Willem Breuker: baritone saxophone, soprano saxophone, ratsche
Gunter Hampel: bass clarinet, flute, pandeira
Karlhanns Berger: vibraphone (Sun only)
Buschi Niebergall: bass, sirene
Peter Kowald: bass, small bells
Jaki Liebezeit: drums, percussion
Mani Neumeier: drums, percussion
The Globe Unity Orchestra was - intermittently between 1966 and the late 1980s - a truly remarkable thing: a big, big band playing free music. They weren't totally free, of course; there was some structure. But for the most part, the Orchestra, under the leadership of pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach, gathered the finest improvising musicians in Europe and set them loose. The form of most of the group's workouts will be familiar to anyone who's heard John Coltrane's landmark 1965 album Ascension. The ensemble sound is a rumbling, throbbing roar, which goes and goes for 30 or 40 minutes at a stretch, interrupted by erupting solos from the various members of the Orchestra. And when your band includes players like Peter Brötzmann, Manfred Schoof, and Willem Breuker, or drummers like Can's Jaki Liebezeit or Guru Guru's Mani Neumeier, things can get kinda fierce.
A lot of music rests its magic on being “cosmic,” of appealing to some sort of connection between the abstractions of sound and the abstractions of transcendental experience. Yet, very little music succeeds in being “planetary.” Alexander von Schlippenbach’s first outing with the Globe Unity Orchestra is a fascinating portrait of planetary globalization in the late 1960s, a fully discordant pile-up of instruments all atop a single pianist trying to keep it cuttable onto two sides of a record. Why would “globe unity,” the soft and “world music” sounding variant of globalization, be harmonized and mellifluous?
