The cause was liver failure caused by hepatitis, said his wife, Moki.

Mr. Cherry used a pocket cornet -- a shrunken cornet -- to get an open, quiet sound. He managed emotionally charged statements without force, and his playing radiated fragility, as if he had come to his style without study.

He began his career studying the works of the trumpeter Fats Navarro, and his playing was often a lyrical paraphrase of be-bop ideas without a wasted note. By the end of his life, his music incorporated funk and ethnic musics from around the world, fusing his avant-garde vocabulary with folk and pop music. In describing his studies to the drummer Art Taylor for the book "Notes and Tones" (Da Capo Press, 1993), Mr. Cherry said, "First it was form, then phrasing and then sound, always sound."

Mr. Cherry was a product of the fertile postwar be-bop scene in Los Angeles in the 1940's. He came from a musical environment, with a grandmother who played piano accompaniment for silent movies, a mother who played piano at home and a father who owned a music club in Tulsa. His father also worked as a bartender at the Plantation Club, a leading jazz club, in the Watts section of Los Angeles.

At Jefferson High School, Mr. Cherry studied with Samuel Brown, a respected teacher who had taught the jazz musicians Wardell Gray, Frank Morgan, Hampton Hawes and Art Farmer. The Los Angeles of his youth produced or was home to many jazz musicians who helped to set the standard for experimentation in the next few decades, including Charles Mingus, Scott LaFaro, Gary Peacock, Eric Dolphy, Charlie Haden and Paul Bley.

By 1954, Mr. Cherry, still a teen-ager, was playing professionally, a career course his father tried to stop. Two years later, Mr. Cherry met Ornette Coleman, a meeting that changed the course of jazz history.

Mr. Cherry, along with the drummer Billy Higgins (whom Mr. Cherry met when both were high school students in a truant-detention school) and a tenor saxophonist, James Clay, were drawn to Mr. Coleman's ideas and began rehearsing regularly with him. At the same time, Mr. Cherry was performing in the area, working with the intermission band at the Lighthouse, which was then the most famous jazz club in Los Angeles.

In 1958, Mr. Cherry and Mr. Coleman, along with the pianist Paul Bley (who was the leader of the group), the bassist Charlie Haden and the drummer Mr. Higgins began an engagement at the Hillcrest Club; live recordings of some of those sessions show the band playing Mr. Coleman's tunes with authority and a sense of experimentation.

In February 1958, Mr. Coleman began his recording career with "Something Else," an album that included Mr. Cherry and Mr. Higgins. The pianist John Lewis arranged for the group to join Atlantic Records, where it recorded the album "The Shape of Jazz to Come" a year later. That same year, the group spent two and a half months at the Five Spot in New York, a stay that was meant to last only two weeks. Mr. Coleman's music split the jazz world between those who believed in his rewriting of jazz orthodoxy and those who didn't.

The importance of Mr. Coleman's recordings with Mr. Cherry cannot be overestimated. The rhythmic relationship between the two musicians, loose and flexible yet completely empathetic, took jazz modernists away from an emphasis on overt discipline and precise detailing. And both Mr. Cherry and Mr. Coleman drew on a huge variety of sources for their melodies. They knew be-bop, but even Mexican melodies showed up in their improvisations, along with country blues lines. This added a rural, folk element to jazz.

Mr. Cherry first recorded under his own name in 1960, on an album called "The Avant Guarde"; John Coltrane was a sideman. He recorded infrequently in the next few years, but began a series of associations that had him collaborating with nearly every important player in the mushrooming avant-garde of the time.

In 1962, he began an association with the saxophonist Sonny Rollins that included concert appearances around the world and recordings; he also recorded with the saxophonist Steve Lacy. That year Mr. Cherry also helped form the New York Contemporary Five with the saxophonists Archie Shepp and John Tchicai. By 1964, Mr. Cherry had begun work with the saxophonist Albert Ayler.

In 1964, after touring Europe, Mr. Cherry went to Paris. He formed a band of international musicians there that included the tenor saxophonist Gato Barbieri. A year later, the band came back to New York City, where it recorded what is often considered Mr. Cherry's masterpiece, "Complete Communion," for Blue Note records, beginning a short association with the label.

