While working on her new documentary about composer, pianist, and poet Sun Ra, Christine Turner kept words of wisdom from the visionary bandleader close at hand.
“I kept these quotes on my wall above my desk,” said the filmmaker, speaking via Zoom from her home in San Francisco. “They’re from an Arkestra newspaper I picked up at one of their shows a few years ago.”
One Sun Ra self-help tip was particularly valuable.
“The possible has been tried and failed,” it reads. “Now it’s time to try the impossible.”
That thought is echoed in the title of her film Sun Ra: Do the Impossible about the Birmingham, Ala.-born Renaissance man who, along with his band, lived in a house on Morton Street in Germantown in Philadelphia, from the late 1960s until close to the time of his death in 1993.
“But also for me personally, the challenge of taking on a task that” — she says laughing at the enormity of it all — “could at times seem impossible!”
That’s because there’s so much Sun Ra to consider in her briskly paced, thoroughly researched 85-minute movie.
It reaches back to the “transmolecularization” that the musical savant born Herman Poole Blount, known as “Sonny,” claimed to have experienced in 1936. He was, he said, 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 entire 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 include poet-musician-activist Moor Mother and critic and WRTI-FM (90.1) editorial director Nate Chinen.
Starting in the 1950s — decades before DIY punks got the idea — Sun Ra released hundreds of self-made recordings that ranged from old-fashioned swing to bleeding-edge avant garde.
He created an enormous body of work, much of it recorded with famed band members like John Gilmore, June Tyson, and Marshall Allen, the now 101-year-old maestro who has continued to travel the spaceways and led the Sun Ra Arkestra in the 32 years since its founder’s death.
“It’s a vast catalog that can be deeply intimidating,” said Turner, who has shown her films at BlackStar five times before, starting with Homegoings, her 2013 feature-length debut about a Black funeral director in Alabama. It won the festival’s award for best documentary.
She’ll be back this year attending her film’s screening at the Wilma Theater at 2 p.m. on Saturday, as will Allen, whom she interviewed in 2023 at the Morton Street house that Sun Ra famously bought from Allen’s father for $1.
Sun Ra: Do the Impossible arrives at a time when Sun Ra’s presence is larger than ever.
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