Space Jazz, a Sonic Sci-Fi Opera by L. Ron Hubbard, Featuring Chick Corea (1983) — openculture.com

The Church of Scientology has a number of fascinatingly distinctive characteristics, including but not limited to its foundation by a science-fiction novelist. That novelist, a certain L. Ron Hubbard, launched his religion in the America of the 1950s, a prosperous place in a Space Age decade when all things science-fictional enjoyed a perhaps unprecedented popularity. Another big mainstream sci-fi wave would wash over the country in the late 1970s and early 80s, when, as Nathan Rabin puts it at Slate, “thanks to the popularity of E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises, space was the place and science fiction was the hottest genre around. Scientology wanted in, so an ambitious plan was hatched: Hubbard’s epic 1982 Battlefield Earth novel, to be followed by Space Jazz,” an album containing a “sonic space opera” based on the novel. At the top of post, you can hear the track “Earth, My Beautiful Home,” one of the project’s few un-bombastic numbers, and one performed by a genuinely more-than-credible jazz pianist, Chick Corea. 

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