The seventies were ending, and the eighties had begun. I was living in downtown Manhattan. The East Village music scene was vibrant with a cross-pollination of many musical genres. I found myself being a part of the downtown Punk-Jazz, Avant-Garde, Blues, R&B, Jazz, and Pop and the beginning Hip-Hop scene I was playing at spots like CBGB’s, The Squat Theater, Max’s Kansas City, Lone Star Café, The Pyramid Club, Mud Club, A7, The Bottom Line, among others, with all different kinds of artists like Sun Ra, James Blood Ulmer, Big Joe Turner, James Brown, Lester Bowie, Vernon Reid, Larry Young, Ornette Coleman, and in the studio with Sly & Robbie, Gwen Guthrie, KRS-ONE, George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, Richie Havens, Bobby Brown, Bernard Wright, The Brecker Brothers, RUN DMC, Doug E. Fresh, Marcus Miller, Lenny White, Deodato, Maceo Parker/ Fred Wesley, LL Cool J, Miles Davis, Eric Clapton, Buddy Miles, David Sanborn, Heavy D, among many others. It was while living at Stuyvesant Town I first met my neighbor Randy Pratt. Randy was busy creating all different kinds of bands to showcase his bass playing, songwriting, and conceptual ideas. I found him to be a totally out-of-the-box creative individual, my kind of guy! I would go out to see his various ensembles perform and enjoyed what I saw. During that time, I was starting to do a lot of recording sessions with many different artists in so many different genres that I was constantly on the go, be it in NY or traveling around the world. Randy and I would talk about music and even about the possibility of getting to do some music together, but our lives took us to other places.
I had moved from downtown while working with Sly Stone, who at that time was living on the East Coast, with James Mtume, got busy working on a bunch of TV shows, including, The Cosby Show, A Different World, Sesame Street, New York Undercover, writing music for commercials, theater, movies, and touring too. Randy and I would stay in touch on the phone, playing snippets of music back and forth, but we wound up losing contact with each other for decades. The cosmic order of our lives brought us back in touch and we started to work on some music. Little did we know that we would embark on a new musical journey together. We discovered that the combination of our individual experiences had brought us to a point in time for new discoveries and a new music! It was destiny that we would find each other at this point of our lives, to create something unique. No one has lived the lives that Randy and I have, with all the music that it entails, so it was only natural for us to be able to transcend our own individual forms of expression along with Ed Terry and Josh Barrell. We now find ourselves here in the 21st century with a music for our time now and a trajectory moving forward into the future…
We have only just begun to explore the multiple possibilities in music and concepts to share with the world, and the universe.
We have only just begun to explore the multiple possibilities in music and concepts to share with the world, and the universe. What adventures lie ahead? It is a cosmic (inconceivably vast) endeavor!
Wm Spaceman Patterson
NYC 2023