Billy “Spaceman” Patterson was around 13 years old when he first heard Sun Ra. The New Brunswick, N.J. native had seen the astral jazz adventurer’s name on the door of Rutgers University’s student center. He didn’t know what a Sun Ra was, but beyond that nondescript portal lay another sphere entirely: a giant globe of color, with dancers and horn players stepping out into the crowd. Years later, when Spaceman got a chance to play with Sun Ra’s Arkestra, band members could recite the exact time and place of this otherworldly encounter. “Oh yes, we remember. We prepared you for this. We came and we bathed you in sound.”
Since that cosmic christening, Spaceman has performed or recorded with everyone—from Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman, to the Bomb Squad and Boogie Down Productions, to the prolific Jamaican rhythm section Sly & Robbie (on Larry Levan-remixed classics, no less). He was even one of Bill Cosby’s longtime musical consiglieres, if that still means anything. And these are just the gigs that can be readily verified with outside sources. Though Spaceman declines to give his age (“I’m young ancient; we’re eternal beings,” he demurs), a Berklee School of Music spokesperson confirms he attended there from 1972 to 1974.
Spaceman often occupies the kind of supporting roles that don’t necessarily show up in official credits. One such gig: Bandleader on the ’90s TV police drama “New York Undercover,” where weekly musical guests ranged from established legends including James Brown and Stevie Wonder, to younger stars like Aaliyah and Notorious B.I.G. Space speaks of backing up a pre-fame Alicia Keys as she was developing her breakthrough hit “Fallin’.” He remembers a show with Pharoah Sanders where the audience was “standing on the tables, screaming,” because the music was so intense. Reached by phone at his Harlem home, Spaceman isn’t kidding when he says, “Look, I’m the only guitarist you know who’s played for everyone from Sun Ra to Kathie Lee Gifford.” And now, Frank Ocean.
When Ocean set his visual album Endless loose on the world in the early hours of August 19, a guitarist named simply Spaceman was listed in the credits for three songs. When Ocean followed up with Blonde in the evening of August 20, his accompanying Boys Don’t Cry magazine given out at pop-up shops mentioned “Space Man” among a very general roll call of album credits. His Spaceman’s identity, though, wasn’t immediately clear: a mystery among mysteries. Ace Frehley, the original “Spaceman” in KISS, seemed safe to rule out. Sadly, it turned out that Jason Spaceman, from noise-rock luminaries Spiritualized and Spacemen 3, wasn’t the guy, either. What about John Mayer, who went uncredited on Ocean’s 2012 album Channel Orange? Not Spaceman, he told me through his publicist.
All the while, on social media, another guitarist Spaceman—the one who opened a door in New Brunswick and entered the mighty gravitational field of Sun Ra—was sending a message to Earth via hashtags: “#WhoisSpaceman #IamSpaceman.” Following Spaceman on Twitter were Ocean’s close collaborator Om’Mas Keith, Ocean’s engineer Caleb Laven, and Michael Uzowuru, another Blonde/Endless guest. Keith even retweeted one of Spaceman’s transmissions. But he didn’t respond to my requests for comment. And a rep for Ocean declined to comment when I asked for confirmation. Could this really be the same Spaceman sharing Blonde and Endless credits with André 3000, Jonny Greenwood, and Pharrell?
Spaceman says he’s Spaceman. Speaking with him leaves little doubt. He tells me he’s known Om’Mas Keith pretty much all the producer’s life, and the connection is credible beyond the oddities of social media. Keith helped sculpt Channel Orange. His parents were avant-garde jazz musicians who played with Sun Ra. And he got an early break from Spaceman’s friends (and collaborators) in Ultramagnetic MCs. “When Frank listed me just as Spaceman, I was like, ‘Oh, OK,’” Spaceman says. “And then I saw everybody speculating. It’s pretty funny actually. It’s like, ‘You’ve created a narrative for me. This’ll work good.’”
Inspired (like so many) by Jimi Hendrix, Spaceman is an explorer of sonic textures—an early adopter of guitar-based synthesizers. On Gwen Guthrie’s 1983 recordings like “Seventh Heaven,” that’s him on guitar synth. “People say, ‘What the heck is that sound?’ I have a massive amount of toys when I come in the studio.” So while Space says he played acoustic and electric guitar as well as guitar synth on Blonde and Endless, it’s easiest to hear him in the more warped or unusual tones. On Blonde, for instance, Space says he’s on “Nights” (“I just did like millions of guitars on there”), “Skyline To,” “Seigfreid,” “Ivy,” “Pink & White,” and possibly “Pretty Sweet” and “Close to You” (“I can do it sounding like it’s playing backwards when it’s forward”). On Endless, he’s credited on “In Here Somewhere,” “Rushes,” and “Deathwish (ASR),”; he’d add “Slide on Me” and “U-N-I-T-Y,” too. Not that Space had any idea where he’d show up before Ocean finally unveiled the long-simmering albums.
