About Between

At the end of the 1960s, improvising musicians from a wide variety of disciplines met in Munich and played "music between worlds", between avant-garde, electronics, folklore, medieval, impromptu and samba. The core of BETWEEN in 1970 consisted of the two young Munich composers Peter Michael Hamel and Ulrich Stranz, the Argentine guitarist and instrument maker Roberto Détrée, who had been living in Munich since 1966, and the native New Yorker Robert Eliscu, at that time principal oboist of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra.

They were joined in 1971 by the two American percussionists Cotch Blackmon and Charles Campbell, the later world-famous flutist James Galway from Ireland, at that time principal flutist of the Berlin Philharmonic, and, from as of the first recording, the sound producer Ulrich Kraus. From 1973 on, other musicians from all over the world added their accents to BETWEEN: Tom van der Geld (vibraphone) and Roger Jannotta (woodwinds), both from the USA, Gary Lynn Todd from USA (double bass), Jeffrey Biddeau from Trinidad (congas), Pandit Sankha Chatterjee from Calcutta (tabla), as well as guests Walter Bachauer (electronics), Peter Pannke (tanpura), Duru Omson (bamboo flute), Al Gromer Khan (sitar), the great American jazz saxophonist Bobby Jones and the then Munich Cathedral organist Franz Lehrndorfer.

"BETWEEN stood and stands for the simultaneity of things that are actually mutually exclusive." (Peter Michael Hamel, 2005)

"Actually, we wanted to call our project B.A.C.H.," Peter Michael Hamel recalls of 1970, when the task was to find the most unusual name possible for an extremely unusual formation. "Of course, we made this choice somewhat in reference to the immortal baroque composer of the same name, but above all, these four letters stood for "Between All Chairs". Because that's exactly how we felt about our music. But when we realized that this idiom doesn't even exist in English, we dropped this idea."

What remained was the term "Between", which the four founding members of the group finally agreed on as the band name. And even this slimmed-down term says a lot about the self-image of this unique project: "We always felt our music as an "in-between", something comparable had not existed before. Above all, our sound was stuck between the categories of serious and light music. You could never fix us to any category. I'm satisfied with the result, up to this day!" says Hamel.