When Open Sky Unit first appeared in 1974, it slipped into the world almost sideways: a live album by a small Liège collective, issued on a classical label run by family, documenting a band that seemed to exist as much for the joy of playing as for any careerist ambition. Half a century later, its return on Sdban Records underlines just how pivotal this “mythical” session was for Belgian jazz. Recorded at the Jazzland club in Liège, the record catches Micheline Pelzer(drums, voice), Jacques Pelzer, Steve Houben, Ron Wilson, Janot Buchem and Michel Graillier in full flight, fusing soul, funk and free‑leaning improvisation into a warm, slightly ragged language that feels both deeply local and spiritually in tune with the wider 1970s jazz fusion moment.
The group’s story is rooted in kinship and community. Formed in the early ’70s as an homage to Dave Liebman’s group Open Sky, Open Sky Unit grew out of informal jams in Liège into a working band whose line‑up reflected both family ties and a porous, border‑hopping scene. Veteran saxophonist Jacques Pelzer, one of Belgian jazz’s central figures, stands alongside his drummer‑vocalist daughter Micheline and his second cousin, saxophonist/flutist Steve Houben. Around them cluster bass player Janot Buchem, percussionist Michel Graillier and American pianist‑composer Ron Wilson, a Californian who settled in Liège and nearby Maastricht after his army service and quietly became the group’s main writer and conceptual anchor. That mix of generations and backgrounds is all over the music: it swings easily, but it also absorbs pop, funk and spiritual jazz currents without strain.
Originally issued on Duchesne, the classical imprint run by Pelzer’s brother‑in‑law, the album presents a set of Wilson‑penned tunes that stretch song forms into open frameworks. Pieces like “Open Sky,” “Sunshine Star” and “Passion and Compassion” ride lithe, elastic grooves where the split between jazz and soul feels irrelevant: horns preach, the rhythm section leans into earthy vamping or light‑footed funk, and Wilson’s vocal‑inflected writing keeps everything tethered to melody even as solos push outward. The recording, cut live in Jazzland, is far from technically pristine, but that’s part of its pull; you hear chairs, air, the slight overdrive of a band pushing the room, and a collective energy that a cleaner studio take might have sanded away. The group toured this music around Belgium and beyond - including a run to Tunisia - before dissolving in the mid‑’70s when Houben left for Boston and Berklee, but the LP remained as a snapshot of that brief convergence.
The new vinyl reissue restores the album to circulation while also fleshing out its backstory with a collector‑grade limited edition of 200 copies. This special version adds a faithfully reproduced 7" single built around Ron Wilson’s “Sunshine Star,” originally released in 1973. On the A‑side sits “Peace Is The Answer,” a gently insistent soul-jazz plea that only ever appeared on that first single and now resurfaces for the first time in decades. Flip it over and you get the acoustic incarnation of “Sunshine Star,” just piano and voice, recorded a few months before the longer, more muscular jazz‑funk version laid down at Jazzland. Heard today alongside the album cut later anthologised on the Funky Chicken compilation, the single underlines how Wilson conceived these songs as living things: capable of inhabiting both intimate, living‑room intimacy and full-band, dance‑floor‑tilted exuberance.
Although Open Sky Unit never cracked the international touring circuit in a big way, their reputation grew quietly among crate‑diggers, DJs and historians, aided by anthologies like Utopic Cities: Progressive Jazz in Belgium 1968–1979. The 2025 Sdban reissue doesn’t just satisfy collectors hunting down an elusive title; it places the band back where they belong, as key participants in a moment when Belgian jazz was rethinking itself via fusion, funk and a new sense of Black Atlantic connection. Heard now, Open Sky Unit feels like a missing link: a modestly scaled, family‑driven project whose blend of spiritual uplift, earthy groove and rough‑hewn improvisation mirrors the best of the decade, and whose songs, once again spinning on fresh vinyl, sound ready to claim a wider sky.
