BYG Actuel 12: Alan Silva and His Celestrial Communication Orchestra - Luna Surface

I haven’t gotten a chance to see Gravity yet but from what I’ve heard, the experience of seeing it on an Imax screen in 3D can induce existential terror at the vast emptiness of space and our fragility in the face of the forces of the cosmos. Forty-four years earlier, Alan Silva and His Celestrial Communication Orchestra[1] accomplished that same thing musically with their first album for BYG Actuel, Luna Surface. Recorded less than a month after the Apollo 11 spacecraft touched down on the lunar surface, the album is both an incredibly assured debut as leader for Silva and a chaotic, relentless journey into the horrors of outer space.

Alan Silva was born in Bermuda in 1939 but he migrated with his mother to Harlem before the end of World War II. He picked up the bass at some point in this childhood and he made his first major splash on the instrument as a participant in the landmark October Revolution in Jazz, which trumpeter Bill Dixon put on at the Cellar Door in Manhattan. Around the same time he spent a brief time in Sun Ra’s Arkestra, giving him a taste for larger ensembles that he kept in the back of his mind over the next five years, which he spent in smaller bands led by Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, Sunny Murray, and Archie Shepp. It was with the latter that Silva travelled to Algiers in July 1969 to perform at the Pan-African Festival which put him at ground zero for the nascent Actuel summer.

BYG Actuel 11: Archie Shepp - Poem for Malcolm

Archie Shepp’s remarkable first full studio album Four for Trane[1] consists mostly of Coltrane covers—unsurprising considering the title—but his follow-up Fire Music, recorded in the wake the assassination of Malcolm X, counts three Shepp compositions alongside tunes by Duke Ellington and Antonio Carlos Jobim. The last of these Shepp compositions is “Malcolm Malcolm Semper Malcolm,” a brief poem reflecting on X’s passing, which happened a week before the recording, followed by an expressive, pained solo by Shepp with minimal backing by David Izenzon and J.C. Moses on bass and drums respectively.

Malcolm X is not an explicit presence on any of Shepp’s albums in the four years after Fire Music, although his legacy haunts every sonic, cultural, and personal exploration that Shepp undertook during this time. In August 1969, when Shepp recorded three studio albums for BYG Actuel over the course of five days, he decided to grapple once again with the X’s towering legacy. What’s more, he again chose to use a poem to do this on “Poem for Malcolm,” which closes out the first side of the album of the same name.[2]

BYG Actuel 09: Jimmy Lyons - Other Afternoons

It is one of the great misfortunes of BYG Actuel that the label never got the opportunity to record Cecil Taylor. Taylor was present in Paris during the Actuel summer, hanging around the background as the mysterious guru of the scene, but his presence is undocumented as far as records go.

Jimmy Lyons, Alan Silva, and Andrew Cyrille were all crucial components in the BYG Actuel story, but their experiences in Europe did not begin in 1969. These three terrific musicians formed the core of Taylor’s quartet, the Cecil Taylor Unit (which memorably appeared in expanded form on Taylor’s two Blue Note dates, Unit Structures and Conquistador!), had already enjoyed France’s open-arms acceptance of free jazz when the Unit travelled to Paris in 1966.[1] When Taylor returned to Paris three years later, Alan Silva had already moved on to Archie Shepp’s band,[2] but he brought his former Unit bandmates into the fold at the always open Studio Saravah soon after they arrived. All three got their first opportunities to record as leader at Studio Saravah, although none of them could coax Taylor—who didn’t release any albums between 1966 and 1973 and didn’t record any non-live albums again until 1978—into the studio.

BYG Actuel 03: Sunny Murray - Hommage to Africa

There are probably arguments that could be made against this claim, but Sunny Murray is free jazz’s first truly free drummer. Instead of simply keeping time, Murray’s playing is purely expressionistic, pouring his entire being into a cacophony of textural percussion. Considering his place in the free jazz pantheon, it is unsurprising that he cut his teeth in the Cecil Taylor Unit and then in the Albert Ayler Trio and Quartet, three of the most important groups in free jazz’s development. While his playing on albums by these groups, and especially on the Albert Ayler Trio’s fiery Ghosts, is rightfully lauded by fans and critics, his work as a bandleader is too often overlooked. He recorded two great ESP-Disks—1965’s Sunny’s Time Now and 1966’s Sunny Murray—while still a member of Ayler’s band—along with the transitional Big Chief for EMI/Pathe in 1968 between his stint with Ayler and Archie Shepp’s invitation to join him at the Panafrican Festival at the start of the next summer. While Murray’s first three albums as leader are very good, Murray’s voice is still very much tied to his work with Ayler. Murray’s time with Shepp and his experiences recording for BYG Actuel freed him of these stylistic constraints and allowed him to find his own voice as a writer.