Phalanx was a co-led quartet built around two players who had arrived at the avant-garde from opposite directions. James "Blood" Ulmer, born Willie James Ulmer on February 8, 1940 in St. Matthews, South Carolina, had come up through soul-jazz organ groups in Pittsburgh and Columbus, Ohio before moving to New York in 1971 and becoming the first electric guitarist to record and tour extensively with Ornette Coleman. Coleman's harmolodic theory reorganized how Ulmer thought about the instrument, and his own records, starting with Tales of Captain Black in 1978, turned it into something closer to free funk. George Adams, born April 29, 1940 in Covington, Georgia, had spent the 1970s inside the mainstream of the New York scene: three years with drummer Roy Haynes from 1969, then Charles Mingus's band from 1973 to 1976 (Mingus Moves, Mingus at Carnegie Hall, Changes One, Changes Two), then the Gil Evans Orchestra, and from 1979 the quartet he co-led with pianist Don Pullen. He played tenor with a huge, rasping tone, doubled on flute, and sang.

The first version of the band was Ulmer's own working trio with a saxophone bolted on. Amin Ali, born May 4, 1956 in Philadelphia and the eldest son of drummer Rashied Ali, had played electric bass with Ulmer since 1980, alongside drummer Grant Calvin Weston, a Philadelphian born in 1959 who had joined Ornette Coleman's Prime Time at seventeen. That quartet cut the band's first record in September 1985 at Volkspark-Studio Hamburg in West Germany, produced by Burkhard Hennen, the founder of the Moers festival. Moers Music released it in 1986 as Got Something Good for You (momu 02046), billed on the sleeve to "James Blood Ulmer, George Adams: Phalanx." Ulmer wrote most of the material, Adams contributed "A Night Out," and the two co-wrote "Rough Traders"; both men sing on it. The LP ran seven tracks, the 1987 CD eight, adding "Free." A concert by the same lineup, taped in Bremen in 1986, stayed unreleased for twenty-seven years.

Late in 1986 or early in 1987 the rhythm section changed and the band's center of gravity moved with it. Sirone, born Norris Jones on September 28, 1940 in Atlanta, had co-founded the Revolutionary Ensemble with violinist Leroy Jenkins in 1971 and had recorded with Marion Brown, Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders and Cecil Taylor. Rashied Ali, John Coltrane's last drummer and the proprietor of the loft-era club Ali's Alley, took the drum chair from Weston. In the process he replaced his own son on the bandstand: Amin Ali was out, and the elder Ali was in. Ulmer later described the group as a collective formed by himself, Rashied Ali and Sirone, with Adams brought in on saxophone.

That quartet made both of the band's studio records for the Japanese label DIW, produced by Kazunori Sugiyama for Disk Union. Original Phalanx was cut on February 13 and 14, 1987 at Sound Ideas in New York and mixed live to two-track digital, a decision that left the playing unusually exposed. Ulmer wrote "Song Number One" and "Troublemaker," Sirone wrote "Free Spirit" and "Angel Love," and Adams wrote "House on 13th Street," "Playground" and "A Smile," the last of which appeared only on the CD. In Touch followed on February 27 and 29, 1988 at A & R Recording in New York, engineered by Jim Anderson, with Adams adding soprano saxophone and Ulmer picking up flute for some of the melody statements. Scott Yanow's AllMusic review of it noted that the group dispensed with the opening themes almost immediately in favor of solo and collective improvising, and rated it four stars out of five, a notch above the three he gave each of the earlier records.

There was no fourth studio album. The band stopped recording after 1988, though it reconvened for at least one concert, at the Museum of Natural History in 1991, reviewed by Mike Joyce in The Washington Post that April. Asked about the group by Jazz Journal in 1992, Ulmer put its status plainly: "It is a good band, but it is not my band." Adams passed away in New York on November 14, 1992 at fifty-two, after a year of breathing difficulties. Rashied Ali died in Manhattan on August 12, 2009, and Sirone in Berlin ten weeks later, on October 21. Ulmer, the last of the four, died in New York on June 3, 2026 at eighty-six.

The catalog has stayed in circulation in fragments. DIW reissued Original Phalanx on CD in 1994 (32DIW 801CD), restoring "A Smile" and the full length of "Playground," which had been truncated on the LP. Moers Music still lists the Got Something Good for You CD in its own catalog. And in 2013 Ulmer issued the 1986 Bremen tape himself, as Phalanx Live, a limited factory-pressed CD on his American Revelation label sold at gigs and through his website, which restored the Amin Ali and Weston lineup to the discography twenty-five years after the fact.

Phalanx worked the seam between two idioms that rarely shared a bandstand: Ulmer's harmolodic guitar, all clanging open strings and unresolved intervals, and Adams's tenor, a blues-and-church instrument at heart that could be pushed into pure noise. The two rhythm sections pulled the result in different directions. Amin Ali and Grant Calvin Weston, who had played Ornette Coleman's Prime Time music and Ulmer's own, gave the Hamburg record a hard backbeat and vocals, closer to free funk than to free jazz; Sirone and Rashied Ali, whose credentials ran back through the Revolutionary Ensemble and John Coltrane's last band, replaced the groove with a floating, elastic pulse and turned the group into a genuinely free quartet. Composition duties were shared across all three of the studio records, with Sirone and Adams each writing for the band rather than just soloing over Ulmer's tunes, which is one reason the DIW sessions feel collective rather than led. Critics have generally treated the band as a strong one-off. The description that has stuck to it, quoted on the group's own Wikipedia entry, is "an ad-hoc supergroup that thrived and disappeared."