Carnegie Hall

Afrofuturism is generally defined as artistic works (music, film, painting, and so on) that dare to imagine an optimistic, progressive future for African Americans through the lens of sci-fi narratives, often throwing back to tropes of African folklore. Anyone who experienced their tender-aged years in the 1970s probably first encountered Afrofuturism through the hi-tech fantasia of Wakanda, the African homeland of Black Panther, the Marvel superhero; or the rogue adventures of Lando Calrissian, mayor of the interstellar Cloud City from the 1980 Star Wars sequel, The Empire Strikes Back—all this while their parents soaked in the electric excursions of Miles Davis, as the jazz-fusion of Bitches Brew changed the renowned trumpeter into equal parts rock and jazz icon.

Space opera’s whitewashed world of Flash Gordon made no room for Black, indigenous, and people of color throughout the 1920s and ’30s. If their radio serials and comic strips were any indication, science fiction creators must somehow have presumed that darker-skinned populations—perhaps through some unscripted natural selection eugenics—would not survive into Buck Rogers’s 25th century. The imaginations of Black American musicians said differently: from the android social stratification storylines in singer Janelle Monáe’s music to the comic-book surrealism of funk pioneer George Clinton’s artwork for Parliament-Funkadelic albums, all the way back to the discography of avant-garde jazz bandleader Sun Ra.

Born Herman Poole Blount (circa 1914) in a galaxy far, far away (Birmingham, Alabama), the late experimental pianist-composer known as Sun Ra later declared the planet Saturn as his homeland—laying claim to an alien heritage that infused his songs with the first sounds in jazz that qualified as Afrofuturist. Sun Ra’s own El Saturn record label released tunes with titles like “Space Is the Place,” “Tapestry from an Asteroid,” “Space Jazz Reverie,” and “Rocket Number Nine Take Off for the Planet Venus.” Releases from the Sun Ra Arkestra musically presaged the free-jazz movement of the 1960s, while ideologically spinning ancient Egyptian cosmology with a space-age orientation.

Sun Ra’s influence gleams from the ankh jewelry and Epperson fashions of singer Erykah Badu to the African diaspora sci-fi of poet Saul Williams, and to all of the musicians performing as part of Carnegie Hall’s Afrofuturism festival.

Post Sun Ra, the psychedelic, intergalactic music on Bitches Brew (represented visually by the surrealist cover art of painter Abdul Mati Klarwein) represents an Afrofuturist jazz of its own. Pianist Herbie Hancock commanded a flying saucer from the cover of Thrust (1974), traveling sonically and spatially to worlds unknown. That through-line extends more than 40 years later to the album cover of The Epic (2015), Kamasi Washington’s ambitious triple-album featuring the saxophonist staring defiantly against the backdrop of two planets and all of outer space.

Flying Lotus—a modern-jazz-fusion figurehead who sometimes collaborates with Washington—appears as part of the Afrofuturism festival, ready to present his transcendental musical alchemy. Performing as well, the legendary Sun Ra Arkestra (now under the direction of longtime bandleader-saxophonist Marshall Allen) continues the sacred cosmic quest of its founding father: boldly going where no Afrofuturist band has gone before. Literature boasts no bigger figure of Afrofuturist prose than the late Octavia E. Butler; flutist-composer Nicole Mitchell and her Black Earth Ensemble perform Xenogenesis Suite (inspired by Butler’s speculative fiction) during the festival. Clarinetist-bandleader Angel Bat Dawid presents another must-see collaboration with composer LuFuki and multi-instrumentalist Dr. Adam Zanolini, as their Autophysiopsychic Millennium offers up music they’ve designated an “Afrofuturist participatory sonic convocation.” Trumpeter Theo Croker, techno pioneer Carl Craig’s Synthesizer Ensemble, hip-hop duo Chimurenga Renaissance (featuring multi-instrumentalist Tendai “Baba” Maraire and guitarist Hussein Kalonji) and Malian singer-songwriter Fatoumata Diawara all bring the promise of Afrofuturist music to fruition, simultaneously celebrating the past while focused on the far-flung future like sonic Sankofa birds.

Photography: Nicole Mitchell by Michael Jackson.