In the mid-60's, Mr. Cherry began experimenting with all sorts of music, and for the rest of his career he wandered internationally. He began playing duets with the drummer Ed Blackwell, which he continued until the 1980's.

In the 70's, he taught at Dartmouth College, and lived not only in Europe but also in the Middle East, all the while absorbing local music. In 1973, he recorded the "Relativity Suite," with the Jazz Composers' Orchestra, which included a string section. He recorded with Lou Reed, the singer and guitarist, and took part in the group Codona, with Nana Vasconcelos and Collin Walcott.

Mr. Cherry recorded a funk-and-ethnic album in Paris and also performed with the band Old and New Dreams, a revival of Ornette Coleman's acoustic quartet with the saxophonist Dewey Redman in Mr. Coleman's place. In 1984, he founded the group Nu, which included the saxophonist Carlos Ward and Mr. Vasconcelos. He continued to make recordings into the 90's.

In addition to his wife, of New York City, and his stepdaughter, he is survived by his sons Jan and David, of Los Angeles; Eagle Eye, of New York; Christian, of Copenhagen, and his mother, Daisy McKee of Los Angeles.


Photo: Don Cherry (Jack Vartoogian, 1990)


Don Cherry: Trumpet Innovator


photo © 1955 James Radke, courtesy of
Fabio Rojas (December 1997)
Don Cherry died over a year ago and jazz lost one of its greatest voices. On a more positive note, in honor of Don Cherry, let me take a few moments to say something about his trumpet playing. The more I think about it, the more he'll be remembered as being one of the defining voices of the jazz trumpet. I think he is one of those figures that is part of the great lineage from King Oliver, Louis Armstrong right up through Freddie Hubbard, Lee Morgan and the moderns like Wynton Marsalis (the neotraditional) and Leo Smith (the avant garde).  
For starters, he was the first great free trumpeter. On Shape of Jazz to Come and the other great Atlantic recordings, he produced the first competent examples of the bebop style played independent of traditional harmony. He also had a truly distinctive voice on the horn - kind of tight and astigmatic but at the same time large and open. Very much like Ornette Coleman's sound, but in its own way much more warm. It was this combination of Coleman's bluesy sound and Cherry's bop that gave the first great Coleman quartet its truly distinctive sound. It is so remarkable that in one interview, Wynton Marsalis said that if a person were to listen to just one jazz album, it ought to be The Shape of Jazz to Come.  
Then in the mid 60's he pushed the frontiers of free jazz with John Tchicai, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler and his own recordings as leader. Recordings such as Complete Communion and Symphony for Improvisers demonstrate that beauty is an integral part of free music - not just honking and screeching. These records are remarkbale for their ensemble playing and some of the first examples of the playing of soon to be famous sidemen (and women) such as Gato Barbieri. 
In the late 60's and 70's, he began to experiement with Indian and African musics. As always, his music aimed at a combination of beauty and playfulness. One of my favorites from this era is Mu in which he plays alls sorts of traditional instruments as well as cornet. Fans of drumming will enjoy this because of Ed Blackwell who, for an entire hour was constantly producing new and edgy accompaniment for Cherry's music. In the 80's, Cherry began to experiment with electronic instrumentation as well as continuing to be a virtuoso acoustic musician.  
He also helped introduce the pocket trumpet to jazz and was constantly experiementing - succesfully - with traditional instruments as well as electronics.
In this light, it is easily seen that Cherry was a figure that connected the bebop of the late fifties to the experiementation of the 60's and 70's. He was not just a dilletant, he had a beautiful sound and his music was a pleasure to hear. In short, he created a new approach for trumpet and extended the range of the jazz aesthetic. He truly deserves a place in the pantheon of the great jazz trumpet players. 
If you have never heard Don Cherry, then I recommend hearing: 
The Shape of Jazz to Come by Ornette Coleman
Complete Communion by Don Cherry
Symphony for Improvisors by Don Cherry
Mu, the Complete Session by Don Cheery and Ed Blackwell


Also see our 2013 article about Cherry's late work
MAIN PAGE ARTICLES STAFF/FAVORITE MUSIC LINKS WRITE US

https://www.allaboutjazz.com/the-humus-of-don-cherry-don-cherry-by-clifford-allen.php?page=1

