It’s clear at this point that the work of Afrofuturist jazz visionary Sun Ra is beloved by Portlanders. From his band, the Arkestra’s frequent trips to the Rose City playing packed shows (sans Ra himself, who left the planet in 1993), to the epic retrospective exhibition of his art, design, and intergalactic costumery held at the Portland Art Museum in 2019—the spirit of Sun Ra is more than welcome in our freaky little art town.Â
It’s no wonder then that an attentive crowd of Ra adherents and cosmic music lovers would show up to the Hollywood Theatre on a chilly Tuesday night to see Christine Turner’s excellent new documentary, Sun Ra: Do the Impossible.
In the first minutes of the film we find Sun Ra at the piano, delicately hammering out a deeply sincere rendition of “Over the Rainbow.” His dreamy, abstracted interpretation slowly fills with angular and dissonant chord clusters, stretching the well-worn song into new, unheard dimensions. It’s a poignant if curious entry point for a film about one of the most fabled, prolific, and inspired jazz composers of the 20th century. But the song, as Scholar Louis Chude-Sokei points out, was one of Ra’s favorites, encapsulating his life-long striving to enact “another world” of transcendent possibilities here on Earth.
A prophetic and self-styled mythic figure, Sun Ra claimed he’d arrived here from the planet Saturn to deliver humanity out of ignorance and imminent self-destruction. How would he achieve such a seemingly impossible goal? Through art, poetry, philosophy, and most importantly, transformative music. Most artists contain multitudes, Sun Ra contains vaster galaxies.
Ra was also a social activist, and a deeply read scholar of religion and spirituality. He believed that Black suffering in America was crucially due to a loss of life-giving mythology—that an ancient, Pharaonic Blackness needed to be restored to liberate the African American population, and then the world. To make this point clear he made films, wrote anthemic “space chants,” incorporated ritualized dance into his live performances, donned elaborate, Egyptian headdresses, and arrayed his band in space age garb to prepare for a transformed sci-fi future. “The possible has been tried and failed,” he once decreed, “now it’s time to try the impossible.”
To encapsulate an oeuvre of this magnitude is quite a feat, Turner’s film handles the task with care and grace, showing the various strains of Ra’s art and philosophy to be resonant fragments of a cohesive body of work. This is in no small part due to the cast of brilliant, mostly Black commentators the film gathers to explicate the many enigmas of Sun Ra. Poets like Harmony Holiday and the eminent Fred Moten are stationed comfortably near scholarly figures like Jayna Brown and Brent Hayes-Edwards who are virtuosic in illuminating the complexity and richness of Ra’s creations.
Then there’s the members of Sun Ra’s own band who show up to lend reverence to their late leader’s memory. Knoell Scott, longtime Arkestra member and charismatic sax player, waxes eloquent about the way Sun Ra cared for his band and community members, with a “mother’s love, not a father’s love—a father’s love is very judgmental—he had a mother’s love, unconditional.” The tenderness is palpable.
Do the Impossible also places special emphasis on the women in Sun Ra’s orbit, lending feet of film to Arkestra high priestess, June Tyson, whose impassioned, sung interpretations of Sun Ra’s poems—often delivered at center stage, festooned in a glittering cape—could bring audience members to their knees before her transition from this temporal plane in 1992.
Turner’s filmmaking is clear-eyed and visually distinct. She’s dug up glorious, unseen performance footage of the band, and sculpted a movie as fervent as it is sumptuous. There’s film of Sun Ra swaying mythopoetically on stage, bedecked in silver sparkling sundries, wielding a deep blue crystal ball, or sections in which the colossal band frantically lets loose an assaultive blast of noise that would make metal-heads wince. These startling passages contrast more softly sensual segments: Such as flickering footage of the Arkestra atop the pyramids at Giza, their brightly colored lamé robes wafting in the wind.
As an artist, Sun Ra’s visionary approach has too often been written off as quixotic or superfluous, but Do the Impossible expounds upon its subject with tender admiration. His creative cosmology and mythic personage are treated as profound, conjured realities, capable of transcending dominant preconceptions of what art and selfhood can contain. As Ra himself intimates in the film, he hoped his music could encourage each of us to become our “impossible selves,” which we may “have left behind” when our courage failed, or when that deep, embodied identity was forced out of us by oppression or abuse.
In this time on our planet when so much seems to be riding on a razor’s edge—politically, ecologically, technologically, racially—it would seem that we need the encouragement of artists like Ra. As Chude-Sokei concludes, in him we may have “found a prophet...in sync with where people are right now.” What Turner’s film accomplishes in this regard is nothing less than incredible: Demonstrating not only the power and imaginative efficacy of Sun Ra’s futurism, but how it might actually inspire the creation of a better world, borne through each of us.
Sun Ra: Do the Impossible is screening again on December 4 at Mono Space. Director Chrstine Turner will present the film and be joined by editor Steven Golliday for a Q&A following the screening, more info here. In addition, the Sun Ra Arkestra returns to Portland at the Hollywood Theatre on February 25, 26, and 27, more info here.
