During one of the many sumptuous montage sequences in the new PBS documentary Sun Ra: Do the Impossible, the late jazz icon’s voice hisses, “I am strange—my mind is tinted with the colors of madness.” Taken from “I Am Strange”, an obscure 1952 7-inch that didn’t see widespread release until 2009 (later issued as part of a 2016 box set), Sun Ra’s monologue crackles with a frantic quality he didn’t often reveal to the public.
“I Am Strange” captures Ra as if he were fending off the flames of the madness he describes. His voice grows resolute as he asserts the determination of his love as a bulwark against hate. Still, the unease lingers.
For a fleeting moment, one gets the sense that Sun Ra’s inner conflict could shatter his outer persona and reveal the vulnerable human buried somewhere behind the facade. With Do the Impossible, which airs on PBS this month as part of the network’s long-running American Masters series, director Christine Turner both honors and peels away at Sun Ra’s outward presentation.
This is no small feat. For decades leading up to his death in 1993, Sun Ra spoke most often—on record, on camera, in college lecture halls—in a coolly detached monotone. He was, as even casual observers know, fond of dropping gems like “all [that] planet earth produces is the dead bodies of humanity”.
These types of pithy statements rained down from Sun Ra’s mind like petals from a cherry blossom tree in full bloom. His assertions about humanity’s precarious place in the cosmos were made all the more stark and provocative by his inimitable deadpan.
At times, Ra (born Herman Blount), came across as if he was mocking us—and why not? After all, this was someone who claimed to look down on our planet from higher realms of consciousness, steadily wagging his finger at our species’ wanton appetite for destruction. In that regard, much of what Sun Ra offers in Do the Impossible repeats themes he has voiced in previous documentaries, such as A Joyful Noise (Robert Mugge, 1980), Brother from Another Planet (Don Letts, 2005), and the feature film Space Is the Place (John Coney, 1974).
To her credit, however, Turner straddles the boundary between the man and the galactic-scale myth he spoke into existence. Fortunately, Turner is no stranger to outsized personalities. In her 2023 short documentary, J’Nai Bridges: Unamplified, Turner did a similar balancing act. In that film (also a contribution to American Masters), the sheer sonic boom of Bridges’ voice provides a counterpoint to Turner’s portrayal of her as a living, breathing—even down-to-earth—person. Alas, bringing Sun Ra down to earth proves to be a much trickier challenge. Thankfully, Turner is up to the task.
Where previous filmmakers fell for the temptation to play up Sun Ra’s unabashedly oddball nature, Turner opts for a more measured approach. Mere seconds into the film, Ra plays a solo piano improvisation of astonishing elegance in a Venice concert hall. At that moment, before the film’s narrative arc is underway, it becomes clear that there is more to say about this enigmatic figure than simply that he was strange—more than even the things he told us himself. (For a good example of Sun Ra’s finesse and compositional sense on piano, Sundazed Music’s 2025-released archival recording Uncharted Passages: New York Piano Soliloquies, 1977-79 is a great place to start.)
It is in this space, in its striving to imagine Sun Ra as a life more than just a towering heap of accomplishments and grandiose statements about being on a mission to enlighten humankind, that Do the Impossible flourishes. Several former members of Sun Ra’s Arkestra speak bluntly about how they were paid meager wages. More than one of them likens Ra’s all-consuming demand for devotion to his creative mission to being in a cult. Two former bandmembers hint at (but don’t elaborate on) the idea that Sun Ra may have been gay.
That Suna Ra’s personal life remained impenetrable in his lifetime means that we’ll never be able to solve the mystery of who he actually was. Still, Do the Impossible is no less enjoyable for trying. Of course, the accomplishments occupy center stage for much of the film’s 80-minute runtime. Turner and her cast of interview subjects rightfully laud Sun Ra for his contributions not only to jazz but to 20th-century composition more broadly. Arkestra members like Cheryl Banks-Smith, Ahmed Abdullah, and Marshall Allen, musicians like DJ Spooky and King Britt, and cultural commentators like Harmony Holiday and Louis Chude-Sokei all weigh in.
Oddly, none of Turner’s interviewees says what this film gradually reveals as undeniable: that if history has recorded Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Charles Mingus as the all-time giants of the genre, Sun Ra actually surpassed them all in several respects. For starters, there’s the dizzying volume of his output. (He put out so much music that no one has ever been able to come up with an official tally for how many albums he made!) Then there’s the utter sophistication of his compositional approach—a standard he maintained even when belting out seemingly incomprehensible noise solos on a Moog synth.
Next—and this is where Do the Impossible arguably outshines previous documentaries—Sun Ra’s range across the entire pantheon of jazz can’t be overstated. It doesn’t have to be stated outright because Turner’s choice of performance footage says it all: Sun Ra could lead large, orchestra-sized ensembles to switch on a dime between avant-garde expressionism and traditional, 1920s-styled swing with impeccable agility and grace. Can we say that about any of the other most iconic figures in jazz history?
Early in the film, Sun Ra says, “My music concerns the cosmos and the greater universe. It also concerns the myth of things in opposition to the reality of things.” At points, Turner and her cast fall too easily for the myth. No one, for instance, brings up the question of whether Sun Ra’s commitment to his identity as an extraterrestrial being could have resulted from trauma or some sort of psychological break.
Likewise, why did Sun Ra feel free to appropriate ancient Egyptian lore instead of rooting his aesthetic in West African spiritual systems? Again, no one confronts the inconvenient fact that Egyptians aren’t ethnically “black” in our contemporary understanding of the word.
Surely, someone as well-read as Sun Ra, who accurately diagnosed that black Americans were “separated from our myths”, would have been aware of the distinctions between Egyptians, Ethiopians, West Africans, and the countless other ethnic groups that have populated the African continent. In the end, however, not even these missteps detracts from the awe-inspiring sense of assurance it took for Sun Ra, who was born in Alabama in 1914, to stare down the barrel of American racism and declare himself not only above prejudice, but above civilization itself.
In its gorgeous embroidery of color, sound, and thoughtful reflection, Do the Impossible achieves the seemingly impossible by allowing us to understand Sun Ra on both a larger-than-life and a life-sized scale.
Sun Ra: Do the Impossible is now streaming for free on PBS’ website and the PBS app until 2:59am EDT on March 21, 2026. Check local listings for broadcast dates on your local PBS station.