The Humus of Don Cherry

by

"Don Cherry had an effect on people everywhere he went, because whenever he was in town, everybody would show up."
"If we're going to speak about words, we could talk about a word like 'aum.' Because you don't say the word 'aum,' you sing it. And you have to sing it where you use the 'a' as 'ah,' which is the throat. Then you're singing, sustaining the tone 'ah.' Then you go to the 'u,' and then you reach the 'm' and you've liberated the body. That's a word. In the Bible they speak of the Word. First there was the Word. And then they speak of the word that was lost." Don Cherry in an interview with Art Taylor, in response to Taylor's question of what Cherry thought of the word 'jazz.' Notes and Tones (Da Capo, 1977)

When I first read Taylor's interview with Don Cherry, the above statement (and indeed the entire exchange) caught me as rather funny in a far-out sort of way, and it only took a little while to realize that, despite Taylor's rather forward-thinking approach to music, he did not have a handle on the umbrella-like breadth that improvisation holds over world music, and the spiritually communicative use that most music has had throughout civilization. 'Jazz,' after all, could be a limiting term referring primarily to a regional blues-based music played in the Red-Light District of New Orleans during the early 20th Century. It is a classifying term placed on a fragment of the essence, what trumpeter Dizzy Reece has called the "cry," something that makes up the music of all cultures. As this umbrella-like form is a central aspect of Don Cherry's musical philosophy, it makes just as much sense to refer to Cherry as a 'jazz' musician as it does to discuss him as strictly a trumpeter.

Born November 18, 1936 near Oklahoma City, Cherry began playing the trumpet at age fourteen while living in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, and listened intently to Fats Navarro's work. In fact, Cherry is quoted in the liner notes to Ornette Coleman's Tomorrow is the Question (Contemporary, 1959) as saying Navarro was "the only trumpet player I cared to copy my phrases from" (considering Navarro's penchant for fast smeared soundmasses, that is a logical comparison). Cherry worked regularly with revered Los Angeles tenor man George Newman during the middle 1950s, and also played piano in a group with bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Lennie McBrowne (unfortunately, this group is not known to have recorded). Cherry and drummer Billy Higgins were rehearsing with altoist Ornette Coleman (as were Haden and drummer Ed Blackwell) who had been trying unsuccessfully to get gigs in the area. In Ornette's experience, "Don was the only trumpeter at the time able to play [this] music" (a sentiment echoed in interviews with reedmen John Tchicai and Prince Lasha) - certainly, Cherry, along with Bill Dixon and Donald Ayler, was a rare brass torchbearer in the reed-dominated nascent 'new music.' Ornette, Cherry, Haden and Higgins worked in Los Angeles at the Hillcrest Club with Paul Bley, the tapes of which became The Fabulous Paul Bley Quintet (America, 1972) and Coleman Classics (IAI, 1974). Shortly thereafter, the quartet attended the Lenox School of Jazz in Massachusetts under the direction of Gunther Schuller, where they came to the attention of Atlantic Records producers Nesuhi and Ahmet Ertegun, a relationship which lasted through enough material for nine and a half records. Recording The Shape of Jazz to Come in 1959 in fact paid for the quartet's trip east, and a subsequent three-month engagement at the Five Spot somewhat fulfilled that promise.

