A kaleidoscopic portrait of the visionary jazz musician, composer, and poet known as Sun Ra and the musical, historical, and philosophical currents that shaped him.
Poet, Egyptologist, cosmologist, historian, activist, bandleader, musician…jazz pioneer Sun Ra was all of these. In this illuminating biography, Christine Turner takes us on a complex journey through the life of a complex man who either was born in Birmingham, Alabama, sent from Saturn, or both. With his band, the Arkestra, he extended the boundaries of free-form jazz, put his own mark on the standards, and pursued forays into electronic music, yet could be just as inspired to riff on “Over the Rainbow.” His musical mission was also rooted as an agent toward advancing Afrofuturism, mixing interstellar metaphors (“space is the place”) and his own scientific explanations (“transmolecularization”) with the state of Black life in America.
Turner gracefully balances recollections from the Arkestra’s devout, still-in-awe band members and dancers, comments from big-fan historians, scholars and other musicians, and the musings of Sun Ra himself with unforgettable performance footage and scenes from a self-produced film to paint a portrait — informative, enriching, and at times mind-blowing — of a man who was as much a visionary as a he was a musician.”
— Brian Gordon via Tribeca Festival
Herman Poole Blount was born on May 22, 1914, in Birmingham, Alabama, and departed this earth on May 30, 1993, as Sun Ra. Along the way he became a conscientious objector, legally changed his name to Le Sony’r Ra, forged a vision of a Black Space Age future, created a big band that toured the world and continues to this day, wrote over 1000 jazz compositions, issued more than 200 self-produced records, pioneered the use of electronic keyboards,
and published volumes of broadsheets and poetry. Sun Ra reached back in time to ancient Egypt to claim civilization as Black and fused it with the dawn of the Space Age to assert Blackness as the very nature of the “omniverse. ” Compelling and strange, he claimed to have been “teleported” to Saturn, where he was told that the world would descend into chaos and that he must speak through music. Though his “Earth departure day” may have occurred more than three decades ago, his influence continues to grow with each successive generation.
Christine Turner is an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker whose intimate portraits of artists, activists, and everyday people capture the beauty and struggle of life. A frequent collaborator with Firelight Films & Firelight Media, Christine recently directed J'Nai Bridges Unamplified, a verité film on the acclaimed opera singer J’Nai Bridges (PBS/American Masters); and Lynching Postcards: ‘Token of a Great Day’ (Paramount+), which was nominated for a Peabody and won an NAACP Image Award. Other directing credits include the Oscar-nominated short The Barber of Little Rock, about a local barber's fight for a just economy (The New Yorker); the Sundance selection Betye Saar: Taking Care of Business (New York Times Op-Docs); Paint & Pitchfork (The New Yorker) about celebrated artists Amy Sherald and Kehinde Wiley; and Homegoings, her critically-acclaimed feature directorial debut (PBS’ POV). As an episodic director and producer for television, Christine has also collaborated on non-fiction series such as The 1619 Project (Hulu), Amend: The Fight for America (Netflix) and Art in the Twenty-First Century (PBS), among others.
Sun Ra photo by Hans Kumpf.
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