazine, December 2017: https://www.furious.com/perfect/junetyson.html.; June Tyson, “Sun Ra Research June Tyson Sept 25, 1986,” Interview by John Hinds and Peter Hinds, Private interview, September 25, 1986: https://vimeo.com/229361616; Knoel Scott, “Remembering June Tyson and John Gilmore,” Art Yard, March 15, 2017, https://artyardrecords.co.uk/remembering-june-tyson-by-knoel-scott/; Claire McBride, “June Tyson,” Forgotten Women of Genre, March 25, 2020, https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/forgotten-women-of-genre-june-tyson; Nick Bazzano, “The June Tyson Sessions: Remixperiments with Vocal Materiality and the Becoming-Woman of Cosmic Music,” Women & Performance 24, no. 1 (May 22, 2014): 108–16).
5Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, 3rd ed. (University of California Press, 2012).
6 John Szwed, Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra (Pantheon Books, 1997).
7 Cat Celebrezze, liner notes to June Tyson: Saturnian Queen of the Sun Ra Arkestra, Modern Harmonic, 2019, LP and CD.
8 Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (PM Press, 2012), 27.
9 Federici, Revolution at Point Zero, 27.
10 Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 1997), 152.
11 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 152.
12 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 152.
13 Carmen Teeple Hopkins and Lise Vogel, “Mostly Work, Little Play: Social Reproduction, Migration, and Paid Domestic Work in Montreal,” in Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, ed. Tithi Bhattacharya (Pluto Press, 2017), 136.
14 John Corbett, “Sun Ra, Street Priest and Father of D.I.Y. Jazz,” Design Observer, June 22, 2007, https://designobserver.com/sun-ra-street-priest-and-father-of-d-i-y-jazz/.
15 For more on Ra’s place in creative music, see Graham Lock. Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Work of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton (Duke University Press, 1999). The Arkestra still performs today. Any remarks made about its misogynist nature have more to do with Sun Ra and the ways in which he ran the ensemble, rather than the ensemble itself and its members. That being said, the Arkestra still operates within the systems and the legacy of Sun Ra, who upheld a hyper-masculine environment.
16 Ytasha Womack, “Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture,” Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 5, no. 2 (2013): 2.
17 Ajay Heble, Landing on the Wrong Note: Jazz, Dissonance, and Critical Practice (Routledge, 2000), 119.
18 Heble, Landing on the Wrong Note; Szwed, Space is the Place.
19 Szwed, Space is the Place, 250.
20 Szwed, Space is the Place, 250.
21 Benjamin Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits (University of California Press, 2011), 110.
22 Dan Ouellette, “THE LANDFILL CHRONICLES Chapter 18.2 - The Iconic Carla Bley,” Medium, August 30, 2023, https://danouellette.medium.com/the-landfill-chronicles-chapter-18-2-the-iconic-carla-bley-f3f40c656ade.
23 Szwed, Space is the Place, 250.
24 Tyrone Hill, “June Tyson,” 50 Miles of Elbow Room, March 2020, https://www.50milesofelbowroom.com/articles/353-june-tyson.html.
25 June Tyson, “Sun Ra Research June Tyson Sept 25, 1986,” Interview by John Hinds and Peter Hinds, Private interview, September 25, 1986: https://vimeo.com/229361616.
26 Farah Jasmine Griffin, “When Malindy Sings: A Meditation on Black Women’s Vocality,” in Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies, ed. Robert G. O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin (Columbia University Press, 2004), 104.
27 Griffin, “When Malindy Sings,” 104.
28 Szwed, Space is the Place, 250.
29 Lore, “June Tyson: Sometimes I’m Happy.”
30 Nichole Rustin‑Paschal, The Kind of Man I Am: Jazzmasculinity and the World of Charles Mingus Jr. (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), 121‑23.
31 John Pareles, “Music: The Jazz Wife, Muse and Manager,” New York Times, July 21, 2002, https://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/21/arts/music-the-jazz-wife-muse-and-manager.html
32 Pareles, “The Jazz Wife, Muse and Manager.”
33 Szwed, Space is the Place, 250.
34 Scott, “Remembering June Tyson and John Gilmore.”
35 Scott, “Remembering June Tyson and John Gilmore.”
36 Benjamin Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits (University of California Press, 2011), 4; Chris Tonelli, Voices Found: Free Jazz and Singing (Routledge, 2020).
37 George Lewis, “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives,” Black Music Research Journal 16, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 91-122.
38 Lara Pellegrinelli, “Separated at ‘Birth.’”
39 Szwed, Space is the Place, 372.
40 Robert Innapollo, “Review of Atlantis (re‑release),” Cadence, vol. 20, no. 3 (March 1994): 27–29. This review focuses on the 1973 Impulse! re-release. The title track was recorded live at the Olatunji Center in Harlem, which means that Tyson would likely have been dancing. That being said, her vocals are still clearly audible at the end of the recording.
41 Scott DeVeaux, “Constructing the Jazz Tradition: Jazz Historiography,” Black American Literature Forum 25, no. 3 (Autumn 1991): 525-560.