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The first time an ark appears in the Torah, God is wiping Earth clean. He hates himself for creating something as flawed as humanity and vows to start over. The ark he tells Noah to build (all 3.6 million cubic feet of it) not only will save Noah and his family but will also guarantee a new beginning — "be fruitful, and multiply" — for new generations of humanity who will "replenish the earth."

The first time an ark appears in jazz, a black man has left the segregation of Alabama for the doo-wop and jazz of Chicago. He has renamed himself Sun Ra, and he too wants to start over. Instead of wiping Earth clean, he vows to leave it in an ark. Instead of Noah’s gopher wood, the ark will be made of sound, built of instruments, and engineered by musicians. His "Arkestra" will be his vessel of intergalactic travel, a big-band mother ship bound for interstellar spaceways.

In 1974, Ra put his ark — his Intergalactic Solar Arkestra — on film. Space Is the Place, which has now been released on DVD, acted out what Ra had always claimed: he had been to other planets, and he preferred them to life on Earth. When Space begins, in 1972, Ra and his yellow spaceship (it runs on music fuel) have just landed in Oakland after a trip to a planet that will be the new home for American blacks. He’s come to the East Bay, in the thick of Black Panther consciousness, to recruit the planet’s first settlers.

Space Is the Place may be fantastical, Africanist science fiction, but it’s rooted in the racial realism of post-civil-rights America. Ra’s "other planes of there," his songs for Saturn and Jupiter, are sorrow songs gone Black Power gone cosmic. With echoes of low-swinging chariots and paradise "up yonder," he offers Oakland blacks an "alter-destiny," a world far north of north where they’re not held captive by the evil "Overseer." It’s an over-the-top version of what UC-Berkeley professor Scott Saul writes about in his new book, Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties (Harvard University Press) — the drive of Cold War–reared jazz musicians to pursue social freedom through music, "to capture in sound the freedom of collective animation."

A new tribute to Ra, The Myth Lives On (Kindred Spirits), tries to keep Ra’s pursuit of freedom through space travel alive. "We can leave the earth for the Black Planet," the liner notes declare, and the musicians on board (King Britt, Yesterday’s New Quintet, and Francisco Mora Catlett among them) position themselves as the offspring of Ra’s interstellar ark. Their music — abstract, spaced-out jazz experimentalism laced with black holes of electronics and synthesizers (complete with two versions of Ra’s apocalyptic noise poem "Nuclear War") — tends to reflect their Black Planet desires.

The one exception, Build an Ark’s "The Stars Are Singing Too (Door of the Cosmos)," trades electronics for hand drums, hand claps, flutes, and a chorus of voices led by Dwight Trible that sounds as if it had been recorded in a cozy living room. There is nothing cosmic or spacy about it. It is Earth music by Earth people. The multi-racial, multi-generational 20-member Los Angeles collective have just released an album of their own, Peace with Every Step (Todosonidos Presenta), that’s less new-school Ra and more old-school Noah. With "collectively composed" songs like "Love Is Our Nationality" and chanted invocations of peace and freedom, Build an Ark build their ark of sound to help make earth a better place to live.

As well as to Ra, Build an Ark dedicate the album to another ark advocate, pianist Horace Tapscott, who founded the Pan Afrikan People’s Arkestra in 1961. Tapscott wasn’t interested in outer space. He was determined to foster black community through the preservation of black music. "We would preserve the music on our ark," Tapscott wrote in his 2001 autobiography, Songs of the Unsung (Duke University Press). "And it will be around for people to listen to and enjoy." He saw his ark as a "cultural safe house" that would grow deep roots in local neighborhoods like Houston’s Third Ward (where he was born) and LA’s Central Avenue (where he was raised).

But he also saw it as a tool of mentorship and education, a way of passing along the values of community and respect to younger generations. It seems to have worked. Build an Ark are the arkestra born of the Arkestra, and though some of their compositions are avowed throwbacks to the jazz collectives of the ’60s and ’70s, the band stay contemporary at the right moments. Peter Harris’s anti-war poem tucked inside the balaphones, acoustic guitars, and trap drums of "Love Is Our Nationality" is an urgent reminder that calls for community and peace ("Unpin your badge," he hums, "reveal your ribcage") cannot simply be left as mere historical nostalgia. As we end a year of groundless war and astounding political deception, they must be heard anew, as necessary interventions of dissent, as protests against another age of flawed humanity.