Elena Smon Wolay wrote a musical story for children and adults about Sun Ra, the bandleader who claimed Saturn as his home. She read and sang alongside an ensemble credited with voices, drums, saxophone, synthesizer, sampler and Mellotron. Her script brought a difficult artistic history into a shared performance. An audience could meet the cosmic claim through a story and the musicians who carried it.
Wolay later curated a Sun Ra photo exhibition at Malmö Konsthall and convened a conference on Afrofuturism there. These are different works. One puts a cosmic tale into the hands of performers for children and adults. The other asks visitors to look at the visual record of a musician whose sound and image changed what a Black future could look like. Both come from a larger practice of music journalism, DJing, publishing and programming through Jazz Är Farligt, the experimental music platform Wolay founded in Sweden. The recurring question is how a person can hear a sound for the first time when the culture around it has already decided what belongs in jazz.
Wolay has spoken about being Black and a woman in a music world where authority is unevenly granted. In a first-person HYMN interview, she describes the pressure of having to fight for her knowledge and work to be recognised. Jazz and other unusual sounds became a place to choose what she wanted to hear. At a 2018 Lund University seminar, she discussed Afrofuturism as a means of surviving and thriving in a racist society. That is a practical account of a cultural field often pictured only through spaceships and elaborate costumes. The ear can also be a tool for making a different life possible.
A concert that begins on Saturn
The Rönnells bookshop programme describes Wolay’s Sun Ra performance as a musical story for children and adults about his life, ideas and Saturn. It credits her with the concept, script, reading and singing. Liselotte Wennerstrand and Sofia Jernberg sang; Moussa Fadera played drums; Reine Fiske played Mellotron; Gustav Nygren played saxophone; Daniel Fagerström used synthesizer and sampler. Each instrument gives the story another texture. The acoustic breath of a saxophone sits beside the electronically altered possibilities of a sampler. The arrangement lets the tale of an elsewhere be heard as a meeting of materials already present.
Sun Ra claimed a cosmic origin and built a musical world around it. Wolay presented an artist who used an invented home to challenge the limits assigned to a Black musician on Earth. Her script joined the tale of Saturn to the history of a person seeking another way to live. The ensemble's credited range, from drums and saxophone to Mellotron and sampler, made the sonic possibilities of that tale part of the performance's design.
The performance was part of Jazz Är Farligt, a platform that began as a club and expanded into a fanzine, record label, festival and children’s show. Its range is relevant to the Sun Ra concert. A child might first meet experimental music through a story, then later encounter its records, performers or histories in other settings. Wolay was making entry points into an often forbidding culture. The same music could be heard in a bookshop, at a festival or in a classroom-like conversation without being reduced to background sound.
The Rönnells event coincided with the centenary year of Sun Ra’s birth in 1914. That calendar connection could have made the performance a birthday tribute. Its mixed-age address did something more expansive. It treated a historical musician as a source of questions children could bring into their own hearing. Where is home if a person says it is on Saturn? What can a group of musicians do together that none could do alone? Why might someone make a new name and a new world through sound? The show’s credited script, song and instruments made those questions performable, even for listeners too young to know the archive behind them.
A 2014 Musikindustrin interview places the children's Sun Ra show alongside Jazz Är Farligt's club, festival, fanzine and record label. Wolay was carrying the same musical inquiry into forms that could reach different listeners. The Rönnells programme gives the performance's subject as Sun Ra's life, ideas and Saturn. The stakes of that story change with its audience. A cosmic claim can be funny; it can also carry the need to imagine beyond a social order that has already made its exclusions clear.
The ensemble credits reveal an unusually broad arrangement for a story concert. Wolay devised the concept and script, then performed it with two singers and four instrumentalists. The Rönnells programme names the makers separately, preserving the difference between the person who wrote and narrated the text and the musicians whose work gave it a live form. Their combination made the project a performance with shared authorship, rather than a talk about an album.
A photograph hears a different question
In 2021, Malmö Konsthall presented Wolay’s Sun Ra exhibition in Mellanrummet. The show used photography, a medium that can freeze a figure whose art was made in motion and sound. Wolay’s curatorial challenge was to let an image lead viewers toward a musical world without pretending that the image could contain it. A photograph of costume or a gathering of musicians can establish the force of a visual universe; the records and performances remain larger than the frame.
The exhibition’s accompanying programme included a conference on Afrofuturism that Wolay organised in September 2021. The pairing matters. A visitor could see the photographs, then hear people discuss the ideas and sonic histories to which they point. The visual and the spoken offered different forms of access. Neither required the visitor to arrive already knowing what Afrofuturism meant. The museum became a place where knowledge could be built in public rather than tested at the entrance.
