The Globe Unity Orchestra

Globe Unity 2002 (Intakt CD 086)

GROWING up in the post-war years in London, the anti-German ethos was often almost tangible.

I had been born in the apex of doodlebug attacks over the London-Essex suburbs, and such memories carried deep antipathy.

Then, when I was in the sixth form at school in the early ’60s, there was the trial of extermination-camp supremo Adolf Eichmann, when the raw and horrifying details of nazi Holocaust atrocities were exposed day after day on every newspaper front page.

Yet at school I had a powerful English teacher who showed us that fascism was only part of the German truth, and he invited us into his choice of school play — Bertolt Brecht’s marvellous narrative drama The Caucasian Chalk Circle.

It changed many of our attitudes towards the people and culture of Germany as we acted out the ideas and humanism of a German communist in suburban Essex in 1962.

Such memories came bounding back to me as I listened to this album of the Globe Unity Orchestra, originally the creation in 1966 of the Berlin-born pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach, who had first assembled a musical amalgam of German, English and other European free-jazz musicians in the Berlin Philharmonic just two decades after the cessation of the anti-fascist war in a pioneering and celebratory blast of jazz freedom, in an orchestra which was to meet again many times during the following four decades.

One of those more recent times was in January 2002, when many of the original members, like Schlippenbach himself, Bristolian tenorist Evan Parker, south London trombone genius Paul Rutherford, the Albert Ayler-inspired saxophonist from Remscheid Peter Brotzmann, the pioneering free trumpeter Manfred Schoof and drummers Aachen-born Paul Lovens and Londoner Paul Lytton all reunited for a rampaging session in Lovens’ home city.

The explosion of unity  bursts out of  Schlippenbach’s opening chords and the crashing Anglo-German drums of the album’s single hour-and-a-quarter-long track.

Brotzmann’s gushing, super-adenoidal tenor carves out the hornway as, one after another, these unchained heralds of free improvisation return to each other’s collective sonic comradeship after long, rampant choruses of solo timbral power and beauty.

When the singular British bassist Barry Guy — who as founder of the massive London Jazz Composers Orchestra knows well the purposes behind such music — said that “this music is intrinsically social,” he invites listeners to step deeply inside its sounds.

When Rutherford’s extraordinary solo time comes and he explores his instrument’s inner and outer limits and every jot of its sliding voice, you wonder about the life experiences of his father, an anti-fascist soldier from Woolwich, and how they have woven themselves into the powerfully original and soul-soaked notes and brilliance of his son and these other peace-loving troubadours of a postwar jazz generation, German and British.

And when the soaring Schoof enters, his trumpet breathing a fiery friendship and hatred of fascism and war, it is as if the barriers are tumbling all over the world, for if it can happen in Europe after such a 20th-century history, then it can also happen any time, anywhere.

The next phase is Schlippenbach and the drummers and it is as if he is a drummer too, so forcefully and with so much passion and blood does he assail and caress his keys with an uncanny multiplicity of sound sensations.

And suddenly you realise that there is no bass in this orchestra, that the earth of its depth of sound is coming from drums and piano and the profundity of grounding notes from all the horns which create what sounds like an eternal detonation for several minutes until Parker — or is it Brotzmann, for by this time nations and individuals are eclipsed, discounted and forgotten in the blast — and only when Brotzmann re-enters with his tarogato, unaccompanied yet encompassing the full orchestral unity, are you reminded that this orchestra is composed and created from an audacious group of singular and wildly creative musicians playing out their lives between two centuries, two millennia.

In the end you can’t write accurately about such music, only listen to and marvel at it and the artists who so bravely create it in defiance of difference and war.