Jimetta Rose

MettaSun album bio by Marcus Moore:

To encounter Jimetta Rose’s new album is to step through a spiritual portal. One moment, you’re rooted in the familiar terrain of jazz lineage and soul tradition; the next, you’re somewhere else entirely, somewhere luminous and governed only by possibility.

That place, as Rose imagines it, is MettaSun, a sonic and philosophical plane inspired by the cosmic teachings of Sun Ra, but fully reimagined through her own lens.

This project began as a seed planted years ago by a trusted collaborator — the DJ and producer Ras G — who told Rose that her artistic future could eventually resemble that of June Tyson, the distinguished voice of Sun Ra’s Arkestra. Rose had long admired Sun Ra’s music, though she initially knew him more through his instrumental catalog than his vocal work. That changed once she began diving deeper, discovering the fluidity of his universe, and the way his music felt equally structured and abstract, disciplined and mystical. In those songs, Rose found inspiration and permission to reassert her voice.

For the last seven years, Rose has poured herself into the collective, particularly through her choir-centered project — Jimetta Rose & The Voices of Creation — that foreground healing, joy, and communal transformation. But this album marks something different: a return to herself as a solo artist, and more importantly, a reclamation of her own authorship. It’s the sound of someone stepping out from behind the curtain with a renewed sense of purpose — as a singer-songwriter, but also as a producer, arranger, architect, and world-builder.

That distinction is central to understanding this album as a reinterpretation of Sun Ra compositions, dismantled and rebuilt according to the frequencies Rose heard in her own spirit. Though Sun Ra’s arrangements are sacred artifacts to be preserved, they’re also living sounds meant to evolve. Rose treated the songs the way a rap producer treats samples: finding hidden melodies, layering unexpected references, and drawing new emotional contours from familiar foundations. She transformed the urgency of  Sun Ra classic “Nuclear War” into a meditation on vulnerability and endurance — even as nuclear war hangs more heavily above our heads, our world inching towards demise. ​Elsewhere, "Spring Time Again" wafts through your headspace with the ease of a late April afternoon, a ballad challenging enough to uphold Sun Ra's complicated arrangements, though accessible enough to satiate those who skew traditional. In its totality, MettaSun is a treatise on rebirth and self-permission, conversations across time meant to heal listeners as much as it is healing Rose.

Recorded live in the studio over several days there were moments where the process tested Rose’s resolve. Yet those pressures only sharpened the project’s honesty. Rather than chase perfection, she embraced the truth of her circumstances, letting what emerged remain on the track. What emerged is an album that feels immediate and emotionally transparent. That transparency extends to her collaborators. Backed by a handpicked ensemble and enriched by layered background vocals from members of her extended musical family, the album carries the warmth of community even as it centers her vision. It breathes with collective energy, but its heartbeat is singular.

Sun Ra often spoke in mythic terms, framing music as transportation, a notion that Rose understands deeply. Her project expands into a broader mythology, complete with interplanetary narratives, animated visuals, and an immersive live experience that invites audiences into her invented landscape. In her conception, music is an ecosystem, and MettaSun is more than an album title: It’s a belief that imagination isn’t just about escapism, it’s a survival tactic and a discussion about how we build alternate futures when the present feels untenable. Like Sun Ra, Rose sees creativity as a radical act, a way to envision structures rooted in love, peace, and collective care.

Too often, Sun Ra’s work is reduced to spectacle, eccentricity, or avant-garde provocation. But beneath the costumes and cosmic discourse was an artist insisting that Black people had the right to imagine themselves beyond imposed limitations. Rose carries that lesson forward with the understanding that the true power of his legacy is in activation.

For Rose, MettaSun is about giving herself permission to be fully expansive, to sing without confinement and create without compromise. On it, for instance, she claims the producer title. She may not play every instrument, but she hears the construction of sound and knows how to guide others toward it. The result is an album that honors Sun Ra’s lineage while asserting her own individuality, welcoming longtime devotees of the experimental jazz musician while remaining accessible to listeners unfamiliar with his catalog. It bridges avant-garde tradition with melodic intimacy, abstraction with groove, cosmic theory with grounded feeling.

That accessibility is part of Rose’s mission: She wants positivity to feel compelling, and for community-building to be experiential, embodied, and joyful. She hopes people will leave her performances changed, directed towards a little more openness, a little more imagination, and a little more willingness to engage their surroundings differently.

In today’s fragmented culture of cynicism, Rose offers something quietly radical: sincerity and vision. The insistence that love remains possible, and that creativity still transforms. MettaSun is not about nostalgia for Sun Ra’s era. Instead, it’s about carrying his frequencies into the present and asking what they demand of us now.

The answer, Rose asserts, is simple and expansive all at once: Dream bigger, love harder, and build from the heart. And if you need a soundtrack for that journey, she’s already composed it.