 By 1961, however, the quartet had disbanded, with Cherry and Higgins going to work briefly in Sonny Rollins' quartet, and Jimmy Garrison (Haden's replacement) joining Coltrane's band. In the few years that followed the dissolution of the Coleman group, Cherry underwent the difficulties that can face a sideman in a noted, working ensemble striking out on his own as a leader — namely, keeping a group together as well as trying to find one's creative way. Cherry made an abortive date as leader for Savoy in 1963, featuring the loose medley that would later become "Togetherness," as played by tenor man Pharoah Sanders (in his first known session), pianist Joe Scianni, bassist David Izenzon and drummer J.C. Moses. Reedman Prince Lasha, a schoolmate of Ornette's who met Don Cherry in Los Angeles as the Coleman quartet was coming together, recorded with "Sweet Cherry" in May of 1963 at a loft session also featuring Cliff Jordan, Charles Moffett and Sonny Simmons (It Is Revealed, issued on Zounds). Following a few short-lived bands, Cherry joined the New York Contemporary Five in October 1963, replacing trumpeter Bill Dixon (suffering from embouchure difficulties, he remained the group's chief arranger). This group, with reedmen Tchicai and Archie Shepp, bassist Don Moore and the aforementioned Moses, had a successful run in Copenhagen, recording two sessions for Sonet and two for Fontana (one sans Cherry), and featuring a number of compositions from Ornette's book as well as Cherry's own "Cisum" and "Consequences." "Cisum" (from volume one of the Sonet recordings) is particularly interesting, as it shows Cherry's unique compositional style at an early stage, the theme quite obviously an outgrowth of his solo style, a jagged construction that in parts recalls Ornette's music with its bar lengths mashed together, yet utilizing North African scales and a deep minor key for its structure (not to mention a militaristic 'call' signaling its entrée).


The Five disbanded in early 1964, with Shepp and Moses staying on in Scandinavia for a few months while Cherry and Tchicai returned to New York, where the trumpeter began to work off and on with tenor man Albert Ayler and drummer Sunny Murray in their respective (and combined) groups. In a way this was perhaps more fruitful than the New York Contemporary Five had been, for not only was Ayler's music as rooted in the folk tradition as Ornette's had been, Ayler was drawing his thematic references from traditional songs he heard while living in Scandinavia, bringing them into a free improvisational context and as he has said, "we play folk from all over the world" (interview with Frank Kofsky, quoted in the liner notes to Love Cry, Impulse, 1967). This sounds a lot like what Don Cherry's approach was soon to become, and in addition to both having spent time in Scandinavia, these perfect bedfellows probably influenced one another a great deal more than their few recordings together attest to. At the very least, Ayler's recordings of "Bells" and other loosely-stitched suites of military-marches, European folk songs and Afro-American blues became de rigeur after Cherry had moved along.

"Togetherness" was the loosely frameworked suite on which Cherry built most of his concert and recording repertoire over the next three years—fragments of it show up in all three of his Blue Note LPs, despite differing titles. When Cherry left the US for Paris in 1965, it did not take long for him to assemble a new working group, one that joined five itinerant musicians together for over a year (though the group's only recordings as a unit have appeared as bootlegs since its disbanding). In Paris, he met Heidelberg-born vibraphonist and pianist Karl Berger and the young French bassist Jean-Francois Jenny-Clarke; Cherry had brought drummer Aldo Romano and Argentina-born tenor man Leandro "Gato" Barbieri with him from Rome.

 Berger paints a picture of Cherry as one who functioned on a level completely beyond most other musicians; he carried a pocket-sized transistor radio with him wherever he went, listening to music from the world over, practicing tunes from Turkish folk music to the Beatles constantly and incorporating them into his suites. Often, Cherry would show up to concerts and rehearsals playing his wood flutes and with a slew of newly-found songs committed to memory, leading the affably game ensemble through an hour-long suite, the themes of which may or may not have been known beforehand. Indeed, altoist Carlos Ward, a later associate of Cherry's who worked with the trumpeter and composer in various aggregations throughout the '70s, had one of his most telling moments as a soloist on Relativity Suite (JCOA, 1973) in a subsection called "Desireles," one that Ward felt seemed written exactly for him. "It could have been already named, because I didn't know. A lot of songs Don would bring in, maybe he has titles to them but he didn't say. There was one piece that he would bring to every gig [I played with him], and he'd bring a little bit more each time, but he never played the whole piece... it was a composition in progress." The Durium recording, which focuses on the actual "Togetherness" suite, displays a somewhat ragtag quality of 'practicing on the stand,' but indeed this was probably the most-rehearsed material in the group's repertoire, its multiple themes introduced at will by references in solos and calling upon familiarity and flexibility as much as instrumental prowess. It is entirely possible that the other four members of the group did not know what they were going to be playing for the recording date—Monk, highlife, or one of Cherry's tunes, it was all part of "Togetherness."


