" data-original-title="" title="">Alexander von Schlippenbach's Globe Unity Orchestra (GUO) employs a similar head-scratching process to that utilized to make geuze, a much-treasured Belgian beer. Both elicit the "how did they do that?" question, and both seem to be a gift from Mother Nature. Schlippenbach brings together a choice assemblage of improvisers, like the ingredients of guesze (wheat and three-year-old female cone hops), The beer and Globe Unity Orchestra are then animated by spontaneous processes. With the guesze, it is a fermentation by wild yeast found in the atmosphere, specifically from the valley of Zenne, west of Brussels. When this beer was first created back in the fifteenth century, what we know as yeast fermentation must have seemed like magic. GUO also draws on a type of spontaneous fermentation, one that we call free improvisation. Thus far, at least, there is no science to explain this magic.

This recording—made some fifty years after the pianist created a big band by combining the