If you only know the trombone from big band solos or bebop lines, Globokar will mess with your expectations fast. He grew up in France to Slovenian parents, trained as a classical trombonist and composer, and ended up somewhere between the concert hall and the free jazz scene, comfortable in both and fully owned by neither. He studied with Luciano Berio and worked in the world of contemporary composition, but he also spent real time improvising alongside jazz musicians, and that mix shows up in everything he plays — extended techniques, multiphonics, breath sounds, growls, all deployed with the same seriousness a composer brings to a string quartet.

His most jazz-adjacent move was co-founding New Phonic Art in the late 1960s with Michel Portal, Carlos Roqué Alsina, and Jean-Pierre Drouet — a group improvisation project that borrowed the freedom of jazz without ever pretending to swing. Around the same time he was orbiting the Globe Unity Orchestra scene with Alexander von Schlippenbach, playing in rooms full of European improvisers who were busy inventing their own vocabulary instead of importing one from Chicago or New York. Globokar's trombone in that context sounds less like a horn and more like a voice under stress — cracking, multiphonic, sometimes genuinely unsettling.

What makes him worth hearing if you're coming from jazz is that he never treated improvisation as a technique problem to solve. For him it was tied up with politics, with the body, with the idea that making sound is itself a kind of statement. His pieces often ask performers to react to provocation, to break rules mid-performance, to treat the concert as something unstable rather than fixed. That attitude runs straight through the European free improvisation scene of the '60s and '70s, and Globokar was one of the people insisting that jazz's freedom could be pushed even further out, past melody, past rhythm, into pure gesture.

He's not someone you put on for a relaxed evening. His records demand attention and occasionally patience — there are stretches that sound more like experimental theater than music in any conventional sense. But if you want to understand where European free improvisation split off from American free jazz and became its own animal, spikier, more conceptual, less rooted in the blues, Globokar is one of the clearest routes in. He didn't invent that split single-handedly, but he lived right in the middle of it, trombone in hand, refusing to make things easy.