While Berger and Barbieri eventually became ensconced in the New York scene, the former going on to form the Creative Music Studio at Woodstock in 1968, Cherry split his time between Scandinavia (he kept a home in Sweden with his wife Mocqui and son Lanoo Eagle Eye) and the United States, convening orchestras and small groups for regular expansions and reworkings of "Togetherness," including those at the Baden-Baden New Jazz Meeting of 1968 (Eternal Rhythm, MPS) and in 1971 at the Berlin Jazz Days ("Humus," with the New Eternal Rhythm Orchestra, on Actions, Philips), and a trio he led with bassist Johnny Dyani and Turkish drummer Okay Temiz. Cherry's music, while it had incorporated non-Western scales, began now to incorporate drones more regularlyh and making explicit use of instruments like the tamboura (going perhaps farther than a two-bass concept). Cherry, a collector of various wooden and metal flutes from Asia, also began using the doussn'gouni, a Malian stringed instrument he was exposed to while in Scandinavia. Ironically, some of the most interesting and effective uses of non-Western instruments were purely by kismet. For example, Joachim Berendt had a gamelan brought to Baden-Baden without telling Cherry, and insisted that it be used in the recording. Berger, Cherry and Swiss drummer Jaques Thollot were thus given the task of figuring out a way to incorporate them musically without proper understanding of how they are played, or even without proper mallets with which to play them. The high-pitched metallic tone that characterizes their sound on Eternal Rhythm is more greatly a result of 'making do' than sonic intent. In the hands of another ensemble, one has to wonder whether it would have come off at all.

 In a way, all of "Togetherness" — the incorporation of a myriad of themes and instruments to a work in progress — would mean nothing if it were not done with human growth in mind. To be sure, incorporating such a wide-ranging lexicon into the 'jazz' or 'free jazz' framework is a start, but Cherry could not stop there. The live recordings of both his trio and "Humus" include a great amount of group-audience interaction, with Cherry teaching concertgoers the proper way to say the phrase 'Si Ta Ra Ma' (later revisited in full song form with Dutch percussionist Han Bennink on Don Cherry, BYG, 1971) as a way into the heart of the music itself. In another context, the sing-along might seem hokey, but here it is done with utmost sincerity at giving concertgoers the opportunity not to merely listen, but to learn and understand, whether or not they are formal musicians. At the Workshop Freie Musik in 1971, Cherry and the Peter Brötzmann Trio held a workshop entitled "Free Jazz and Children," in which approximately 200 children with no musical experience were brought into a semi-classroom situation with instruments and four improvisers. Granted, according to Brötzmann it was not a complete success (mainly due to so many people showing up), but did lead to further experiments with children and improvisers as part of the "Kinder und Künst" program under the direction of Germany's Council on the Arts.

 "Don Cherry had an effect on people everywhere he went, because whenever he was in town, everybody would show up... things started happening around him because he was such a fun person to be around," so the words of Swedish percussionist Bengt Berger, who met Cherry in the early 1960s during the trumpeter's initial stay in Scandinavia. Indeed, Cherry's music is often associated very closely with the Scandinavian new music community, including such luminaries as Swedish reedmen Bernt Rosengren and Bengt 'Frippe' Nordstrom (whose album of duets with Cherry is the scarcest European jazz album), multi-instrumentalist Christer Bothen (noted for his playing of the dousson'gouni) and Norwegian bassist Arild Andersen. As a leader, Cherry recorded two sessions for Swedish labels Sonet and Caprice (including the eponymous Organic Music Society, 1971) in addition to having a huge structural influence on groups like Gunnar Lindquist's G.L. Unit (Orangutang!, EMI, 1970) and the work of Danish trumpeter-composer Hugh Steinmetz, who met Cherry in 1963 when the New York Contemporary Five visited Copenhagen. Cherry and his then-wife Mocqui bought a one-room schoolhouse in Togarten, Sweden, which became one of his principal home bases (this, in fact, was where Carlos Ward began working with him). Bengt Berger also began working with Cherry around this time: "I had been to India and had studied tabla, which he got very interested in, so we got to playing a lot, and I stayed for a long time at his house in Sweden and going on European tours [with him] as well." One of the focal points for the new music in Sweden was Stockholm's Moderna Museet, which had a geodesic dome at the time that the musicians played in — Cherry, Rosengren, Berger — allowing many of the young musicians to meet one another, as well as play with visiting musicians from other countries. Certainly, Cherry was galvanizing musicians in New York and Paris, but the European country which might qualify most as a spiritual home seemed to be Sweden. Perhaps this was because of several highly-skilled players of non-Western instruments in Stockholm, perhaps because of the rich folk heritage of the region, but whatever the reason, it bears mentioning that Don Cherry had a strong presence among this community in particular.

