"In the first minutes of the film we find Sun Ra at the piano, delicately hammering out a deeply sincere rendition of "Over the Rainbow." His dreamy, abstracted interpretation slowly fills with angular and dissonant chord clusters, stretching the well-worn song into new, unheard dimensions. It's a poignant if curious entry point for a film about one of the most fabled, prolific, and inspired jazz composers of the 20th century. But the song, as Scholar Louis Chude-Sokei points out, was one of Ra's favorites, encapsulating his life-long striving to enact "another world" of transcendent possibilities here on Earth."
"A prophetic and self-styled mythic figure, Sun Ra claimed he'd arrived here from the planet Saturn to deliver humanity out of ignorance and imminent self-destruction. How would he achieve such a seemingly impossible goal? Through art, poetry, philosophy, and most importantly, transformative music. Most artists contain multitudes, Sun Ra contains vaster galaxies. Ra was also a social activist, and a deeply read scholar of religion and spirituality."
Sun Ra's creative legacy maintains a devoted following in Portland through frequent Arkestra performances and a major 2019 retrospective at a local museum. A recent screening drew attentive crowds who witnessed Ra's inventive piano interpretation of "Over the Rainbow," a piece tied to his lifelong striving to enact "another world." Sun Ra claimed origin from Saturn and pursued the deliverance of humanity from ignorance through art, poetry, philosophy, and transformative music. He combined scholarship in religion and spirituality with social activism, arguing that restoring a Pharaonic Black mythology could help liberate African Americans and, ultimately, the world.
Read at Portland Mercury
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