At best, any casual music consumer would find the avant-garde work of musician, composer, and bandleader Sun Ra transportive. At worst, they may find it frustratingly inscrutable. Sun Ra wrote in 1972 that “Imagination is a magic carpet / Upon which we may soar / To distant lands and climes / And even go / beyond the moon / To any planet in the sky / If we came from / nowhere here / Why can’t we go somewhere there?”
All this may indeed be true, but any piece of abstract art, en route to “somewhere there,” can be as disorienting as it is liberating. Without fixed or familiar reference points, we can get lost in space.
Christine Turner, who produced and directed the documentary film “Sun Ra: Do the Impossible” for the documentary production house Firelight Media, must have known this instinctively, which is why I imagine she took on the task of guiding us through the magical mystery tour that is the life and mind of Sun Ra.
Sun Ra, the pioneering Afrofuturist, is one of the most fascinating, prolific, and accomplished artists of the 20th century. He also is one of the least understood and hardest to understand. It’s not just because his musical trajectory is so long — ranging from the more classical traditions of ragtime and swing to less structured and often highly improvisational forms of bebop and free jazz — but because Sun Ra himself purposefully defied classification. He was as much a fearless philosopher, scholar, and performance iconoclast as he was a miner of acoustic subterrains. He famously said, “The impossible attracts me because everything possible has been done and the world didn’t change.”
“Do the Impossible” doesn’t betray Sun Ra’s ethos by trying to make him wholly linear and legible, but instead honors it by providing context and observation. Although few specifics are known about his early years (Sun Ra consistently provided contradictory versions of his origin story, which included being a citizen of the planet Saturn), the film shares some basics: The earthly form of Sun Ra was born Herman Poole Blount in 1914 in Alabama.
He reportedly taught himself how to play the piano, as well as read and compose music. He was heavily influenced by the blues singers and big bands of the early years of jazz, served a jail bid as a WWII conscientious objector, and went on to factor prominently in the growth of the Chicago jazz scene. He gained the moniker “Sonny” as a child, but shed his slave name by legally becoming Le Sony’r Ra in 1952. He started a record label in the early 1950s, formed an “arkestra” that went by dozens of names, recorded more than 200 albums over the next 40 years, wrote more than 1,000 compositions, and toured the world wearing outfits that fused space age and ancient Egyptian themes.
You can retrieve much of that information from Wikipedia, but “Do the Impossible,” which is entirely scored with Sun Ra’s music, is a wondrous celebration of the ideas, visuals, and sounds that Sun Ra conjured. We are introduced to his eclectic and encyclopedic literacy, and hear his views about metaphysics and “transmolecularization.” We view his concerts, some of which feature more conventional big band performances, to more outrageous pageants of far-out costume parades, free-form dance, spoken word, and what can only be described honestly as noise. In one concert scene, Sun Ra has his back to the keyboard while randomly banging on keys to chaotic effect.
Perhaps the juiciest moments of the film are the lineup of musicians, dancers, vocalists, scholars, and critics who serve as a collective Rosetta Stone for Sun Ra’s body of work. Many describe the experience of performing and working with Sun Ra, from his disciplined work ethic and no-nonsense, no-drug or alcohol rehearsals, to his cheapskate management ways. Some of the commenters were clearly part of his cult of personality, but others simply had respectful and generous interpretations, declaring that he was “preparing us for a different world,” creating “portals to other dimensions” and “saving our people.” What was particularly interesting were the observations that Sun Ra had more of a maternal energy than a fatherly one, and that he confounded easy categorizations of sex, gender, and racial identity as much as he did musical identity. He both rejected the conventional limitations in our human forms and minds, but fiercely championed our human-ness. He was intense and ostentatious, but probably took himself less seriously than most people assumed.
Although Sun Ra died in 1993, the Sun Ra Arkestra continues to record and perform under the leadership of Marshall Allen to this day. “Do the Impossible” helps us understand that before Little Richard, George Clinton, Octavia E. Butler, Afrikka Bambaattaa, Saul Williams, Janelle Monae, and Lady Gaga beamed onto the popular culture scene from other universes, there was the counter-cultural Sun Ra, challenging us to not just think outside the box, but to dismantle the box entirely.
As jazz is increasingly relegated to the cultural margins, and artists of all genres are namelessly Spotified, “Do the Impossible” confidently asserts Sun Ra’s place in the pantheon of musical revolutionaries.
“Sun Ra: Do the Impossible” premieres nationwide on PBS on February 20, 2026, at 9 p.m. ET. (check local listings); pbs.org/americanmasters and the PBS App.
I watched the documentary was thoroughly enlightened to learn of another black person of his stature & musical genius.