Marshall Allen, 99, Astronaut

Marshall Allen, 99, Astronaut is centered around Marshall Allen, world renowned free and avant-garde jazz musician and current leader of the legendary Sun Ra Arkestra, of which he has been a continual member since 1958. For this film, Ari Benjamin Meyers composed two original scores for Allen to interpret, inviting him to engage, through music, in an intimate conversation about the spontaneity of music-making, the rigors of rehearsal, and the potentiality of collaboration. The camera portrays Allen privately rehearsing a seemingly nostalgic melody in his Philadelphia residence, the Arkestral Institute of Sun Ra, which has been the band’s home, rehearsal hall, and frontier of musical exploration for over five decades. On the brink of his one hundredth birthday, he interprets Meyers’ composition on the alto saxophone, and turns the occasional memory lapse into prompts for improvisation, exposing both his frail age and his brilliant virtuosity.

Meanwhile, we wander through the house that, like a dense palimpsest, manifests the rich history and eclectic activities of the Sun Ra Arkestra through futuristic props and images of ancient cosmologies. Merging the documentary with the speculative genre, the film then teleports Allen onto a stage, playing his Electronic Valve Instrument (EVI) against the dome of Philadelphia’s historic Fels Planetarium. There, spectacular nebulas and symbols of his life—from the patch of the racially segregated US Army regiment he served in in World War II, to the landmark mosaic dedicated to the Sun Ra Arkestra in the city’s Vernon Park—follow one another before he disappears in the darkness and becomes himself a constellation.

Telling a musical and visual story of transformation from the earthly to the otherworldly, the work transcends temporality and place and pays homage both to Allen’s century-long life lived through music and to Sun Ra’s revolutionary musical vision and utopian politics, which saw in the unknown of sonic experimentation and the vastness of the universe the possibility of a transformed present and radically different future.