The Magic Sun: A Film (review)

Sun Ra (1914–1993) is at once a legendary and an obscure figure in the history of jazz. He is revered by aficionados of "avant-garde" jazz, but—unlike Ornette Coleman or Cecil Taylor—he appears irregularly in jazz scholarship and jazz history textbooks. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, he first attracted attention as a mainstream jazz pianist and arranger in Chicago during the late 1940s. He played in Fletcher Henderson's Orchestra (1946–47), Gene Wright's Dukes of Swing (1947–48), and briefly accompanied Coleman Hawkins. At around the same time, Sun Ra became interested in the history of ancient Egypt. His extensive examination of this civilization led him to develop what Graham Lock has dubbed his "Astro Black Mythology," an aesthetic and political philosophy that attempts to use "intergalactic" rhetoric to revise "white"/established accounts of African American history, heighten awareness of achievements of blacks throughout history, and reconnect African Americans to their African past.

Inevitably, this philosophy deeply impacted Sun Ra's music. In the mid- to late-1950s, he adopted futuristic costumes for performances and gave titles related to outer space and Egypt to numerous compositions. He also began to emphasize percussion in his music by using multiple drummers in his "Arkestra" and encouraging other band members to play assorted percussion instruments. Additionally, he drew upon Afro-Caribbean rhythms, and expanded his music's tonal and timbral palettes. Sun Ra's move to New York in 1961 marked the beginning of what several critics call his "free-jazz" period. His music of the next decade emphasizes timbral variety and experimentation, and includes many passages of collective improvisation. From the 1970s to his final concerts in the early 1990s, Sun Ra continued to use and extend the techniques he developed during the 1960s, but he also reincorporated elements of conventional jazz into his music.

At the height of Sun Ra's "free-jazz" period, experimental filmmaker and minimalist composer Phill Niblock (1933– ) made a seventeen-minute black-and-white film of "Sun Ra and His Solar Arkestra." Entitled The Magic Sun, this entire film consists of extreme close-ups of "Arkestra" members playing three of Sun Ra's mid-1960s compositions: "Celestial Fantasy," "Shadow World," and "Strange Strings." It is shot with bright backlighting, and is shown in negative. The result resembles, in some ways, a medley of increasingly hazy ultrasound videos; what one sees is a completely black background with intermittently decipherable silhouettes.

Like many of Niblock's later films, The Magic Sun explores the abstract movements of work rather than the workers themselves or the context of the work. Specifically, viewers see fingers plucking guitar strings and pressing saxophone keys, mouths blowing into mouthpieces, and hands holding drumsticks. However, they won't get any sense of the musician's personalities; a complete face appears only a couple of times near the beginning of the film. Additionally, the film's visual component contains few clues about the circumstances of the presentation. The viewer cannot know whether the visuals are derived from a live performance, a rehearsal, or something staged specifically for the film. Finally, since the images are only marginally related to the soundtrack (e.g., the faster cuts and movements tend to be combined with the more active music), the film reveals little about the actual sounds the musicians on-screen are producing. The musicians' movements simply don't match the soundtrack. Some viewers clearly treasure this film's extreme abstractness. This reviewer, however, found the film to be rather boring. It simply lacks the variety that one hears in the music.

In addition to The Magic Sun, this DVD contains four "philosophical proclamations" that Sun Ra recorded in the mid-1960s. The first, entitled "Statement," is a four-minute "intergalactic autobiography." The other three, all accompanied by music, are recitations of poems from his collection, The Immeasurable Equation. This fifteen-minute bonus, accompanied by photos of Sun Ra and members of his Arkestra, includes previous unavailable material, and is...