Baden-Baden Free Jazz Orchestra

Baden-Baden, Südwestfunk studio, 12 to 14 December 1969, the annual Free Jazz Meeting. Steve McCall had persuaded the organisers to invite the Chicago musicians living in Paris: Lester Bowie, Joseph Jarman, Roscoe Mitchell, and the pianist Dave Burrell. They met sixteen Europeans: Albert Mangelsdorff, Kenny Wheeler, John Surman, Willem Breuker, Terje Rypdal, Tony Oxley, Alan Skidmore, Heinz Sauer, Gerd Dudek, Eje Thelin, Bernt Rosengren, Hugh Steinmetz, Leo Cuypers, Claude Delcloo and Karin Krog among them.

Bowie wrote and conducted a thirty-two-minute piece for the whole orchestra and gave it the title, because, as he said shortly before he died, that is what it was: getting to know each other. MPS released it in 1970 with three shorter tracks from the same meeting: Rypdal's group, Krog's minute-long For My Two J.B.'s, and a Breuker-Surman duo.

The critical literature treats this as the moment two avant-gardes met: George Lewis calls it an early intercultural event between two emerging scenes, and it was the first time most of these players had worked together in a large group. AllMusic gives three stars. The Japanese blog Bossanova.jp compares it to Globe Unity and warns that handling it carelessly gets you burned.

Japanese CD edition from Solid's MPS series.