The King Übü Örchestrü, one of the important orchestras for improvised music, is celebrating its 40th anniversary with many members of the original cast. Far from free jazz, it set the style for collectively improvising large ensembles.
Even back then, in the mid-1980s, the large ensemble often played in changing line-ups; it quickly made a name for itself as a pool of the most diverse, but always very distinguished European improvisation artists. From the very beginning, King Übü Örchestrü was a unique phenomenon in the European musical landscape: “With enormous influence, as you can see when you visit venues for advanced music today, for example in Berlin or Cologne: playing with balanced sounds, a spatial structure and the radical equality of all instruments is seen by large parts of the young generation as a natural heritage.” (Thorsten Töpp, 2021)
The King Übü Örchestrü – whose name is a theatrical reference to Alfred Jarry’s grotesque play Ubu Roi – saw the light of day when it recorded its debut album Music Is Music Is (Uhlklang, 1985) at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin in December 1984. Two further studio albums and two live albums followed.
Marc Charig, Erhard Hirt, Paul Lytton, Melvyn Poore, Phil Wachsmann and Alfred Zimmerlin are the ones who have been there from the beginning and are now also part of the 40th anniversary concert. Axel Dörner and Phil Minton have added to the line-up since around the beginning of the 2000s. The Örchestrü then temporarily disappeared from the scene until guitarist Erhart Hirt brought many of the members back together and added Stefan Keune and Matthias Muche to the ensemble. In 2021, the Örchestrü played concerts again for the first time, which also resulted in a new album. The exploratorium concert will now additionally feature double bassist Alexander Frangenheim as a guest.
What counts most in King Übü Örchestrü is the collective, the group work, the interactions with each other. The aim has always been to treat all instrumentalists equally and to consistently abandon all notions of soloing: “The interactions between the ensemble members are testament to the time that they have known one another and played together. No one plays a solo in the jazz sense of the word, drowning out others and hogging the limelight. Instead, everyone seems to be listening to the others all of the time and contributing when there is an appropriate space for them. There are occasional crescendos but these arise naturally as a result of players reactions and do not sound pre-planned. In similar fashion, there are also quiet patches during which the quietest sound is audible. This is not an ensemble in which members feel they must play as much as possible to justify their existence; rather it is one in which the members have developed the same instincts and complement each other perfectly. An object lesson in free improvisation.” (John Eyles, 2023)
