If (like us) you’re a fan of the great Sun Ra, this wide-ranging TV interview from the 1970s is a goldmine of other-worldly wonderings..!
Finland wasn’t the obvious stage for cosmic philosophy, but by 1971 the Arkestra had become a global curiosity. Jazz festivals were beginning to open their doors to avant-garde performers, and Sun Ra’s combination of free improvisation, theatre, and prophecy made him both a cult figure and a confounding interview guest.
It was in Helsinki, on the TV interview below, that Sun Ra was asked the simplest of questions:
Where did his music come from?
What followed was part philosophy lecture, part cosmic sermon — the kind of moment that makes you wonder if the interviewer had any idea what they’d just unleashed.
“It’s being in tune with the greater universe,” he said calmly.
“My music isn’t part of the past or the present or the future.
It’s what I call an alter-destiny.”
Half a century later, it still sounds like a message from another time.
Decades later, his ideas would echo through Afrofuturism and Spiritual Jazz — from George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic to the cosmic imagery of Kamasi Washington.
But at the time, very few people were ready to take him seriously. Interviews like this one, filmed in black and white for European television, capture the mixture of awe and confusion he inspired.
Sun Ra’s Vision Beyond the Possible
At the time, most people still introduced Sun Ra as a jazz bandleader — the eccentric figure behind the Arkestra, famous for wearing space-age robes and mixing swing with free improvisation.
But to him, music was only the starting point.
“The world as it is today is the result of the possible,” he said.
“Now it’s time to try the impossible.”
That one sentence captured his entire worldview: if humanity keeps repeating what has already been done, the results will stay the same.
Only imagination — “something else in the universe as big as this” — can shift the direction of history.
It wasn’t just poetry.
In the middle of social upheaval, racial tension and Cold War anxiety, Sun Ra offered an alternative cosmology — one that placed creativity, not politics, at the centre of survival.
He called it alter-destiny: a deliberate step outside the accepted limits of what is possible.
Freedom, Angels and Other Beings
Then came a question that might have stumped most musicians: what should the human race do to save the planet?
Sun Ra barely blinked.
“The human race has always looked for freedom,” he began,
“but they never passed any constitution for other types of beings.”
He pointed out that no government on Earth had ever written laws to protect anything beyond humanity itself.
“What country,” he asked, “would give rights to an angel if one landed here?”
It sounded absurd, but the point was serious: real freedom means recognising life beyond your own experience — whether that’s another species, another culture, or another way of thinking.
In his usual way, Sun Ra took a moral argument and reframed it as science fiction.
Choosing the Unwanted
Later in the same conversation, the interviewer asked how he chose musicians for his Arkestra.
Sun Ra’s answer was quietly moving:
“Sometimes I choose them if the world doesn’t care anything about them.
That’s where I come in.”
Behind the cosmic language was a deeply practical humanism.
He built his community from players who might otherwise have been ignored — people with talent, potential and heart, who didn’t fit the conventional mould.
In his band, imagination was the only qualification.
Music, Vibration and Intuition
Even the physical space of the bandstand, he said, affected the music.
“Every time I change somebody on the stand, it changes the placement vibrations.”
He treated sound, movement and intuition as one continuous field — a kind of living mathematics.
It’s easy to smile at the mysticism, but anyone who’s ever played on stage knows he wasn’t entirely wrong: how people sit, listen and breathe does change the sound.
Still From the Future
Half a century on, the clip feels prophetic rather than eccentric.
Long before “Afrofuturism” was a recognised movement, Sun Ra was imagining how art could rebuild meaning in a broken world.
He wasn’t predicting the future; he was inviting people to invent it.
His closing words are almost a chant, part music and part prayer:
“We do invite you… be of our space world.”
He meant it literally and metaphorically — an open invitation to think differently.
Look for more? Check out the official website of the Arkestra.