Take Nine (from Outer Space)
Late to the game, I first read about Bill Sebastian's Outer Space Visual Communicator (OVC) in May 2015. It seemed an intriguing sidebar in Sun Ra's half-century career — the planet-hopping Afrofuturist sharing stages (in the late 1970s) with an idiosyncratic fractal light projector created by a man who is literally — and serendipitously — a "rocket scientist." Twenty-two years after Ra's 1993 earthly departure and one year after his commemorative Sun-tenniel, the decade-spanning Ra-OVC alliance seemed (to me) largely forgotten history.
Around that time I viewed a grainy 1986 video for the Ra perennial "Calling Planet Earth," enhanced with radiant light painting by the OVC. I was curious about the performance. As administrator of the Ra catalog, I'm familiar with most of his known recordings, but couldn't locate this terrific version and wondered where it originated. Sleuthing the web, I discovered that not only was Bill Sebastian still alive — he was still in Boston developing advanced iterations of the OVC, which by then incorporated Virtual Reality (VR) technology. Meanwhile, I had discovered a second 1986 Ra video, "Sunset on the Nile," which also featured the OVC. Again, a first-rate performance, heard nowhere but on a lo-fi VHS tape.
After an introductory phone chat with Bill, what ensued was the improbable evolution of this album. We won't call it THE Great Lost Sun Ra Album, but it is assuredly *A* Great Lost Sun Ra Album. Yet since it was neither envisioned nor existed as an album in the first place, it had never been categorically "misplaced." It was found without having been lost.
The backstory is extensive and complex. (Sebastian chronicles the details in an interview included in the LP and CD edition.) Bill was, by turns, a fan, then a friend of Ra, and finally a collaborator. Bill's dream was to create spectacular multi-media audio-visuals combining Ra's music and his OVC.
Bill's brainchild was a keyboard-triggered "instrument" that "played" colored light instead of sound, projecting wild, multi-hued patterns on a screen hung above performers onstage. He built the archetype in his Boston home in the mid-1970s — long before desktop computers existed. He doggedly refined and improved it, then updated, tweaked and reconfigured the device, until he felt it was ready for public performance.
According to Dave Tompkins, in the 2010 book How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop:
"Sun Ra finally met the completed OVC in the fall of 1978, in Sebastian's drafty loft in downtown Boston. There, he found his new friend hunched over a small hexagonal keyboard, his fingers flitting across touch-sensitive 'capacitants.' Sebastian was making 'spacescapes,' as if he had Close Encounters on speed dial, consuming 15,000 watts of power in the process. Sebastian [said] he would play the OVC just to keep warm in the winter. 'The capacitants respond to the magnetic field in your hand. … It's like electronic finger-painting. You could shoot comets across the screen. Seventeen million colors at mind-dazzling speeds'."
In terms of what the OVC might accomplish, Ra and Sebastian were simpatico. As Bill confessed in a 2018 interview with Brian Coleman, "I have been bored by reality for a long time. We are sending out an invitation to people who want to go someplace different and are willing to fly to destinations unknown."
In this sense and others, Sun Ra was an ardent fellow voyager.
"Sun Ra probably understood what I was doing even better than I did," said Bill. "He was one of the few people who fundamentally understood the concept that music is not restricted to your ears. If you think about when he describes his music, there are these other worlds and they're communicating to you. The idea that those other worlds could communicate through light as well as through sound was, to him, as obvious as it was to me. His comments when he first saw the system were, like, 'Yes, of course. This should've been done fifty years ago. Why did it take you so long?' He was amazed that no one else had done it."
These compatriots embarked on a string of live performances at Boston's Modern Theater in December 1978, the last on Christmas. In late 1979 they presented a series in New York at Soundscape, and another in June 1980 at the Massachusetts Art Institute. (The latter was captured on videotape, most of which Bill eventually discovered was "unviewable.")
