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 04: Archie Shepp - Yasmina, a Black Woman

Out of the second wave of free jazz musicians,[1] Archie Shepp is part of the trinity of tremendously influential and important saxophonists that shifted the course of the art form, alongside Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders. By the time Shepp travelled to Algiers for the Pan-African Festival in 1969, all three were calling Impulse! Records home, but they had sharply diverged in their aims. Ayler was making some ill-advised moves into jazz/R&B fusion; he would be dead of a presumed suicide a year later. Sanders was crafting his own spiritualist identity in the post-Coltrane wilderness and writing some of his best music (including “The Creator Has a Master Plan”) while he was at it.

Unlike these two contemporaries, Shepp was staying the course by transforming his sound. On his second Impulse! album Fire Music, with its odes to the recently assassinated Malcolm X, Shepp had refracted his musical identity directly through the broader civil rights movement. 1965 was the year of X’s death, the Watts riot, and riots and racial violence in urban centers around the country. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act did not completely end de jure segregation, but they did shift attention and tension to the de facto segregation that was the hallmark of Northern urban centers. Anger and fire were the orders of the day. By 1969, however, Shepp’s philosophy, and in turn his music, shifted toward cultural nationalism. In 1968 and 1969 he recorded five songs that would make up his final Impulse! release in 1974. That album was named for the Los Angeles based US organization’s new black holiday Kwanzaa.