Malmö Konsthall’s exhibition account introduces Sun Ra as a bandleader whose orchestra moved between accessible melodies and atonal disruption. Wolay’s choice of subject suits a curator unwilling to define jazz as one polite sound. Sun Ra made a practice of changing expectation in midstream. A listener could be drawn in by a tune and then asked to stay when its familiar structure gave way. Wolay’s own account of Jazz Är Farligt describes a musical outlook drawn to the unexpected, the demanding and the moments when sound might disturb instead of reassuring.
The museum also described Afrofuturism as a meeting of science fiction, historical imagination and a challenge to whiteness as the norm. That framework does not make every image of Sun Ra self-explanatory. His visual style could be consumed as spectacle if detached from the conditions against which it worked. Wolay’s conference added voices and contexts around the photographs. The curatorial act was to insist on relation: sound to image, an artist’s invented cosmos to the world that made such invention urgent, past performances to a future audience in Malmö.
Wolay had explored these relations in words and sounds before the exhibition. At Lund University’s 2018 seminar, The Sounds of Afrofuturism, she appeared with musicologist Erik Steinskog. They used an excerpt from Sun Ra’s film Space Is the Place and examples of later artists remixing his work. The seminar set an original creation beside its afterlives. A remix is not simply a tribute; it can make an older sound available to a new context and test whether its promise still works. Wolay’s contribution, according to the university’s account, connected that sonic practice to survival in a racist society.
The word “sounds” in the seminar title is therefore doing work. Afrofuturism is not only a set of images that can be recognised at a glance. Music can change a listener’s sense of time through repetition, interruption and layering. An old recording may speak to a new performer without becoming new in itself. A speculative future can be heard in the relation among records, the hands that select them and the audience learning to listen differently. Wolay’s record collecting and DJ practice place her at that junction.
The university’s account says the presenters played later music that remixed Sun Ra. That sequence matters as an editorial choice. A listener first meets a source, then hears what another maker found in it. The difference between the two can be more instructive than a definition projected on a wall. A sound that survived its first audience becomes material for another generation, while the remix carries its own time and concerns. Wolay’s selection placed change inside the act of listening. It showed the future of a recording as a history of people choosing to return to it, each with a different ear.
Jazz as an open border
Wolay started Jazz Är Farligt in the early 2010s, first as a club with Conny Lindström. In a 2016 HYMN interview, she explained that the name came from a record called Punk är trevligt – Jazz är farligt and that the project expanded into many formats. The title’s joke depends on an expectation: jazz is supposed to be difficult, perhaps even threatening, while punk gets labelled pleasant. Wolay keeps the threat alive as an invitation to leave the safety of categories. The club can hold a performance that seems too noisy, too electronic or too theatrical for someone else’s rulebook.
That openness is specific, not an excuse to put any music together without thought. In a first-person interview with Throw Me Away, Wolay discussed selecting records that disturb and engage rather than smooth the edges of a room. She named particular periods in musicians’ lives and recordings as objects of interest. Her DJing follows research and feeling at once. A set can carry the history of what she has heard and the immediate mood of the people listening. Its form exists for one night, even when some of its source records have survived for decades.
The project also became a printed fanzine. Wolay described the first issue as including diary pages, writing on musicians and a jazz fashion feature. A fanzine can join experiences that a more narrowly defined music institution keeps apart. The private difficulty of continuing creative work, the history of an improviser and the clothes through which music becomes visible can occupy the same object. The paper form gives the platform a life beyond a club night, while preserving the sense that someone made it with a point of view rather than an impersonal catalogue.
The diary pages are especially revealing in a publication devoted to music. They put the life of the person selecting and presenting records beside the artists she admires. That placement resists the pose of the neutral expert who seems to have arrived without a body or a history. The fashion feature, meanwhile, treats a musician's visual presence as part of how a scene becomes legible. Neither element replaces listening to the records. Together, they show that Wolay's platform makes room for the social and visual conditions through which people find music and carry it into their own lives.
The one-day Jazz Är Farligt festival at Liseberg put that sensibility before another public. A 2015 Liseberg announcement described its aim as exploring and playing with what jazz could be by inviting it into other rooms and genres. The festival did not need to declare every musician an Afrofuturist to carry a future-facing method. It changed the conditions of encounter. An audience drawn by one sound could leave with another in its ears.
Wolay’s choices have also been made under the pressure of who is permitted authority in music. In the HYMN interview, she names the different reception she receives as a Black woman working with experimental sound. In Musikindustrin, she describes resisting others' ideas of which genres should be hers. Those experiences do not explain every record she chooses. They show why a platform built on the right to hear differently can matter as more than a matter of style.
The Sun Ra children’s performance and Malmö exhibition make the connection clear. In one, young listeners are offered a space story carried by live music. In the other, museum visitors see the artist’s visual world and can join a conversation about its histories. Wolay’s method moves between a child’s curiosity, a record collector’s attention and a public institution’s responsibility to provide context. Her work does not try to deliver a single authoritative portrait of the future. It changes who can enter the conversation about it, and what they are allowed to hear once inside.