"The concerts typically began with the Arkestra playing abstract works before Sun Ra appeared," Bill recalled. "The OVC usually generated visuals in those segments, with no lights on the Arkestra. After Ra entered, there were lights onstage and the OVC was more of a complement to the musical performance."
After those partnered efforts, Bill returned to the lab to further develop the OVC technology, particularly by adding a video component.
Fast-forward to 1986, when Bill was a technical consultant at Mission Control, a state-of-the-art recording facility in Westford, Massachusetts. Figuring it was time to rekindle his collaborative dream, he invited Ra and bandmates up to the Bay State to experiment. The plan was to record raw soundtracks for carefully crafted performance videos, which would showcase the hallucinatory artistry of the OVC choreographed with Ra's music. Sunny and the Ark spent a full day recording over a dozen works; the proceedings included Ra laying down some improvisations on the then-new Prophet VS polyphonic synth.
All live music taping was produced in one day, August 25; the following day, Sebastian captured A- and B-roll Betacam footage of the musicians miming, marching, dancing, and frolicking with and without the OVC, for use in the video mix.
From these exhausting sessions, two titles were mixed. "Calling Planet Earth" and "Sunset on the Nile," with added OVC effects, were issued on separate VHS tapes (hand-copied in limited quantities by Sebastian), sold only at Sun Ra gigs.
Sebastian odysseyed on with the OVC, but from a Ra perspective — seeming end of story.
What about the rest of the 1986 Mission Control session?
In our first phone call, Sebastian casually remarked that he owned five unmixed 24-track, two-inch analog master tapes. After the two selected songs had been mixed for video, the balance of the recordings were shelved and remained in storage untouched — for three decades. When I asked about the condition and availability of the tapes, Bill professed he had no idea if they would even play, but he offered to retrieve them. I booked a recording studio outside Boston to dust off these relics and hear if the history they captured was still audible. Except for the musicians, engineers, and assistants present at Mission Control in 1986, these performances had never been heard.
I've often facetiously remarked that Sun Ra never recorded in a Dave Brubeck studio with a Miles Davis budget. This seemed like it could be the closest thing.
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When I reached out to prospective engineers and studios, my preliminary inquiries foretold a daunting task because of the configuration of the tapes (2-inch, 24-track), their age and storage history, and the uncertainty of their durability. Vintage tapes, poorly stored and/or carelessly handled, can deteriorate over time, or disintegrate on playback.
I called my buddy Sean Slade, who co-founded Boston's Fort Apache Studios in 1985. Slade, who has worked with the Pixies, Lou Reed, Radiohead, Weezer, and a long list of luminaries, also happens to be a longtime Ra fan and attended many Boston shows by the Arkestra. He was familiar with Mission Control, and speculated that the tapes were likely well-recorded and, if unplayed for 30 years, probably safely preserved. We were joined in the studio by another Boston mainstay, Brother Cleve, a longtime mutual friend and fellow Ra scholar, who was also a fine musician (Del Fuegos, Combustible Edison, Waitiki), vintage keyboard authority, and mix engineer. [Note: Sadly, Cleve passed away in 2022.]
The tapes were first "baked" (yes, as in an oven — don't try this at home) before being transferred to digital — miraculously, without technical glitches — on a rented two-inch deck at Woolly Mammoth Studios in Waltham over two sessions in 2016. During initial playback — the archaeological discovery phase — we reviewed the tape contents and acknowledged that what we captured in ProTools was a brilliant, historic, sprawling multitrack mess. On that August day 30 years earlier, tape had rolled — and it continued rolling, capturing the musical genius and chaos that flowed from Ra and his disciples. In addition to dazzling solos, sparkling ensemble passages, and thrilling arrangements, unedited tapes invariably include false starts, bum notes, missed cues, half-hearted bridges, aborted takes, and good ideas gone bad. Ra was famous for capitalizing on mistakes; he was also highly adept at tape editing — which in capable hands = Quality Control Insurance. We recognized a monumental job ahead shaping this raw material into an album worthy of Ra's legacy.
