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. 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. 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.

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.

–Text courtesy Esther Schipper Berlin and Fondazione In Between Art Film