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.
