I saw the Watts Towers — or a picture of them, at any rate — before I’d heard about them, before I knew what they were. They’re in the background of the photo on Don Cherry’s album Brown Rice (1975): skeletal spires silhouetted against the twilight, with Cherry in the foreground, cradling his trumpet, wearing robes that seem not only pan-African but pan-astral. Taken together, the purple-blue sky, Cherry’s outfit, and these skyrocket towers create the impression that this was the site from which Sun Ra would have chosen to blast off and return to Saturn. Cherry grew up near the…