“There’s a lot of stuff that we recorded that I still haven’t heard yet,” Space says. “So the whole thing was, ‘What’s going to show up on the record?’ I was talking to Om’Mas and I was saying, ‘Do we know?’ And he said, ‘We’ll know when it comes out.’ And when he droppedEndless, I thought that was it. And then, boom, a couple of days later, Blonde. ‘Oh, those songs! I remember them.’ We recorded a lot of music.”
How much music? “We had like 14-hour, 15-, 16-hour sessions,” he says. “We’re creating continually. So something may happen, and [Frank might] say, ‘Oh, that’s nice, let’s try this here.’ So it winds up becoming a thing, and then I wind up doing a lot of different kind of textures.” Engineer Caleb Levan would leave on the red recording light just in case the musicians stumbled onto an idea worth preserving. “It wasn’t defined: ‘OK, this is Endless,’ or ‘this is Boys Don’t Cry or Blonde’ or whatever the working titles were,” Space adds. “I call it just one giant, long record.”
Of all the greats that Spaceman has worked with, he compares Ocean to Miles Davis. Both, he says, brought the ability to “stretch the envelope” while also keeping the music accessible. “Frank was cool,” Space says. “He’s a cat. He’s a creative kind of guy that’s very introspective. And he’s got big ears. He hears a lot of things. He’ll hear something and say, ‘Ah, yeah, that’s good.’ We wind up finding the elements that work in a particular sequence of sounds.” (For instance, Ocean sometimes ran his vocals through guitar effects.)
Spaceman with James Brown; photo by Jessica Burstin
A continuum doesn’t flow just one way. Playing with Ocean has given Spaceman a fresh storyline—in time for a solo album he has in the works, mind you—but working with Space also slots Ocean within the guitarist’s personal pantheon of black musical icons. So who, of all the people Spaceman has played with, impressed him the most? “Sly Stone, man. Sly is like one of my big brothers. I’ve known Sly since I was a kid, like 15, 16 years old… I got my funk firsthand.”
Space’s freewheeling recollections tend to benefit from his habit of inhabiting his subjects’ voices. “Being around a cat like Miles Davis, he would be like”—and here Spaceman assumes a raspy whisper—“‘Don’t finish the phrase. Do it like that, with the wah-wah.’” Giving a dead-on Bill Cosby impression, he recalls his “Cosby Show,” “A Different World,” and “Cosby Mysteries” boss prompting him for a guitar part by saying, “Why don’t you make the sky open?” To which Spaceman might respond, “OK, is that a translucent sky with the sun peering over an altocumulus cloud at a 43-degree angle?”
This ability to channel the spirit of others is undeniably helpful for a session guitarist. “For some reason or another, I can hear the inner voice of someone wanting to get the music,” he says. “To me, the genres are all one. It’s just music. If it needs to be funky, let it be funky. If it needs to be cosmic, let’s get cosmic. If it needs to be folky, let’s get folky. If it needs to be, just, not sounds that people ever know from Earth, let’s go to Alpha Centauri. Let’s go there. There’s a lot of fun happening up in Saturn. It’s cool dancing around those rings sometimes. The cosmos is infinite.”
Sun Ra and his Arkestra, including Spaceman; photo by Brian McMillen
Spaceman takes on a preternaturally calm voice when he’s quoting the ultimate musician from Saturn. The first time Spaceman got to take the stage with Sun Ra, he says Sun Ra told him, “I want you to keep by my left hand, and I’m going to let you know when to play. But I don’t want you to play anything until I let you know it’s time to play.”
The show started around 9 p.m., and when the band got into a groove, the young Spaceman turned to Sun Ra: “Now, Sonny?” “No, hold on.” Around 11:30, the Arkestra was doing perhaps Sun Ra’s most famous work, “Space Is the Place.” Spaceman said, “Oh, come on, man! Come on, Sonny!” He looked over, and Sun Ra just waved his hand. No, not yet.
It was 2:30 a.m. “They done went to Egypt and back, and early Fletcher Henderson music,” Spaceman says, but he still hadn’t played. The concert ended at 4 a.m., and after sitting on the bandstand for seven or eight hours, Spaceman wasn’t happy. He went over to Sun Ra to tell him just that. But the second he opened his mouth, Sun Ra said, “That was wonderful.”
Spaceman replied, “Huh?”
“You exercised discipline and precision,” Sun Ra said. “The discipline of, even though I saw you wanted to play, you knew not to play. And you did it incredibly.” He said, “You played the silence. As a matter of fact, you played the silence unlike anyone has ever played the silence before.”
And then Sun Ra gestured to the saxophonist, Danny “Pico” Thompson, to pay Spaceman for the night. Pico gave him $500, and Sun Ra said, “I’ll see you tomorrow.” There had been about 40 people onstage, and this was the ’80s, so Spaceman was thinking, “Damn, what kind of money is Sun Ra making?!” He was also thinking: “OK!”
When Spaceman came back, the next night, Sun Ra looked him in the eyes, and let him go.