I never in my life thought that a thing like research could be so…dynamic, so stimulating, so enchanting. Some of you may know this but I think it must have to do with discovery and that perhaps is obvious. It never ceases to amaze me the things that pop up out of history, the things that have gone before that somehow have slipped by and are little talked about today. There is so much to know out there.

And in my case, often when I go looking for info on things, maybe just a date or a spelling, I end up in the craziest places. Its a little like Costco – you go in to buy groceries and roll out with patio furniture. On today’s episode of UnEarthed, I went seeking info on an altoist and ended up in a crater on the moon.

And this is part of the reason I will buy certain CDs when I’m out thrifting. Often I will know the album and be happy to add it to my collection but sometimes I will not be so sure. Something will look interesting to me and I will take it home just to figure out what it is, exactly. One fine day, I found an album by Art Pepper called Intensity. Here’s another thing; some cheap looking compilation I am not going to buy but something that is obviously the CD version of an actual album and sure I will take a chance. This Pepper album was released in 1963 and is highly rated, many reviews noting Pepper’s advance into John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman territory in terms of freeing up his style and playing with more – intensity. Good album.

But knowing little about Art Pepper, I looked into his life and career. By the early Fifties, Art was big on the LA jazz scene, finishing second to only Charlie Parker as Best Alto Saxophonist in a DownBeat readers poll. Sadly, also by the early Fifties, Pepper had been a heroin addict for years. He somehow was able to maintain a career as a musician despite going to the slammer multiple times for drug-related offences; four stints totaling about 8 years. His final time inside came in 1964-65 when he was locked up in San Quentin. While there, he played in an ensemble with fellow saxophonist, jailbird and heroin addict, Frank Morgan. A few years later, Pepper spent some time in Synanon, the infamous rehabilitation program noted for its method of “attack therapy” and which later devolved into a cult steeped in terrorism, violence and murder.

Drilling down on Pepper’s discography lead me to work that he did on Jack Nitzsche’s soundtrack to the 1980 film Heart Beat starring Sissy Spacek and Nick Nolte in his first big role since his breakout performance in the mini series Rich Man, Poor Man. Something about the art for this movie and its soundtrack looked familiar to me so I read about it. Turns out the movie is considered the first major film about the Beat Generation and is based on the autobiography of one Carolyn Cassady who was married to Neal Cassady; they both were best friends with Jack Kerouac, who wrote On the Road, my all-time favourite book. This lead me to the article on Carolyn Cassady and her life with Neal and Jack that was immortalized in Kerouac’s famous novel and reading of her life and learning how closely depicted it was in the book was fascinating. Digging into Carolyn though took me to, of all places, the Academy of Parapsychology and Medicine, an organization for which Carolyn served as correspondence secretary, a position that brought her into contact with many major players in the occult including Edgar Mitchell. Right turn.

Mitchell was the pilot on the Apollo 14 moon mission in 1971 and was the sixth person to walk on the moon. Not just a pilot and aeronautical engineer, Mitchell was also interested in consciousness and paranormal phenomena and in 1973 he founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences; “The Institute conducts research on topics such as psychic abilities, channeling, mind matter interaction, energy healing, intention, consciousness, spontaneous remission. They have a long history of studying meditation, alternative healing practices, consciousness-based healthcare, spirituality, human potential, psychokinesis and survival of consciousness after bodily death. The Institute maintains a free database, available on the Internet, with citations to more than 6,500 articles about whether physical and mental health benefits might be connected to meditation and yoga”. Some claimed this institute was controlled by the CIA as a way to funnel money to parapsychologists and psychics. Say what now?

On his way back to Earth, Mitchell experienced savikalpa samādhi or a deep meditation during which he concentrated on the Earth as a blue jewel and he claimed to have conducted ESP experiments with his friend on Earth. Here came a quick side trip for me into Hinduism and the various stages or limbs of the Yoga sutras and the various stages of meditation.

In later years, Mitchell came to believe in remote healing claiming that a teenage healer living in Vancouver and going by the name Adam Dreamhealer helped heal him from kidney cancer from a distance. He has also declared that UFOs are in fact real and that it is without question that we have been visited on this planet by beings from another and he stated that he had spoken to many people who had personal encounters with extra terrestrials. NASA had to publicly distance itself from this claim.

Speaking of other planets, my final stop on this exploration was Mitchell’s having spent nine hours working on the lunar surface in the Fra Mauro Highlands area of the moon. When I first learned this, I was fascinated not only by the fact that different areas of the moon would have different designations but also by the odd name given to this section. I thought it fitting that another planet would have a name not easily discernible to those unfamiliar with geography – terrestrial or lunar. Turns out Fra Mauro was a man’s name, he being an Italian monk, cartographer and accountant who lived during the 15th century when he created a map that was “the most detailed and accurate representation of the world that had been produced up until that time”. The map – with south at the top – is usually displayed in the Biblioteca Marciana, a library in Venice built in 1468. Is your brain exploding? Hang on…

The 80 km in diameter area of the moon that bears the ancient Italian’s name is a formation on the moon thought to have been formed from ejecta, or debris, created by the impact that created Mare Imbrium, the moon’s lava plain that was the result of the planet having been struck by an asteroid a zillion years ago. Apparently Apollo 14 took samples for dating purposes from this area and there are “five major geologic constituents” on this part of the moon’s surface; “regolith breccias, fragmental breccias, igneous lithologies, granulitic lithologies, and impact-melt lithologies”. Like, what are you even talking about? See, that is English, a language I speak, and yet here are words in this language that I have never heard before.

Here’s my point; it often boggles the mind the amount of things that exist and have existed in the world and it’s history that many of us do not know, have never heard of or have never really studied. An additional point is that every one of these little stops I have touched on is more than worthy of more exploration. Jazz music, Art Pepper, jazzbos and heroin, popular musicians in the slammer, Frank Morgan, Synanon, the Beat Generation, parapsychology, Edgar Mitchell, the fact that men have actually walked on the moon and what that must’ve looked like and the ejecta blanket, petrology and clastic rocks to be found on the surface…

And all because I bought a jazz CD at a thrift store.