THE joyous, rampaging sounds of the Grand Union Orchestra have been ringing around Britain and the world for 40 years, their personnel an extraordinary amalgam of the finest cosmopolitan musicians playing in a huge stew of musical styles from US blues, Indian ragas, Latin American salsa to Chinese harmonies, Bengali songs, reggae basslines and West African percussion.

The current orchestra includes some of Britain’s most powerful jazz musicians: saxophonists Jason Yarde and Tony Kofi, trumpeter Byron Wallen and drummer Brian Abrahams, with their roots in the Caribbean, Ghana, Belize and South Africa respectively.

The orchestra’s founder, trombonist Tony Haynes, was born in 1941 in the grandstand of Epsom Racecourse, then being used as a wartime maternity hospital. He told me: “My mother was a secretary, my father a wireless operator who loved opera, especially Caruso. I was virtually self-taught on piano, learned violin at school and started on trombone at 14 so I could be a part of the traditional jazz boom. I was born on the day that my first jazz hero, Jelly Roll Morton, died.”

Another early jazz inspiration was Charles Mingus. “His Black Saint and Sinner Man was a favourite, as were his civil rights resistance tunes like Fables of Faubus. I loved the big bands of Count Basie and Duke Ellington too.”

Haynes became a freelance musician after leaving Oxford. “I played at US Air Force bases, in the Algarve and then home to local pubs in Islington. After an MA in music course at Nottingham University I became musical director at the Nottingham Playhouse and later at Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre, which sharpened my consciousness as I wrote music for plays by Brecht, John Arden, Adrian Mitchell and John McGrath’s 7:84 Theatre and Belt and Braces.”

In 1982 he formed Grand Union with its first production a play about Jelly Roll Morton called Jelly Roll Soul.

I asked him about Grand Union’s powerful, ever-creative cosmopolitanism. “It began with my love for Brecht. What did it feel like to be rootless, a migrant? Brecht knew that well.

“In 1983 we devised our production Strange Migration. I wanted it to reflect the authentic experience of migration, so we needed performers who had truly lived it on their senses. Gradually we gathered a powerful company of musicians whose worlds we all wove together. It started with the Ghanaian songs and congas of Sarah Laryea and the songs of Chilean Vladimir Vega who had spent a decade in Pinochet's prisons.

“In 1984 we performed The Song of Many Tongues. As many fine musicians joined us, we pushed our number to a 16-piece orchestra. Ken Johnson, the Trinidadian steel band virtuoso joined us with the South African trumpeter Claude Deppa and the Indian sitarist and tabla player, Baluji Shrivastav. We welcomed Yousaf Ali Khan, a tabla player from Bangladesh and the kora artiste from Guine Bissau, Sadjo Djolo, and the Angolan singer Maria Joao Silveira. We were becoming a genuine world orchestra, and being based in East London only amplified our cosmic spirit and sound.

“All of us were learners. We learned from our bandmates about their musical and political experiences, their cultures, their languages. That was the true creative artistry we exemplified and tried to bring to the young people we worked with. We teach improvisation and performance skills through our Youth Orchestra and Re: Generation. We offer a pathway for young musicians to develop.”

In their 40th Anniversary Album Made By Human Hands, the Orchestra traverses the years with their global sounds. Hear Courtney Pine’s tenor saxophone on I Live in the City; Shanti Jayasinha’s trumpet on Mexe Mexe; Fiona Burnett’s soprano saxophone on Ol’ Lady, Ros Davies’s trombone on New Day, Louise Elliot’s tenor saxophone on Cano, Johnson’s swinging pans on Love that Day and Haynes’s didjeridu on Nagin Been

The whole world in sounds is there, as it is in every Grand Union concert, each one a universal symphony of what Britain is now and what Britain will become in advancing eras — thanks to far-sighted pioneers like the dauntless Haynes.

Made By Human Hands is released on RedGold Records.