ATLANTA, GA. (www.dragoncon.org) - Twelve-time Grammy Award winning musician, Chick Corea and his world-famed Elektric Band will perform passages from their groundbreaking new album, To the Stars (Concord Records), this Saturday,
September 4, 2004 at 10:00pm in the Centennial Ballroom of Atlanta's Hyatt Regency Hotel as part of the international science fiction convention, Dragon*Con (www.dragoncon.org).
Dragon*Con and Concord Records will also host a special Press Conference and album release party with Chick Corea at the event today, Friday,
September 3, 2004, in the Woodruff Suite at the Hyatt Regency Atlanta, at 4:00pm with host
David Carradine (Kill Bill).
The music of the Corea album is a spellbinding and masterfully innovative tone poem inspired by one of the most powerful novels in the history of science fiction - L. Ron Hubbard's To the Stars. This album brought the Elektric Band back into the recording studio for the first time in a decade with Chick, on piano and synthesizers, reuniting with original band members; bassist John Patitucci, drummer Dave Weckl, guitarist Frank Gambale and saxophonist Eric Marienthal.
As for the inspiration for the music, Corea says, 'I've been a fan of Hubbard's fiction writing since the early '70's and his hard edged science fiction masterpiece To the Stars was always one of my favorite stories. When I started reading it again recently I came across a part in the beginning that describes the
Captain of the spaceship playing a hypnotic melody on the piano in a dive of a spaceport bar in what is called 'New Chicago.' And Hubbard describes the Captain, he describes the bar, he describes the music. And I thought to myself, 'I hear that music.''
Hubbard's novel revolves around a scientific equation, 'As mass approaches infinity, time approaches zero.' As the velocity of the starship 'The Hound of Heaven' approaches the speed of light, it also approaches zero time. So when the ship's crew returns home after having spent just a few months transporting vital supplies and technology to Earth's distant colonies, decades and generations have passed on Earth.
Corea's composition takes the listener along on the voyage of the Hound of
Heaven and into the heart and minds of the crew: the mysterious
Captain Jocelyn, his fiery consort, Mistress Luck, and the homesick and rebellious Alan Corday, an engineer who was shanghaied on Earth to serve aboard the starship for reasons not fully divulged until the novel's stunning climax.
The melodies, rhythms and arrangements of To the Stars combine to make this one of the most challenging albums in the group's history, raising the technical demands on each of the musicians, and taking them individually and collectively to entirely new heights.
New Era Publications has republished the novel To the Stars —considered by many fans to be among the greatest novels in the science fiction genre—in a new landmark hardcover edition, along with a riveting audio book version in CD format featuring Hollywood performers Bob Caso, R.F. Daley, Cathy Schenkelberg and Jim Meskimen.
L. Ron Hubbard is also the author of the milestone international bestsellers Battlefield Earth and the ten-volume Mission Earth series.
