In pre- and inter-performance comments, a plea pervaded pianist Sullivan Fortner’s Friday show at the University of Chicago: Can we be anywhere but here?

Thank goodness Sun Ra and his music mastered the art of spiritual teleportation. Born Herman “Sonny” Blount in 1914, the composer and pianist arrived on Chicago’s South Side — indeed, just blocks from the University of Chicago — in the 1940s. It was here that Ra embraced the moniker “Sun Ra” and founded his Arkestra band, developing its one-of-a-kind, extraterrestrial musical rhetoric.

Fortner, one of the brightest pianistic talents of his generation, couldn’t have known he would invoke Ra at such a fraught time for the icon’s former home. But Ra’s music has a way of touching down right as it’s most needed.

The “Galactic Friends,” as F

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