PBS Gets Hip: Space Jazz Arrives on American Masters

Let’s be clear. There’s not a damn thing wrong with American Masters. Since 1986, the PBS series has consistently delivered reliably substantive documentaries about trailblazing figures in all the arts. If anything, recent events like the shuttering of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the disemboweling of the Kennedy Center have forced us to realize how much we take these types of institutions for granted.

That said, when it comes to musical subjects, American Masters has never been known for edging into avant-garde territory. So when the series pulls up its cardigan sleeves and leaps into the life and career of the late avant jazz giant Sun Ra, it’s news.

Sun Ra: Do the Impossible; ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Christine Turner
Running time: 83 minutes

The work of Herman Blount, aka Sun Ra, is a slippery, unwieldy thing to catalog, define, or analyze. It runs from the 1930s until his death in 1993 if you don’t count his Arkestra’s ongoing performances and the flow of revelatory posthumous releases that continues at a steady clip. It encompasses everything from bebop, blues, and big-band swing to sci-fi conceptualism, electronic experimentation, and the farthest reaches of music’s outer limits. It finds Ra working solo, in small groups, and in large ensembles, often under some variation of the Arkestra moniker but bearing so many names even the bandleader himself couldn’t have kept track of them all.

And crucially, Sun Ra’s oeuvre is about more than music. It deals with racial identity, international history, religion, philosophy, and more. There’s a meaty tome dedicated to his album art alone. It’s a lot to juggle, even for the most outside-the-box filmmaker. So how does Sun Ra: Do the Impossible, directed by Christine Turner, stand up to the task?

As it turns out, pretty damn well.

Possibly the most important decision was to eschew the linear, completely chronological kind of Ken Burns history book approach. As detailed above, the complexity of Ra’s vision would have made that a fool’s errand for anything but a full-on miniseries, never mind an 83-minute film.

Instead, Turner takes a holistic view of the Ra-verse, rolling the history, the art, and its extra-musical manifestations into a shape-shifting narrative that catches and bends the light in constantly changing ways as it moves along. We learn only a bit about who Herman Blount was before he became Sun Ra — his 1942 imprisonment for his conscientious objector status, his subsequent stint with Fletcher Henderson’s band, and his move from his native Alabama to Chicago — because that change was more rebirth than transformation. But Do the Impossible delves deeply into the makeup and mission of the Arkestra leader.

The film zooms in on the auto-mythological core of Ra’s concept. In the ’50s, he had an epiphany that he described as being “transmolecularized” to Saturn and recognizing it as his home before returning to Earth energized by a new agenda: to free Black people from their earthly struggles and awaken them to their interstellar nature. The tool for the task would be the music he’d make by forming his Arkestra.

The doc details the ways the bandleader and his crew underlined the otherworldly qualities of Ra’s racially empowering philosophical and spiritual mythopoeia. These include garb befitting regal Saturnians, exploration of new technological tools like the synthesizer (and before that, the quirky Solovox), and plenty of cosmic concepts for album art, stage sets, musical themes, and lyrics.

Several Arkestra members are interviewed, including Ra’s right-hand man, Marshall Allen. Arkestra life seems to have agreed with the still active 101-year-old, multi-reed man. They share stories of the communal existence, financial struggles, and musical vision the band shared, and the near-religious devotion to Ra’s philosophy.

All of the above made them a natural fit for the blooming ’60s counterculture when they set up shop in New York City. Do the Impossible offers intriguing examples of their acceptance into the fold. A Sun Ra poem was solicited for Esquire’s 1969 compendium of quotations on Neil Armstrong’s moon mission. Ra became the cover subject of Rolling Stone in 1969. And the Arkestra shared high-profile bills with the likes of American proto-punks The MC5 and English blues-rockers Ten Years After.

A topic too seldom touched on, Ra’s gender nonconformity comes up in the context of the outsider identity he embraced early on. Like almost everything else Sun Ra, his sexuality was shrouded in mystery, but it is clear that it consolidated his outsider status. If you think somebody like Little Richard was out of place as a Jim Crow era Black man running counter to stereotypical masculinity, imagine if he played avant-garde music and proclaimed himself a Saturnian on top of it.

Even in the ’70s it was a tough sell. You can scarcely find an article about Sun Ra without the term Afrofuturism, and rightly so — he was at its vanguard. One of the field’s foundational items is Space is the Place, filmed in 1972 and released in ’74, where Ra stars in a sci-fi drama as a version of himself. In a key scene spotlighted by the documentary, he identifies himself to a group of Bay Area Black kids, who roundly refute him as not being for real. Ra answers, “I’m not real, I’m just like you. You don’t exist in this society. If you did, your people wouldn’t be seeking equal rights. You’re not real. If you were, you’d have some status among the nations of the world. So, we’re both myths.”

Through the power of his music and his mythology, Sun Ra strove to go Black activist artists one better by embodying the victory instead of the battle. He constructed a world beyond the one his peers were fighting their way through and made it a magical-sounding place. Do the Impossible identifies that as his primary aim and shows the ways he and his faithful cabal worked to make it real.