Born in Copenhagen to Danish-Congolese parents, John Tchicai (1936–2012) started playing saxophone and clarinet in his teens. In 1962, he moved to New York, and went on to co-found the New York Art Quartet with Roswell Rudd, Milford Graves and Lewis Worrell. He performed with musicians such as Albert Ayler and Archie Shepp, played on John Coltrane's Ascension, and eventually also became a yoga practitioner and teacher of jazz music. Another of his projects was titled John Tchicai & The Archetypes, a group which he formed with his then wife, Margriet Nabier, also the author of this new biography. This extract describes a performance in Cambridge with John Lennon and Yoko Ono and Tchicai's first explorations into the possibilities of a large ensemble.

Following the success of [Tchicai’s Danish ensemble] Cadentia Nova Danica’s London concert, Anthony Barnett asked John to come back a few months later, for an event billing itself as “the first international avant garde concert of fundamentally improvised music and open sound in England”, to be held at Cambridge University on 2 March 1969. The line-up of this “concert-workshop” was impressive: there were some of the South African musicians in exile (Johnny Dyani, Louis Moholo, Chris McGregor), other international players like the saxophonists Willem Breuker and Peter Bennink from Holland, the bassist Barre Philips who was an American expatriate in France, and more.

John suggested to Anthony that the audience should be encouraged to bring small percussion instruments with them. Half-jokingly, he also suggested that an invitation should be sent to the Japanese artist Yoko Ono, who had performed as a singer with Ornette Coleman’s group the year before. Once associated with the Fluxus group of experimental artists in New York, now she was living in London, where Barnett had made her acquaintance. Ono agreed to perform, but said she wanted to bring her own band. To general surprise, that turned out to be her new boyfriend John Lennon, who was still officially a member of The Beatles. They arrived in a white Rolls Royce bringing a guitar and amplifier, recording equipment, roadies and technicians.

The original plan of the concert was that everyone was free to play together in groupings they would sort out for themselves as the concert progressed, but the new arrivals had other ideas. It was decided on the spot that the other musicians would begin and that they would stop to make space for Ono and Lennon. When it was their turn, Ono began screaming loudly and Lennon held his guitar in front of the amplifier to make feedback sounds, while at the side of the stage an alarm clock was ticking. After about 20 minutes of this, John Tchicai and the drummer John Stevens returned to the stage and began playing with them. Others also came back and joined in. The concert went on, musicians and a few audience members were playing, but Ono and Lennon stopped. They left the stage to what the journalist and photographer Val Wilmer described as “a notable lack of applause” while their technicians unplugged cables. Before the concert was over, their Rolls Royce had left Cambridge.

For Lennon, this occasion was the first time he had played anything else than The Beatles’ repertoire in public. In a sense, he had come out of the closet that day. Right away, he and Ono wanted to release an LP of the recording their technicians had made. Unfinished Music No 2: Life With Lions came out two months later. John Tchicai can be heard adding melody to their set. In an indirect way he was asked for his permission, and he gave it, but he – who was later described by Lennon as “apparently a famous avant garde sax guy” – never received an offer of money. All he got was one copy of the record, with a thank-you note and a drawing on the inner sleeve, in Lennon’s handwriting.

John Tchicai is almost certainly the only musician who recorded with both John Coltrane and John Lennon.

Soon after the Cambridge concert, in April 1969, John decided to explore the possibilities of a large ensemble. He had been listening to a lot of different music, from classical composers – Bartok, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Schoenberg, Webern and more – to music from India and Africa, and now he wanted to create a jazz symphony orchestra.

He put an ad in a Danish jazz magazine, saying everybody was welcome to come to the Reprise Teatret, a cinema north of Copenhagen that presented a concert series called Jazz i Reprisen. John performed about ten concerts there in 1969. For this new project, there was a rehearsal on Saturday morning, followed by a performance open to the public in the afternoon. Pierre Dørge joined right away. He’d first seen John play when he was a young kid, and after seeing Cadentia Nova Danica play at the Jazzhus Montmartre the winter before, his interest had grown stronger. John had been playing a big marching-band drum on stage.

Pierre had liked it a lot: “At that concert, John was playing on that big bass drum and the others were playing some ostinato and there was a very powerful rhythm section and I loved the themes. It was really a great experience for me, opening my ears in some other directions. So now we were about 40 musicians showing up and there were some musicians that had just bought some Moroccan clay drums in some of these hippy shops, Indian clothes shops, you know, or somebody had been playing the recorder for three weeks, flute or penny whistle or anything. Some had trumpets and I had my electric guitar and there was a bass player, Steffen Andersen, who was playing with Cadentia Nova Danica already, and Hugh Steinmetz was there, the trumpet player that worked with John.

“And then we played some. John played something and we imitated, so we learned a few lines and we also got some written notes, just one line of notes with a lot of small things written to it, a full page. It was very, very exciting and this approach went directly to my heart, and then there were all these amateurs and half-professionals... John would lead on his alto and then everybody followed his voice and it was like a giant pencil painting. It was not in tune, but there were so many different tunings, there was almost half a note in between the tunings you know, so it sounded fantastic and then John was leading the melody... [Pierre sings a few ascending notes] Some played a little too high and some played a little too low and some played wrong on a recorder and some would play the bongo at a rhythm that was so far away from what was happening... It was like a boat in high sea, very chaotic, but I loved it. And then suddenly, he was looking at you and you should improvise, you know, or this group or this instrument should improvise. John didn’t say very much and I was still very shy. He was not a person that you would talk to and ask a question, not with so many people around. I didn’t want to raise my hand and ask ‘What do you mean by this?’ or something. Just follow the leader you know.

“We had a rehearsal at 10 or 11 o’clock, and at two o’clock there was a performance, from two till four o’clock. There was also a guest who was in town and John knew him. It was Lee Konitz. He was there, listening.”

John Tchicai: A Chaos With Some Kind Of Order by Margriet Naber is available to order via the John Tchicai website and will be stocked in local bookshops soon. Wire subscribers can read Barry Withersen's 1995 interview with Tchicai in The Wire 142 via the online archive.