Dreaming of the Masters

 

If you haven't guessed by now, I was a huge Sun Ra fan back in the '70s.  I lived in New York for the first half of the decade and was lucky enough to have caught Sun Ra performances at several Manhattan and Long Island venues.  I moved to Boston for the second half of the decade, and did my best to catch every Sun Ra performance in Beantown I could while I was a student at BU.

Imagine my excitement, then, when it  was announced that Sun Ra would perform a 12-night stand in December 1978 at the Modern Theater in downtown Boston. This was during the collegiate winter break, when all the other students left town to return home and celebrate the holidays with family, and I had no exams, classes or other pressing responsibilities.  To make it even more enticing, the 12 Days of Infinity, as the series was called, was to feature a light show produced by something called the Outerspace Visual Communicator (OVC).  Bill Sebastian, the inventor of the OVC said, “I can’t guarantee anybody is going to like what they see here, but I can guarantee they haven’t seen anything like it before."

I wanted to attend all 12 of the Infinity nights (that would have been epic) but could only afford to go to three of the shows on my student budget. 

Built in 1900, the Modern Theater (523 Washington Street) was where Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer, the first motion picture with sound, premiered in Boston.  But by the 1970s, the Modern had fallen on hard times, and like its neighbors the Paramount and the Savoy, the Modern was in desperate need of rehabilitation. In 1976, the building was purchased by a non-profit, and by late 1978 the theater was restored to the point where it could stage the Sun Ra performances.

The OVC was basically an approximately 20-feet tall hexagonal structure that loomed behind the Arkestra and dominated the stage.  It containing dozens of smaller hexagonal lights which could change color individually, either in sequence with other lights around it or all by itself.  The effect was not unlike a very large, psychedelic honeycomb.  Sometimes, the colors would create intricate geometric patterns and other times they displayed washes of light; sometimes all the lights flashed in unison and other times they went from being uniformly lit to colors appearing only in certain sections.  It was cool, but for those of us who had seen the Joshua Light Show at the Fillmore or similar displays at other rock shows, it was somewhat pedestrian.  The OVC did not upstage the Sun Ra performances and the whole run would still have been epic even without the added attraction of the OVC light show, although the OVC definitely was a prominent part of the performances and my memories of those shows.

The photos of the Arkestra on the back jacket of The Other Side of the Sun LP were taken during the 12 Days of Infinity and show the OVC in action, although the album is actually a Soho studio recording from November 1978 and January '79.

Dude, I Was There!

The OVC was not programmed like a computer but instead was operated like a musical instrument live on stage by inventor Bill Sebastian himself. Sebastian was a Dallas native who played piano and came north to study politics at MIT during the late 1960s. He became a political activist in the early 1970s, but when he heard Sun Ra playing in Boston in 1973, his life changed. Although he knew nothing about electronics, he spent the next five years and $100,000 constructing the OVC as a way to visualize Sun Ra’s sounds. When Sun Ra saw the OVC for the first time in Sebastian’s Boston loft, he reflected on the “infinite number of vibratory ratios” and made Sebastian a member of the Arkestra on the spot. 

In the 1990s, Sun Ra unveiled a new “OVC-3D,” an improved version of what I had seen in Boston in 1978, unrestrained by  the hexagonal tiles of the former and utilizing the computer technologies that had emerged in the meantime.  A video for Calling Planet Earth contains footage of the new, improved OVC-3D,  although the video obviously contains additional post-production effects to make the whole thing even more mind-bending.

December 1978 also saw the debut of the remake of the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, starring Donald Sutherland.  During the 12 Days of Infinity, I went to a matinee screening of the film with my girlfriend, partly as a way of rewarding her for going to the Sun Ra shows with me.  The movie was fun and scary, just as we had been hoping it would be, but walking out of the dark theater and into the daylight of the New England winter, we saw Sun Ra and members of the Arkestra leaving the movie at the same time as us.  We had just watched Body Snatchers with Sun Ra!  We had been sitting in the same dark theater together for the past two hours!  They were all dressed in full Afro-futurist attire - it was my third time seeing Sun Ra in public, and he was never out of character as far as I know.

I approached Sun Ra and asked for reassurance that people on Saturn don't behave like those in the film we had just seen.  He smiled and waved a hand enigmatically, and walked off without saying a word.  That may sound rude or aloof, but he had an air and a grace about him that the gesture seemed to communicate more - although I know not what - than any words could have conveyed.