I love Sun Ra. Well, I love the idea of Sun Ra. I love what Sun Ra represented. I love the impact Sun Ra had on jazz. I think the ideas Sun Ra put across in his music and his writings have extraordinary value, and merit deep study. And I think Sun Ra’s visual presentation and overall pageantry — his commitment to the bit, in comedy parlance — is fantastic.

About the only thing I don’t like about Sun Ra is his music.

Sun Ra: Do The Impossible is a roughly 85-minute documentary, part of PBS’s American Masters series. I really enjoyed it, and got more from it than I have gotten from roughly three decades of trying this or that Sun Ra album in a vain attempt to hear what others hear.

It’s not perfect. It elides a lot, focusing on a few moments and selected aspects of his decades-long career rather than presenting a linear narrative of how his music progressed from the 1950s to the 1990s. There are coy hints that Sun Ra may have been gay, but his sometimes distressing views on women (Arkestra vocalist June Tyson being a notable exception) go unremarked-upon, and the cultlike atmosphere within the band/organization is also soft-pedaled somewhat.

(I’ve seen a few grumps complaining that there’s not enough of Sun Ra’s music in the documentary — that it should have included full-length performances of tunes. This is not a serious opinion. It’s something only a person with zero understanding of how documentaries work would say. Also, there’s plenty of music in the movie. If you go in with no knowledge of what the Arkestra actually sound like, you’ll come away fully capable of deciding whether their work is for you or not.)

In drummer Art Taylor’s book of artist-to-artist interviews, Notes And Tones, singer Betty Carter tears into Sun Ra. She says:

There is another group I want to mention: Sun Ra. They play Europe a lot. He’s got his metallic clothes on, his lights flashing back and forth, and he’s got the nerve to spell orchestra a-r-k-e-s-t-r-a. It’s supposed to have something to do with the stars and Mars, but it’s nothing but bullshit. Sun Ra has got whitey going for it. He couldn’t go uptown and do that to blackie. He would be chased off the stage in Harlem or in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Betty Carter was an aesthetic conservative. She had very strong opinions on what was and was not jazz, and what was and was not proper music. So it doesn’t surprise me that she didn’t like Sun Ra. (She didn’t like Cecil Taylor either; according to Greg Tate, she claimed his music wasn’t black enough. Which was, to put it bluntly, bullshit.)

As I said above, I don’t like Sun Ra’s music (with a few exceptions), but my reasons are not Betty Carter’s. I don’t think he was bullshitting, or playing what he thought the audience wanted to hear. (You know who did that? Duke Ellingtonand Count Basie, both of whom performed Beatles songs in the late ’60s.) Sun Ra did his own thing, with total dedication and focus. My problem is that (to my ear) he doesn’t go hard enough.

Ra’s big band arrangements were technically impressive — tight, swinging, with some interesting flavors (so much baritone sax!). But there was a kind of lounge-music aspect to the Arkestra’s 1950s and early 1960s music that doesn’t work for me. It’s exotica. It’s kitsch. It’s Not For Me.

As for the free-blare and electronic noise elements of his music, which emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, those don’t really hit the mark for me either. I can get much more face-ripping sax from Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, or Frank Wright, and the synthsplosions don’t have the brain-zapping power of, say, Hawkwind. But that era of Sun Ra’s music produced the stuff I come closest to liking: the twin Solar-Myth Approach albums, It’s After The End Of The World, Outer Space Employment Agency, and a few other live recordings.

On the other hand, I find his lyrics and raps (in the 1960s sense of that term), his written philosophy and poetry, to be quite brilliant. He saw right through American society and came up with an extraordinarily simple and powerful metaphor for cultural alienation. I’m not from here, he said. I look at what you are, and I know I can’t possibly be from here, because I’m not like you. That, I get. And that’s the aspect of Sun Ra: Do The Impossible that captivates me, and that’s why from my point of view it’s about the best possible documentary on Ra.

You get informed commentary from people like John Szwed (who wrote the Ra biography Space Is The Place), Fred Moten, Brent Hayes Edwards (who co-authored Henry Threadgill’s autobiography) and members of the Arkestra, including Knoell Scott and Marshall Allen. Some other folks, like King Britt and DJ Spooky, also provide more thoughtful analysis than one might expect from a music documentary: they’re not just there to offer empty praise, like Bono or Dave Grohl might in a movie about some canonical classic rock band or other.

There’s also a tremendous amount of excellent archival footage, including film of the Arkestra traveling to the Egyptian pyramids, live performances from throughout the years, and clips from the movie Space Is The Place, which is a low-budget, occasionally amateurish, but deeply felt metaphorical exploration of Ra’s philosophy. The scene in which he interacts with a group of snarky teenagers, delivering the most bonkers possible version of a motivational speech, is amazing and deserves to be seen in full. (It’s currently streaming on HBO Max.)

Watch Sun Ra: Do The Impossible. Even if, like me, you don’t really enjoy his music, you’ll come away with a newfound respect for the breadth of his achievement.