Top Ten Sci-Fi Jazz Albums

On The Launch Pad

Robert Frosch, head honcho at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration from 1977 to 1981, wrote that at cocktail parties he was sometimes asked whether NASA had some gizmo or other that had recently been brought to fictional life in a sci-fi book or movie. If Frosch's answer was "No," the next question was usually, "Are you going to get one?" To which Frosch's answer, a truthful one, was often, "We're working on it."

The relationship between real-world science and science fiction is as symbiotic as Frosch's story suggests, and that is reflected in the ten albums featured in this article. A few are simply acknowledgments of the real-world "space race," with no fictional or speculative dimension. Others are imaginative tours de force, sci-fi artifacts in their own right. Some reference space rockets and space exploration, others are strictly earthbound, albeit looking for an alternative reality in which humankind might enjoy a more fulfilling existence. One or two tacitly posit the existence of those legendary little green persons, or rather, their real-world possibility.

Interestingly, most sci-fi has been created by writers and filmmakers who use it to advance ideas of freedom and democracy. During the brief period of artistic freedom that followed the Russian revolution of 1917, for instance, sci-fi boomed, only to be corralled once the despot Stalin came to power. In the West, sci-fi has often been created as an antidote to reactionary, narrowly nationalistic beliefs. Sci-fi is by its nature left-leaning, internationalist and countercultural, which makes it an ideal bedmate for jazz, in much the same way that jazz and Afro-Futurism are compatible.

Anyway, here are ten albums that are in the same orbit, one way or another, of sci-fi as we know it. The first was released in 1958, the most recent in 2023. Sci-fi connections apart, they are all high-altitude jazz, their cover art, and usually their musical content also, boldly going where no jazz had gone before.

The albums are listed in chronological order of release.

May the Force be with you.

Curtis Counce Suits Up And Goes Walkies

Curtis Counce
Exploring The Future
Dootone
1958

Back in the late 1950s, jazz was part of popular entertainment and the news cycle to a degree that is only a shadowy memory in 2024. When the USSR launched the space race with the first Sputnik in fall 1957, jazz was quick to respond. A handful of albums, released in 1958, had cover art, track titles and, in some cases, musical content, that celebrated the event. By contrast, pop music was way behind the curve. Its first significant space-age release was British beat combo the Tornados' "Telstar," a salute to the eponymous US satellite launched in summer 1962.

The best of 1958's space-age jazz albums—or more precisely, album covers—is Curtis Counce's Exploring The Future. Musically, the album has nothing to do with space travel. It is instead unreconstructed hard bop, albeit played by five masters of the style: Counce (bass), Harold Land (tenor saxophone), Rolf Ericson (trumpet), Elmo Hope (piano) and Frank Butler (drums). But the cover shot shows Counce taking humankind's first zero-gravity space walk. Track titles go with the flow, among them "Exploring The Future," "Into The Orbit," "Race For Space" and "The Countdown."

In 1958, human space flight was still a long way off and space walks were even further down the line, so the album's semiology is more science fiction than faux real-world reportage. Unfortunately, 1950s sleeve credits rarely included art directors, photographers or illustrators and the name of the genius responsible for Exploring The Future's sleeve art seemingly went to the grave alongside Dootone's founder, Dootsie Williams, in 1991. (If you know otherwise, please share the information in Comments, below.) Williams, by the way, produced doo-wop group The Penguins' coincidentally touching-on-sci-fi 1954 hit "Earth Angel."

Other 1958 sleeve designs wrapping straight-ahead jazz in space-age clothing include Betty Carter's Out There (Peacock) and Lou Donaldson's Lou Takes Off (Blue Note). Carter is depicted peering out of what, rather unpatriotically, looks like a Sputnik. One wonders what the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA) would have thought of that. Donaldson's sleeve is a stock photo of the launch of a US space rocket. Musically, neither album has anything to do with space, although Donaldson's opening track is titled "Sputnik."

Sun Ra's Myth Science Arkestra Boards Rocket Number Nine

Sun-Ra And His Myth Science Arkestra
Interstellar Low Ways
El Saturn
1967

Sun Ra was the first known jazz musician to use sci-fi graphic design and play sci-fi inspired music. If Exploring The Future is an overture for sci-fi jazz, Interstellar Low Ways is the magical-realist first movement. Recorded at the same sessions that produced the retro-swing masterpiece Jazz In Silhouette (Saturn, 1959), the album maps out the trajectory Ra followed for the rest of his career—off-planet instrumentation, space chants and all. The track titles spell it out: "Interstellar Low Ways," "Space Loneliness," "Somewhere In Space," "Interplanetary Music," "Onward," "Space Aura" and "Rocket Number Nine Take Off For The Planet Venus."

Welcome aboard! Enjoy your flight!

