Plexifilm
Sun Ra and his Intergalactic Solar Arkestra :
Space Is The Place (US,1974)*****
I was looking for a good representation of Sun Ra under the form of a documentary or movie so I checked this video out..
Sun Ra is known now for his free music, an evolution from a more 50s stylistic bebop to more explorative free forms since the early 60s (using psychedelic echo effects already in 1961, making these early albums sound a bit like psychedelia in the “real” form of what that means, much more than to (stylistic) jazz), and then also big band free jazz explorations (since the early 70s), all with cosmo-mystic themes and associations.
I did a Radioshow once at the time when his many (!) releases suddenly were rediscovered, with a series of reissues starting somewhere in the mid to late 90s, albums with an importance which had been so much neglected to allow it to fit within standard jazz history.
Strange that it had taken so long, because this “Cosmo-thing” had brought a whole movement with it, still an important period of inspiration that was active from the late 60s to the early 70s, and which reflected even other great ones like John Coltrane, who had his own cosmic-jazz period, while his close companion, the brilliant Pharoah Sanders (again seemingly with a name that seemed to refer to the days of the black kingdoms of the pharaohs), another brilliant artist who had his own folk-ethno-jazz ideas to add to the “black spirit” in jazz. Don cherry, he only took the ethno-fusion aspect of Sanders, while Miles Davis and many others with him (-I lately heard an incredible track wiith Bobby Bobby Hutcherson-), simultaneously with this conscious making energy, experienced his most energetic “psychedelic period”, playing also occasionally organ, in an incredible trippy way. The grooviness from Miles’s period inspired Herbie Hancock to other new areas.
In any case, there was lots of activity, and a lot of energy mostly dealing with a black spirit that opened up a consciousness to new broadening areas. This energetic boom quickly was overloaded and tempered down again, so that most big names evolved hereafter towards a calmer period.
One of Sun Ra’s disciples, Brother Ah, also distilled from that whole period a more meditative area with the ethnic folk interests intact. Most of these persons were working on an idea with spiritual associations, to give the black man back his own “black” energy, trans-mutated from its African essence, into an area within jazz, with some freedom in its creative process.
Sun Ra himself was stimulating a growing social consciousness with concerns for the black people’s position in Society especially, trying to give them a spiritual and creative place and awareness how to be in such a creative place in Society.
According to the liner notes, Sun Ra participated with The Black Panthers. With them involved, he was able to give lectures of Afro-American Studies at the University of Berkeley for a while, although seemingly he never was paid, with some excuses. This might be due to the fact that The Black Panthers suddenly were discredited after some split groups and some controversial exposed ideas and after investigation by the Police and FBI, during Nixons years. Also Sun Ra himself once had said that the White House soon was going to be a Blackhouse (-in fact nowadays this might not even take too long-). It was also a time that Governor Reagan had attacked Berkeley for having Angela Davis, “a communist”, on the payroll, (a professor who had associations with the Black Panther Party for Self Defense), so also with Sun Ra associated with them, the University might not have been able to afford much more risky associations and attentions. Sun Ra’s study field at the University scholars was widely ranged, from recommending esoteric books (Blavatsky, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Radix journal, Hislip’s “Two Babylons”), and one channelled book (Book of Oahspe), books on etymology, hieroglyphs, colour therapy, Afro-American folklore, ex-slave’s writings, Dr.Livingstone’s travels, the Bible, and accounts of the origins of the Rosicrucian. His teachings included certain permutations of Biblical quotes that would change the ideas on certain significations, some neo-Platonic doctrines, the application of ancient history and religious texts to racial problems, pollution and war, a reinterpretation of the Bible in the light of Egyptology, all of it with a deep interest in social philosophy. Some comparable theories can be found with King Pleasure’s ethical philosophy of Planetism.
After Sun Ra’s return to concerts alone, producer Jim Newman, amazed by the completeness of the Sun Ra and his Arkestra’s performance had planned a half hour documentary for PBS, but this movie quickly and spontaneously turned into a science fiction movie, collectively and social-organically written by many of the participants.
The greatness of the movie is that it, besides a bit of humour and an entertaining, very directly happening story fitting with the time’s contexts, and with Sun Ra’s music in place considering the channelled book ideas and the whole bunch of related ideas behind him to form a spiritual conscious and social awareness, is that it also directly reflects something of a context of what was really happening in those days.
Sun Ra was reading another channelling book during the filming, which had its own impact, the Urantia book, a 2000-some page spiritual account of the history and nature of the universe (of which Urantia or Earth is only a small part).
