Sun Ra, the Afrofuturist bandleader and intergalactic visionary who based his Arkestra in Philadelphia for decades, is heading to PBS.
Sun Ra: Do the Impossible, the Christine Turner-directed documentary that screened at last year’s Black Star Film Festival in Philadelphia, will air as part of PBS’ American Masters series during Black History Month.
It will be shown locally on WHYY at 9 p.m. Feb. 20.
Sun Ra, who was born Herman Poole Blount in Birmingham, Ala., founded Arkestra, now led by 101-year-old saxophone player Marshall Allen after Sun Ra’s death in 1993. He moved with the band to a house in Germantown in the late 1960s, where Allen still lives. The Morton Street house was originally owned by Allen’s father.
Turner’s film includes how Blount, who was known as “Sonny,” experienced a “transmolecularization” in 1936 in which he claimed to have been teleported to Saturn and returned to Earth with a musical mission to bring peace and understanding to the world.
Sun Ra’s music encompasses the history of jazz — from its New Orleans beginnings to out-there experimentation with electronic instruments, King Britt, Philadelphia DJ-producer-turned Blacktronika professor at the University of California San Diego, explains in the film.
Other Philadelphians who offer analysis in the documentary include poet-musician-activist Moor Mother, and critic and WRTI-FM (90.1) editorial director Nate Chinen.
The film’s title is inspired by a Sun Ra quote that Turner kept on her desk while she worked on the documentary. It read: “The possible has been tried and failed. Now it’s time to try the impossible.”
The American Masters treatment arrives at a time when Sun Ra’s presence is larger than ever.
Since 2023, the organization has released five Sun Ra tribute albums. Sun Ra’s oeuvre was central to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent “Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt” exhibit, and his image is featured prominently at the Institute of Contemporary Art’s “Entryways: Xenobia Bailey” exhibit currently on view.
Do the Impossible adds to the growing Sun Ra film library that includes the 1972 movie Space is the Place, and Philly filmmaker Robert Mugge’s 1980 Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise. Another doc, coproduced by Allen along with his son Ronnie Boyd titled Sun Ra: Door to the Cosmos, is in the works.
“As a culture, we’re just catching up with a lot of the ideas and the music that was so ahead of its time,” Turner said of her film’s subject in an interview with The Inquirer in July.
“He’s become an icon of Afrofuturism, and I think that is resonating with people because we’re deeply in need of new ideas and radically imagining another kind of future. And I think people are really hungering for that.”
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