![]() ![]() Not every song that Bandella performs is about outer space, but one of Hadfield’s favorites - “I.S.S.: Is Somebody Singing” - celebrates the International Space Station. ![]() When you look at the huge amount of aerospace industry activity in the Seattle area - with Boeing and SpaceX and what’s going on with Blue Origin and all the other companies - there’s a lot of interest up there.” “Part of the reason to play there, obviously, is the venue,” Hadfield said. This week’s gig at the Museum of Flight will mark the first time that Bandella has performed in Seattle. “I help run several companies and have three television shows in pre-production, and I’m writing my sixth book. Micki’s husband is preparing for a spaceflight right now,” he said. “You can imagine - I mean, Steve Robinson is a tenured professor working on a huge number of projects at UC-Davis. Hadfield said it’s not easy to get the band together for their gigs. “So it’s joyful and fun, and there’s a real reunion feel to it.” “Everybody’s either an experienced spaceflier or, in Micki’s case, the spouse of an experienced spaceflier,” Hadfield said. “He commanded the space shuttle and was chief astronaut, but he’s a keyboards player,” Hadfield said. Ken Cockrell, a retired astronaut who’ll be playing the keyboard for the Seattle concerts. And he is a really deft guitar player and bass player as well,” Hadfield said. “He’s like an Art Garfunkel kind of guy with that beautiful ability to just make the music fuller with harmonies and occasionally take the lead. “Anything with strings, he can play beautifully,” Hadfield said.ĭan Burbank, who participated in two space station assembly missions (in 20) and spent more than five months aboard the station as an expedition crew member in 2011-2012. Steve Robinson, who took on a spacewalk to repair the shuttle Discovery in 2005. Other musically minded astronauts soon joined the group, including:Ĭady Coleman, who had her own turn in the orbital music spotlight when she performed history’s first orbit-to-ground flute duet with Jethro Tull front man Ian Anderson in 2011. But she also is one of those people who is just an instinctive and beautiful harmony singer,” Hadfield said. She’s got a really big, strong torch-song voice. “Micki has been a musician and a performer and a disc jockey and a real free spirit her whole life. One night, Hadfield worked up a jam session with Micki Pettit, the wife of NASA astronaut Don Pettit. Back then, astronauts from NASA as well as the Canadian and European space agencies liked to hang out at an impromptu bar in the basement of one of their housing units. What do you do with those experiences? How do you explain it, and make it part of your own life, and not just a weird perturbation?” Hadfield said.īandella got its start 20 years ago, when Hadfield was going through training at Russia’s Star City complex for future space station missions. “A lot of it goes back to when you have been so incredibly lucky to have had the experiences that the members of the band have had. It’s also natural for astronauts to share their out-of-this-world experiences via the creative channels that they’ve developed throughout their lives. “And when you’re a long way from home, you know, you need art and music in amongst all the busyness.” “We’re just people, multifaceted,” he said. Hadfield said it’s only natural that astronauts bring music with them when they go into orbit. There’ll also be a Q&A session during which the musicians recount their experiences in space. The event will feature some space-themed tunes - including David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” which went viral when Hadfield recorded a tribute performance on the International Space Station in 2013. “We were musicians before we got into the astronaut corps,” one of the band’s founders, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, told GeekWire.īandella’s Seattle concerts, set for Saturday at the Museum of Flight, won’t be your typical summer music tour. (Bandella Photo)Īstronauts have been making music in orbit for almost 60 years, but at least some of the members of a band called Bandella prefer to think of themselves as musicians who just happened to become astronauts. Several astronauts play in Bandella, a “world acoustic” band that’ll be in Seattle this week. ![]()
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