Pilgrim{s} of a {Future} Black Sound {#1}

If pilgrimage names a journey of spiritual or moral significance, this series turns to Black sound and music as the terrain where such transformations take place. Black musicians have always been pilgrims, moving within and through ever-evolving forms of Black Study. To be a pilgrim is to practise what Janaína Oliveira describes as “dancing while dancing”: submitting to a groove that refuses and exceeds racial-colonial regimes of time and space. Black musicality as spiritual practice, social aesthetic, and insurgent method.

This special first screening offers a kind of pilgrimage through clips of live music performance, experimental cinema, artist documentary, and speculative essay to share how black people have always worked (in/as/through) sound to explain, explore, and story the world. The programme makes a claim for Black music as a profound, collective, and constantly evolving expression of social life, embodying a “radical disruptive social energy.” What we are reminded of in the process is how Black sound, what Miles Davis called “that social music”, is also what has long stimulated and informed Black poetry, political activism, and philosophical critique.

ACT I: Jazz Extensions in Black Dimensions

In the Blue Light

Dir. Yasser Abubeker, 2025, 14 mins

In The Blue Light (Documentary) combines rehearsal and concert footage with commentary from Kelela on her career, inspirations and praxis, honed at what she calls "The Kelela Conservatory of Music." It explores Kelela's personal history with both jazz and The Blue Note, which she says she visited for the first time at 19, mini recorder in hand. But it also features her insights on the Black roots of remixing and reimagining music.

Black Journal: Alice Coltrane

National Educational Television, 1970, 15 mins

An intimate television portrait of Alice Coltrane for the groundbreaking public affairs series Black Journal. Coltrane performs and reflects on spirituality, music and lineage, articulating sound as devotional practice and cosmological inquiry. In her hands, the harp becomes both archive and instrument of transcendence.

Pilgrim

Dir. Cauleen Smith, 2016, 7 mins

In “Pilgrim,” viewers experience a live recording of an Alice Coltrane piano performance accompanied by a visual track that documents a pilgrimage across the U.S. taken by Cauleen Smith, tracing historic sites of creativity and generosity that were an inspiration to her: Alice Coltrane’s Sai Anantam Ashram; the Watts Towers; and the Watervliet Shaker Historic District.

The Magic Sun

Dir. Phill Niblock, 1966, 17 mins

Composer, photographer, and filmmaker Phill Niblock's immaculate experimental film features a soundtrack by bandleader and extraterrestrial Sun Ra and the members of his Solar Arkestra, comprised of rare moving footage of the band in this era. Shot in the mid sixties, when the Arkestra was based in New York, this film was produced using a unique black & white negative process (with no internegative) and ultra-tight close-ups on the moving hands and mouths of the musicians, increasingly frenetic as the images seamlessly turn from negative to positive. The result is a virtually abstract music film, edited with pinpoint precision that emphasizes the independence of image and sound, save a single magical moment of synchronization at film's end.

Intermission: 15 minutes

ACT II: The Last Angel of History

The Last Angel of History

Dir. John Akomfrah, 1996, 44 mins

A landmark essay film mapping the relationships between Pan-African culture, science fiction, electronic music and digital technology. Through the figure of the “data thief” — a time-travelling narrator — Akomfrah traces the emergence of Afrofuturism as a strategy of survival and resistance.

Total programme runtime: approx. 120 mins

The programme will start promptly at 7:30pm, with an introduction by programmer Ishy Pryce-Parchment. Tickets are £5/8, and 15% of the proceeds will be donated to MAP (Medical Aid for Palestinians).

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