Some documentaries explain their subjects. Others let their aura do the talking.
Sun Ra: Do the Impossible, directed by Academy Award–nominated filmmaker Christine Turner, firmly belongs to the latter camp. And that feels entirely appropriate for a figure who defied tidy definitions: composer, bandleader, philosopher, and mythmaker who fused cosmic symbolism, ancient Egyptian imagery, and interstellar imagination.
Turner’s elegantly distilled portrait, which debuted at Tribeca Festival last year and is now streaming as part of PBS’s American Masters, reframes Sun Ra not as an eccentric footnote in avant-garde jazz but as a visionary music polymath and foundational architect of Afrofuturism—whose influence now pulses through fashion, art, and sound with renewed urgency.
Born Herman Poole Blount in Birmingham in 1914, Sun Ra would go on to self-produce more than 200 albums and stretch jazz into realms most listeners had never imagined. His career spanned more than five decades, from playing in big bands in the late 1930s to radical explorations in free jazz and electronic music from the ’60s through the ’80s. (He died in 1993.) Turner assembles a kaleidoscope of archival footage, performance clips, still photography, and interviews with his Arkestra members and contemporary thinkers who map Sun Ra’s long cultural afterlife.
“People aren’t just a little bit into Sun Ra, if they’re into Sun Ra,” the San Francisco–based filmmaker chuckles. “People who are really drawn to him talk about how he’s his authentic self. He was fearless in how he presented himself, and I think for that reason he has often attracted other outsiders.”
Indeed, his imprint ripples outward, from the interstellar swagger of OutKast and the android futurism of Janelle Monáe to the mystical poise of Erykah Badu and the sculptural, otherworldly aesthetics of Solange, Grace Wales Bonner, and Pharrell Williams. Each channels Sun Ra’s radical reframing of Black identity, his insistence on myth as survival, and his refusal to be confined by earthly expectations—a philosophy embodied when he famously claimed he visited Saturn, a way of imagining Black existence beyond the limitations of the terrestrial world.
Turner was drawn especially to Sun Ra’s mythmaking, she says, which extended far beyond music to dance, poetry, and film, all designed to stimulate the senses. “It was what he called the cosmo drama, a kind of sonic ritual that was intended to transport and transform audiences into a different state. We take it for granted now because so many artists incorporate all these different elements, but he was doing it early on.”
Costumes were as vital as the music itself. “Sun Ra even said once, ‘Costumes are music,’” she says, adding that the garments were often visibly handmade, cobbled together from metallic, glowing, and transparent fabrics gathered from the band’s travels around the world. (And the Arkestra’s DIY resourcefulness remains to this day: Turner notes that bandleader Knoel Scott asked if he could take home some of the silver fabric that her crew used to light his interview, with plans to incorporate it into his onstage costume.)
And while Sun Ra may be more popular than ever now, the eternally enigmatic figure never saw commercial mainstream success in his time, the filmmaker points out, as he operated in dimensions most of us are still trying to locate. “Part of what I wanted to do in making this film was to take him and his music a little bit more seriously,” Turner says. “For so long, so many people had written him off as a kooky or unserious person because of his ideas. But in many ways, we’re just starting to catch up with a lot of what he’s saying. He said he was making music for the 21st century—so here we are. And his message of infinite possibility is probably needed now more than ever.”
American Masters—Sun Ra: Do the Impossible is streaming on PBS.org through March 21.