We identified titles (the tape boxes were blank), catalogued how much material had been recorded, how much was potentially worth mixing, and what would likely be consigned to the cutting room floor. Besides mixing, the sessions required serious editing — some of the tracks meandered — but generally the performances were solid. Here and there the band sounded devitalized (possibly travel fatigue) and their performances dragged. Vocalist June Tyson had a sore throat and was hoarse; she sometimes wavered away from the mic. She exuded her customary charm, but out of respect we had to omit some vocal passages where she was painfully straining.
Missing from Bill's storage space were tapes containing the stereo mixdowns of "Calling Planet Earth" and "Sunset on the Nile" used on the VHS tapes. It would have been impossible to replicate those mixes from the raw 24-track stripes, so Slade and Cleve created new mixes, and I later made some edits.
We also extracted and edited three of Ra's keyboard parts (one piano, two DX7 synth), which are here programmed as interludes. When you listen to the full mixes, often you can't even hear these parts, which are full of intriguing passages, and which sound like something from Ra's legendary 1960s solo piano Saturn LPs Monorails and Satellites.
There are no surprises in the repertoire. Each of these titles were performed and/or recorded by Ra countless times with the Arkestra. But as any Raficionado will attest, the maestro never duplicated performances or arrangements. "Love in Outer Space," first recorded in 1962, logs more entries in the Ra discography than any other title, yet after 24 years the Mission Control version is arguably one of his best. Ra never got bored with these works, and he wanted to make certain you didn't either, so he kept shapeshifting. Despite the familiarity of this setlist, everything sounds fresh. And while there was no Miles budget underwriting the sessions, there's some Brubeck-quality fidelity in the grooves. Call it "Take Nine (From Outer Space)."
—Irwin Chusid
released October 29, 2024
Personnel
Sun Ra: piano, Prophet VS synth, Yamaha DX7, vocals
John Gilmore: tenor saxophone, percussion, lead vocal ("East of the Sun")
Danny Ray Thompson: baritone saxophone, percussion
Marshall Allen: alto saxophone, flute, percussion
Al Evans: flugelhorn
Fred Adams: trumpet
Tyrone Hill: trombone
Eloe Omoe: bass clarinet
James Jacson: bassoon, Infinity-drum
Bruce Edwards: electric guitar
John Ore: bass
John Brown: drums
Atakatune: conga, percussion
June Tyson: vocals
Dance, gesture, and Virtual Reality: Michael Ray, Barday (Williams), Eddie Thomas [Thomas Thaddeus]
Produced for first commercial release by Irwin Chusid
Original sessions produced by Sun Ra and Bill Sebastian
Recorded at Mission Control Studios, Westford, Massachusetts, August 25, 1986
Session recording engineer: Sidney Burton
Assistant engineer: Kent Wagner
VHS mix engineer: Jimi Randolph
Original 24-track tapes transferred by Joe Pires and David Minehan at Woolly Mammoth Studios, Waltham, Massachusetts, May 17 and August 31, 2016
Tape baking: Jonathan Wyner / M-Works
Mixed by Sean Slade and Brother Cleve at Woolly Mammoth Studios, October 3, 2016; March 27–28 and April 27–28, 2017
Engineer: David Minehan
Digital editing by I.C., 2020
Mastered by: Peter Beckmann and Joe Lizzi
Vinyl cut by Frank Merritt at The Carvery
Cover photo by Charles Steck, courtesy Dorothy Steck
Photo tinting by Edward ODowd
Release co-ordination: Quinton Scott and Hugo Mendez
Thanks to Thomas Jenkins, Jr./Sun Ra LLC, Christopher Trent, Quinton Scott
This album is dedicated to Brother Cleve, who passed away in September 2022.
All compositions by Sun Ra © Enterplanetary Koncepts (BMI)
except "East of the Sun" by Brooks Bowman © Anne Rachel Music (ASCAP)