 For sure, Cherry's integration of Indian, Arabic, Chinese, European and African musics into a whole of which jazz was only a small fraction could have come at no more proper a time — the interest among American and European audiences in non-Western music was at the time fairly high, and consequently Cherry's music gained greater recognition than it might have otherwise. In the 1970s, he recorded for Atlantic and A&M and had a minor hit with "Brown Rice" (as might be expected, one of the stylistically least-indicative pieces that could have been chosen), as well as working in small and large groups with South African pianist-composer Abdullah Ibrahim, often featuring Ward. Nu, though not recorded to advantage, was one of Cherry's most fully integrated projects of the 1980s, one that featured Ward, bassist Mark Helias and percussionist Nana Vasconcelos as an extension of both jazz and non-Western improvisational principles along folk lines, swinging decidedly to the left of either Old and New Dreams (the cooperative band with tenor man Dewey Redman, Haden and Blackwell that revisited the Ornette songbook) or his various traditional music projects often heralded under the 'multi-kulti' banner (indeed, Cherry did cut a record with that very title, for ECM), rather than as investigation of improvisational art along worldwide folk principles, often set simultaneously. Ward, indeed, found 'Nu' to be one of his most important associations, for the very reason that one foot was decidedly within the jazz spectrum — that no matter how divergent his creative search became, the 'cry' was a necessary part of Cherry's music.

 Cherry often spoke of the idea of "selflessness" and of being "aboriginal," a concept which percussionist Adam Rudolph, curator of this month's Don Cherry Celebration at the Stone Gallery and a longtime collaborator of Cherry from 1978 until his death in 1995, has taken to heart and mind. Cherry, of course, never stayed in one place completely, spending time principally in Sweden, New York, and California during the last two decades of his life, but musically his practice took him everywhere. Percussionist Bengt Berger, who played with Cherry frequently in Sweden, noted how Cherry's curiosity led him to teach Turkish drummer Okay Temiz and trumpeter Maffay Falay the fundamental principles of Turkish folk music by asking them to teach him their musical culture—Berger: "he kind of put them onto their own folk music by being very interested in that. Then they started a Turkish group [of their own]." Rather than simply learning to play the music of another region or culture by rote was certainly far from Cherry's mind; part of this 'aboriginalness' was an effort to gain a clearer window into oneself and one's own creative possibilities, that one can become more fully attuned to one's artistic personality by incorporating aspects of other musics into the palette. In some ways, it reflects the age-old adage that one has to get as far away from oneself as possible in order to fully understand where one lies creatively and humanistically—an aesthetic walkabout, in other words. Don Cherry's walkabout took him to Brooklyn, Scandinavia, Turkey, Los Angeles, Paris, India and places in-between, but as an artist, it brought him home.

 Thanks to Adam Rudolph, Karl Berger, Carlos Ward, Prince Lasha, Ornette Coleman, Bengt Berger, and all the artists interviewed for this project.  

Photo Credit:  Jack Vartoogian/Front Row Photos

http://soundamerican.org/sa_archive/sa14/index.html 


SA14: The Don Cherry Issue

“No man is an island.” —John Donne

 It’s an axiom, and one that is ultimately relatable to this issue’s central figure, Don Cherry. But, before we go any further, I want to present a separate axiomatic phrase that envelops the broader working philosophy of Sound American, this time from Benjamin Disraeli:

 “Change is inevitable. Change is constant.”

 In order to quickly veer away from the territory of the precocious teen using his sister’s copy of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations to pad out a five-page paper on the Marshall Plan, let’s explore how these two postulates relate to the pages within Sound American Issue 14.