The Myth Science Arkestra was Ra's most out-there early ensemble, its lineup including trumpeter Hobart Dotson, alto saxophonists James Spaulding and Marshall Allen, tenor saxophonist John Gilmore, baritone saxophonists Pat Patrick and Charles Davis and bassist Ronnie Boykins. All the musicians double up, Allen on flute, bells and flying saucer, Boykins on space gong.

Practically any recording by Sun Ra qualifies as sci-fi jazz and along with Jazz In Silhouette, the Interstellar Low Ways sessions produced material for other gems, all on Saturn: Angels And Demons At Play (1965), Fate In A Pleasant Mood (1965), We Travel The Spaceways (1967), Sound Sun Pleasure!! (1969) and Holiday For Soul Dance (1970).

George Russell Seats Bill Evans Next To Paul Bley In The Particle Collider (And Sparks Fly)

George Russell
Jazz In The Space Age
Decca
1960

Altogether less theatrical than Sun Ra's work, but harmonically and rhythmically every bit as far out, George Russell's Jazz In The Space Age centres around a three-part suite, "Chromatic Universe." In a daring piece of casting, Russell features two of the hottest-rising piano stars on the New York scene, Bill Evans and Paul Bley. They are an odd couple but the combination works brilliantly.

In Norman Meehan's Time Will Tell: Conversations With Paul Bley (Berkeley Hills, 2004), a collection of reminiscences by one of jazz's most entertaining raconteurs, Bley speaks about his ruthlessly competitive attitude towards other pianists, including his love/hate relationship with Evans. Bley was, he says, "an antagonist" of Evans, and during a detailed description of the Jazz In The Space Age sessions, he says he kept thinking, "I'm going to knock this guy [Evans] out, and he's going to sound bad."

It did not work out like that. The pianists bounce off each other productively and both sound great. In his liner notes, Russell wrote, "Tonally and rhythmically out in space, [Bley and Evans] were not victim [in the free improvisation sections] to the tyranny of the chord or a particular meter. In essence, this is musical relativism. Everything can be right. The idea takes over. They worked in the realm of ideas, projecting one upon the other. This is pan-chromatic improvisation." On the trippy "Waltz From Outer Space," Evans, perhaps prompted by Bley's proximity, creates a new kind of block chording, based on his work on Miles Davis's Kind Of Blue (Columbia, 1959) but transferred to Russell's Lydian vocabulary.

Dave Brubeck Bends Time

Dave Brubeck Quartet
Countdown: Time In Outer Space
Columbia
1962

The third album in the Dave Brubeck Quartet's exploration of asymmetrical time signatures, following Time Out (Columbia, 1959) and Time Further Out (Columbia, 1961), Countdown: Time In Outer Space, which was dedicated to NASA astronaught John Glenn, is the first explicitly to evoke space travel. Like Russell's album, it is space-age futurist rather than sci-fi speculative, but no less innovative for it.

While Time Out and Time Further Out have become so ubiquitous that their innovations have been rendered near inaudible by over familiarity, Countdown: Time In Outer Space has no slam-dunk break-out hits such as "Take Five," "Blue Rondo A La Turk," "It's A Raggy Waltz" or "Unsquare Dance" and, partly as a consequence, has remained less well known. Its relative unfamiliarity provides an opportunity to appreciate Brubeck's 1959-62 time-signature explorations as though for the first time. Conclusion, lest we forget: Brubeck was a genius.

Opening track "Countdown" is mutoid stride-piano boogie, but instead of beating us eight to the bar, baby, Brubeck does it ten to the bar. Weird. Jazz likes weird. Closing track "Back To Earth" is in suitably earthly four-four. In between, all heaven breaks loose. "Someday My Prince Will Come" uses three different time signatures. "Castilian Drums" is a 5/4 drum feature for Joe Morello, up there with 1959's "Take Five." At 3:52 it is all too short, but the 2xLP The Dave Brubeck Quartet At Carnegie Hall (Columbia, 1963) has a 10:13 version, and the remastered 2xCD 2001 edition includes the track in its full 14:22 glory.

John Lewis And Milt Jackson Take A Trip With The Beatles

MJQ
Space
Apple
1969

The vibraphone is perhaps the trippiest instrument in the jazz lineup. That must be why the Beatles, champions of all things lysergic, released two albums by the Modern Jazz Quartet on their Apple label. There can surely be no other reason why they chose John Lewis' buttoned-down quartet as the only jazz unit ever recorded by the label.

Apple's second MJQ album, Space, is interstellar in semiology and sound. It was recorded in London and produced by Lewis with a little help from his friends in the shape of Peter Asher, brother of Paul McCartney's partner Jane Asher and head of A&R at Apple. The lavish gatefold sleeve includes some choice contemporary acid-spiel about its centrepieces, Lewis' "Visitor From Venus" and "Visitor From Mars." On the tracks, which took up most of the first side of the original LP, Asher applies well-judged quantities of electronic manipulation to the sound of Milt Jackson's vibraphone, enhancing the trippy effect.