The figure of the Overseer might have been influenced by the Celestial Overseers in this book but might also have a relation with the plantation foremen like Simon Legree in the literature of American slavery. Sun Ra involved the earliest influences to our society, the Egyptian thinking, to the often neglected fact that there has been a 1000 year period of black pharaohs in ancient Egyptian history, something which gives a new origin to Society of today, like a participation of black consciousness in that whole history.
The ex-slave history however made two types of people : the lowest part of society, finding no way to participate, and those who take only the material profit of it, the Devil (in the movie) and his second hand, who tries to eat the crumbs from his master but never gets much else but an illusion it will come later, a position he can’t hold long. The second mystified figure in control of this situation of the down society of the black so strangely enough also is a black person, a mafia-like, macho-type person, in fact the Devil in disguise, who (thoroughly clear through the evolution of the movie) in fact more thinks he is in control of the whole situation on Earth.
Sun Ra, who wrote his own lines in the movie, wonderfully explains and resumes his thoughts, in the creative concept of Ra, as being the representation of black’s spiritual consciousness. At that stage, he only is "a Myth", like an "almost forgotten dream of the black men", and of how black people should be. He says he presents the free music of the universe. Everything in the universe is in harmony except the earth.
Strangely enough some listeners don’t grasp always this total freedom as a new harmony. That free harmony is open and not related with restriction, it’s like a creative openness, or is responding to that idea. He also says People are out of balance because they no longer correspond to the music of the soul. If they would tune back in to that their creative process they would save the earth in its creative process, or otherwise it would destroy himself in the end, and the planet will be destroyed.
During the movie the Devil confronts him directly with reality. People won’t believe him easily because of his funny appearance.
When he established an employment bureau for the Universe, people would come in for a job, to which he answers cynically. A white man from NASA is neglected on racist grounds, a women wants to get high with him, but also there he says the Universe is not for turning High, but in your freedom being in the eternal blackness of space you’re surrounded by the eternal Abyss, she turns away. A man who did “nothing” in life he calls him an expert in Nothingness, but when Sun Ra says he also will get nothing in return for his new job for the Universe, he refuses. To some degree, this all still has double meanings.
The FBI people spy on Sun Ra, try to influence him with normal (jazz?) music, and in their last attempt try to assassinate him.
Also NASA comes in. According to the booklet it was Sun Ra’s concern that they had launched a program which would result in segregation of space, in a twist of the Great Society programs of Lyndon Johnson, Sun Ra wanted a share of the black people, because for him it was another sign they didn’t count in society. So long “they do not exist”. I add to this that here is involved another cryptogram-like significance of an example that white man wanted to conquer Space and walk on the moon, while just for the thought of it, black men should also get involved in the idea that Space belongs also within their reach.
So, Sun Ra, like the "dream of the black man they almost forgot", starting as "a myth" feels the need to mobilize himself with a new program that would bring people back in accord to and harmony with the vibrations of the universe, so that they could play a part in the whole creative process. Anyhow, he still saved two white persons (who lived just like slaves for the society), -nothing The Black Panters would really improve, but anyhow-.
The spaceship clearly is influenced by the channelled books. It drives by music. I saw its form, if I remember well, in a resumed book from Oashpe.
What I didn’t know yet is that the book of Urantia not only played a part in this movie, it was also the inspiration for Stockhausen seven days of opera’s of “Light” (or “Licht”), on which he worked nearly thirty years since 1971.
That book also predicts that there will come a musician who would appear on earth some day and could change the world. Perhaps both Stockhausen and Sun Ra felt called by this idea. Even when both of them seem to include cacophonic strangeness to some, both musicians their music is highly structured into a lot of preparation. For both composers you cannot look completely behind their mental processes and overload of connections with astrology, harmonies with the stars (for Stockhausen) and many more ideas, which for Sun Ra still worked in a spontaneous inspired process. Sun Ra however also had a mysterious past. There was no birth certificate and no one knew where he came from. Around this “Space is the Place” period he accepted the funny-mystic idea that he came from Saturn with a message, something which just suited his music approach well. In the movie in fact he plays God, with his personal message and mystification he also becomes that consciousness he tries to present, but without being overly serious. Nothing else but the Concept mattered much, and music was the expression of the concept which almost became like a religious ritual, but free in mind and with only the core of music itself that mattered. The date of the movie, 1974, was a highlight of Sun Ra’s more bigband approach. There are two different CDs related with it. The first one is the movie soundtrack, the other one a separate LP made afterwards. The performances in the movie were already perfect enough.