 Trumpet player, improviser, and world-music iconoclast Don Cherry was easily my least favorite artist on the instrument when I was growing up. Preferring the more conservative and controlled frenetic style of the late Miles Davis or Booker Little, I couldn’t hear past the lack of definition in Cherry’s phrasing to get to the heart of what he was doing. Over time, however, the way I understood his playing changed from indistinct, splattered lazy missed pitches to profoundly personal arcs of sonic color. My perception of his music developed, and I began to marvel at his ability to create and maintain such a powerful personal musical persona.

 With this new appreciation, I became fascinated by a specific period in the early 1960s during which Cherry, aside from his consistent work with Ornette Coleman, played on some of the most definitive recordings of the free jazz era. The thing that I found intriguing was that he, for all intents and purposes, wasn’t a leader on any of them. From The Avant-Garde with John Coltrane to Evidence with Steve Lacy and a small catalog of recordings with Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, Sonny Rollins, and Pharoah Sanders in between, Don Cherry was a somewhat ubiquitous presence on the great free jazz records of the 1960s.

 Given the unique nature of Cherry’s improvising, his presence on all these records is not so unusual, but what Don Cherry does on those recordings has fueled a lot of questions in my mind, ultimately culminating here in an entire issue devoted to that period. At least that was the plan before Disraeli’s axiom of change, ever looming in the Sound American office, was asserted.

 What is it about Don Cherry that made him able to sound so utterly unique while framing saxophonists as iconic as John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins in a sort of light they would never quite experience again? That was the question I wanted to tackle, but as the first interviews—meant to simply provide a back story for the grand thrust of this issue—began to take shape, it became clear that the influence of the man was not going to be contained in such a simple and limited question. Not to put too fine a point on it, change was inevitable.

 It immediately became clear that the experience of Don Cherry could not be limited to a handful of classic records. At the very least, it is essential to look at his career as an arc in the same way we may view Miles Davis and his many stylistic periods. Cherry was as radical in his changes as Davis, if perhaps more quiet about it. His own music could hardly be called a foray into the music of other cultures and traditions, because it doesn’t exist only as a passing interest or surface level exercise. Instead, he absorbed the music of Africa and the Middle East, and what came out was something that had inflection and influence but no sense of artificial fusion. His music has this quality because, as all of the interview subjects who had met Cherry have stated in their own way, to him all music is music.

 This issue’s initial interviews and articles all tangentially answer the original question of how Cherry affected those early 1960s recordings, but always through the lens of this broader philosophy. Percussionist Hamid Drake, who played in the trumpeter’s last bands, talks about Cherry’s freedom with his musicians and his ability to “orchestrate his individual voice into any situation.” Cornetist Graham Haynes tells stories about Cherry’s giving spirit and citizenship of the world. William Parker, in conversation with special guest contributor Jeremiah Cymerman, paints a picture of the Lower East Side of the 1970s in which Don Cherry was a constant, open, and friendly presence.

 In all of these cases, Cherry’s confidence in his own sound and his magnanimity of spirit are given as approximate answers to what may have been the reason he was able to convincingly play Thelonious Monk tunes with Steve Lacy and Ghosts with Albert Ayler. To stop there, though, would be to miss his greater purpose. Far from being an island, as in Donne’s axiom, Don Cherry was a wide-reaching, permanent, and high-speed mass transit system. For every analysis of his work with Ornette Coleman, [world-music trio] Codona, or [bassist] Charlie Haden, there are three apocryphal stories of his generosity and support for the musicians he played with regularly or met once in passing.

 As the articles for this issue accrue, it will become obvious that this sense of giving and openness is the true power of Don Cherry the musician and the human being. Not only that, but it continues to be so, long after his physical body has left us. As improvisers such as Chad Taylor, Ralph Alessi, Tomas Fujiwara, Jon Irabagon, and Taylor Ho Bynum each try to explain Cherry’s special quality in relation to a specific recording from that magical early-60s period, it instantly becomes clear that he has and will continue to live on in subsequent generations.

