Free Orbit

Hamburg, 1969. A drummer recently arrived from Westphalia, known around the Jazzhouse on Brandstwiete as a capable timekeeper who could swing in 4/4 and play rock beats, which is why Klaus Doldinger had hired him for Passport. His name was Udo Lindenberg. Free Jazz Goes Underground, released by MPS in 1970 under the name Free Orbit, is the first studio album of the band he led, and he sings on it, in English, alongside a second vocalist.

MPS's own note on the reissue admits you need careful listening and some imagination to recognise the voice: no German lyrics, none of the later mannerisms. Lindenberg, quoted in 2025, remembers going into the studio at the peak of the hippie movement, "a massive, global awakening", and the record carries that: free jazz horns over rock rhythm and sung texts, the Hamburg underground of the year of Can's Monster Movie.

MPS reissued it in May 2025, fifty-five years after the original, on CD and in a numbered special edition with a bonus 10-inch of tracks from Lindenberg's first solo album. This Japanese CD is the Solid edition of the same catalogue.

Japanese CD edition from Solid's MPS series.