The rest of the album—Jimmy Van Heusen's "Here's That Rainy Day," Miljenko Prohaska's "Dilemma" and Joaquín Rodrigo's "Adagio From Concierto de Aranjuez"—is more standard MJQ fare. Yet, unlike Horace Silver's contemporaneous That Healin' Feelin' (Blue Note, 1970), Space is a credible psychedelic-era artefact from a well established non-psychedelic band.

Weather Report Plugs In, Turns It Up And Changes Everything Forever

Weather Report
I Sing The Body Electric
Columbia
1972

When it landed in 1972, the impact of Weather Report's I Sing The Body Electric was analogous to the impact of the asteroid that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs when it collided with planet earth. On this occasion, however, it was the existence of acoustic jazz that was threatened. Happily, the music survived, enriched, but the event was certainly seismic, greater than the impact two years earlier of Miles Davis' electric fireball Bitches Brew (Columbia, 1970). While Davis' album eventually created a new audience strand for jazz, it was a slow burner. I Sing The Body Electric worked its mojo instantly. Weather Report became the big arena act Davis dreamed of becoming but never did.

Weather Report's debut, Weather Report (Columbia, 1971), was fundamentally acoustic, even though Joe Zawinul played electric and acoustic keyboards on it. On I Sing The Body Electric, the group plugged in, turned it up and took things to another level. Side two, recorded live in Tokyo, makes liberal use of electronic tone colours; even in 2024, it sounds like a sci-fi event in itself. On top of that, the cover shot looks like reportage of a close encounter and the album title was taken from the poet Walt Whitman by way of the sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury.

Jazz got the message.

For the full deep-space effect of I Sing The Body Electric, it is necessary to listen to the double album from which its second side was extracted in compressed form, Live In Tokyo (Columbia Japan, 1972).

Chick Corea Does The Time Warp

Chick Corea
Time Warp
GRP Records
1995

Given Chick Corea's involvement in Scientology, the religion invented by the sci-fi writer L. Ron Hubbard, it is not surprising that his work periodically edges into the realm of sci-fi, as it does on Time Warp. Corea first became attracted to Scientology in the late 1960s and was still an active member when Time Warp was released some thirty years later. That such a cosmic talent could have stuck with it for so long may be surprising. But artistic geniuses are not like other earthlings, and so we note the association and move on.

Time Warp functions on two levels. The first is adventurous acoustic jazz. Corea, on piano, leads a take-no-prisoners quartet completed by tenor and soprano saxophonist Bob Berg, bassist John Patitucci and drummer Gary Novack, the last two members of Corea's Elektric Band in the 1980s. As music, the album it is among Corea's 1990s highpoints.

The second level is a linear sci-fi story with a comically clichéd plotline, laboriously expounded on in the liner notes. From this angle, Time Warp is underwhelming and irritating. The narrative compares poorly with the superhero graphic novella included with Wayne Shorter's box set Emanon (Blue Note, 2018), discussed below. But the thing is, would it matter if Chick Corea circa 1995 had written a suite based on the manufacturing process for a tub of pot noodles? No, it would no. He was firing on all cylinders. His next album was another blinder, Remembering Bud Powell (Stretch, 1996), with Wallace Roney, Kenny Garrett, Joshua Redman, Christian McBride and Roy Haynes.

Shabaka Hutchings Sets The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun

The Comet Is Coming
Channel the Spirits
The Leaf Label
2016

When it came to pitching sci-fi stories, few bands have done it as well as Britain's The Comet Is Coming. Their press releases read like extracts from sci-fi novels and were little works of art themselves. (The past tense is being used here because two years ago TCIC's Shabaka Hutchings renounced the tenor saxophone and high-decibel music in favour of shakuhachi flutes and quieter, meditative sounds. The band has not officially declared the party over, but it almost certainly is.)

Rewind: A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Hutchings, synths maven Dan Leavers and drummer Maxwell Hallett were students at London's Guildhall School of Music and Drama. As alumni, they formed The Comet Is Coming, for which they adopted the stage names King Shabaka, Danalogue and Betamax. Channel The Spirits was their first full-length album, followed by Trust In The Lifeforce Of The Deep Mystery (Impulse!, 2019) and Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam (Impulse!, 2022). The trilogy of albums was a mini-universe of spaced-out-to-the-max jazz rock. Any one of them could represent TCIC in this article, and the debut has been chosen simply because it got overshadowed by the bigger marketing budgets of the Impulse albums.

Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam's cover bears more than a passing resemblance to the artwork on Sun Ra's The Heliocentric Worlds Of Sun Ra, Volume Two (ESP-Disk, 1966). The similarity is too close to be anything other than deliberate. And, whether the London trio literally subscribe to the End Is Nigh-ism they propounded, and whether Ra really believed his off-planet origin story, both work as illuminating metaphorical devices employed by musical imaginations running gloriously amok.

Starship Shorter Reaches The Edge Of Space... And Keeps Going

Wayne Shorter
Emanon
Blue Note Records
2018

And still the extraterrestrial literature keeps coming. A fan of sci-fi since he was a boy collecting every Marvel comic he could lay his hands on, echoes of the genre have been ever present in Wayne Shorter's music, particularly in the albums he made with his new millennial Quartet with pianist Danilo Pérez, drummer Brian Blade and bassist John Patitucci. On one of these, the 3-disc box set Emanon, Shorter includes a 76-page graphic novella presented in the style of a Marvel comic. In it, the eponymous superhero liberates the inhabitants of planets Ypnos, Polemos and Logokrisia from mental and physical slavery. Unlike Chick Corea's Time Warp, this story is engaging and thought provoking.

Listening to any one of the Quartet's discs can feel like cruising through space on Starship Shorter, watching an unfolding panorama of quasars, suns, star systems and new life-forms pass by. Another metaphor might be one of those deep-sea-exploration documentaries where strange but beautiful sea creatures drift in and out of the submersible's spotlight.

Emanon's first CD has the Quartet in tandem with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. We do not know how Shorter approached rehearsals with the ensemble, but we do know how he approached them with London's Philharmonia Orchestra some years earlier. In a filmed conversation with his mentee and friend Esperanza Spalding (accessible online), Philharmonia conductor Clark Rundell, who says that knowing Shorter changed his life, says that, as the rehearsal began, "I asked Wayne, 'Are you happy with this as a basic tempo?' And he looked at me and said, 'Well it's like this. It's like the aliens are attacking from outer space. And the parents, they're really, really, really scared. But the children, they think it's incredibly cool." And those were his tempo instructions!"

Rundell adds, "I remember the promoter saying to me, 'Did you hear what happened to him at passport control?' The passport control [person] just looked at him, you know, most passport control people could do with a humour injection, and said, 'Do you have anything to declare?' And he was quiet for a minute, and then he said, 'my personal freedom.'"

Jaimie Branch Zaps The Orange Ghoul And Dances On His Grave

Jaimie Branch
Fly Or Die Fly Or Die Fly Or Die ((World War))
International Anthem Recording Company
2023

Tragically, Jaimie Branch's fourth album with her Fly Or Die quartet—the most sci-fi-infused disc in her catalogue—was a posthumous release. Branch died from an accidental drug overdose at her home in Brooklyn in August 2022. By then the album was near complete, with only tweaks, final titles and artwork to be finalized. In the months following Branch's passing, her family, led by her sister Kate (in whose Brooklyn home studio much of Fly Or Die had been recorded) and the band members got together to complete the record.

The result is perhaps the most strikingly beautiful jazz album to be released during 2023. It is full-tilt interplanetary boogie, a bigger bang, the music of the spheres, inducing rapture, the sonic equivalent of the Orgasmatron Exsexsive Machine which Jane Fonda's character encountered in Roger Vadim's 1968 sci-fi romp Barbarella. Mr Spock would probably have considered the music illogical.

Sci-fi artefacts do not have to include space travel or even futurology. They simply have to posit an alternative reality. Such is the nature of Branch's work. It is sci-fi without any little green persons—but with one gross and malevolent Orange Ghoul. One could talk about Lester St. Louis' amphetamine-urgent high-register viola-like cello passages evoking the Velvet Underground in its John Cale pomp, or the Death In The Afternoon / Mexicali majesty of Branch's open trumpet, or the shades of La Monte Young's opium-addled drone music, and much more... but the best way to feel the spirit of the album is to play the YouTube clip below. In their liner notes, St. Louis, bassist Jason Ajemian and drummer Chad Taylor write: "For this [album], jaimie wanted to play with longer forms, more modulations, more noise, more singing, and as always, grooves and melodies... jaimie wanted this album to be lush, grand and full of life, just as she was." It is indeed all of those things.

To read about how Branch zapped the Orange Ghoul and the Repugnican Party, read the AAJ article 7 Steps To Heaven here.

Live long and prosper.

Postscript: On Another Mission

John Coltrane
Interstellar Space
Impulse!
1974

Some may wonder why John Coltrane's masterpiece Interstellar Space is absent from this Top Ten. It is because, despite its title, the album is no more connected to sci-fi than any of Coltrane's earlier albums. The cover photo is something that a contemporary airline might use in a magazine ad, and the track titles—"Mars," "Venus," "Jupiter," "Saturn"—are astronomical. The music is far out, certainly, but as with Coltrane's other mid and late period albums, its quest is spiritual not science-fictional.

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