 For those who have no experience of Don Cherry’s music, and for those who just want an excuse to spend an afternoon revisiting his history, this issue includes a narrative biography and a page of performance footage. It is my suggestion that the reader and listener start here to get a sense of the feeling of Don Cherry so they can make the most out of the interviews and appreciations to come. Although it is a very small, and by no means complete, cross-section of those who have been influenced directly or indirectly by Don Cherry, each has been chosen because of his ability to articulate the specific magic of the man.
-–Nate Wooley, Editor-in-Chief

An Introduction to Don Cherry

As stated in our editor’s opening remarks, Sound American issue 14 is an attempt to appreciate the indefinable magic that makes Don Cherry’s music and philosophy so unique. The following pages are intended to give an in-depth backstory to the stories of praise, inspiration, and consternation that will inevitably follow as our contributors grapple with Cherry as a musical, spiritual, and human being. If this issue were a building, then these articles would be the load-bearing walls, with all that will come later providing differing levels of infrastructure, lighting, and decoration into the understanding of Don Cherry that we’re attempting to construct.

 Cherry was born on November 18, 1936, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and was surrounded by music from an early age. Both his mother and grandmother played piano, and his father owned The Cherry Blossom Club, a venue that hosted some of the great swing bands of the time as they traveled through the Great Plains. In 1940, the family moved westward to Los Angeles, where Cherry’s father worked at the Plantation Club, an essential jazz spot in the Watts neighborhood of South L.A.

 Although he was initially enrolled in Fremont High School in the South Central neighborhood of the city, Cherry often ditched classes to sit in with the big band of nearby Jefferson High instead. Jefferson was well known at the time for producing some of bebop and cool jazz’s biggest stars, such as saxophonists Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray and flugelhorn player Art Farmer. Samuel Brown, the instructor of Jefferson High’s dance band, allowed Don to play, although it is unclear if he knew that Cherry was not officially enrolled.* His truancy ultimately led to Cherry being transferred to an area reform school, where he met and forged a long-lasting friendship with drummer Billy Higgins.

Higgins is just one of the amazing musicians who made up the vibrant musical world that was L.A. in the 1950s. As a youth, Cherry absorbed the few recordings of Fats Navarro, an early hero, and was mentored from time to time by Clifford Brown as the hard-bop trumpeter made stops in town as part of Max Roach’s ensemble. Meanwhile, bassist Charles Mingus was making his earliest experiments in jazz composition, Scott LaFaro was redefining the possibilities and role of the bass in jazz, Eric Dolphy was transposing bird song into his own specific woodwind vocabulary, and Charlie Haden was expanding on his experience playing Appalachian folk music as a youth. It was a time and place that, in hindsight, seems readymade for Cherry’s hunger for new things and spirit of freedom of expression.

*Jefferson High School’s Wikipedia entry does list Don Cherry as a “notable alumnus.”

Cherry met saxophonist Ornette Coleman in 1954. At the time, the trumpeter was working in a band with saxophonist James Clay and Higgins at the storied Lighthouse Café in Hermosa Beach. Clay’s group would play during the intermission between sets of the visiting acts each evening. During the day, Clay, Cherry, Higgins, and bassist Charlie Haden would be with Ornette, learning how to play the young alto saxophonist’s free-wheeling compositions.
In 1958, this group would make their, now legendary, first performances under the leadership of pianist Paul Bley, and without Clay on saxophone. In October of that year, an enterprising recordist caught the band at the Hillcrest, producing the 32-minute beginning of a revolution, Live at the Hillcrest 1958. The album features early examples of the already identifiable styles of all the players involved, although the material—two from Ornette and two bebop/swing chestnuts—did not make the kind of statement that Coleman’s group would in the next year.

 The core of the Hillcrest group, without Bley, went on to create some of the most influential and earth-shattering jazz music of the twentieth-century. With most musicians, album titles such as The Shape of Jazz to Come, Tomorrow is the Question, and Change of the Century invite accusations of hubris, but the music of Coleman made the legitimation of these claims unnecessary.

 Cherry was Ornette Coleman’s longest standing musical partner, performing on almost all of the saxophonist’s most important records from 1958’s Something Else to the musical manifesto of Free Jazz in 1960, the indefinable Science Fiction of 1971, to a sort of summing up of In All Languages in 1987.

 In a way, Cherry was part of Ornette’s sound. The recordings that featured other frontline partners have a different overall sonic patina to them. There is a commitment to a sound—a vocal quality different from what Ornette gets on saxophone—and some sort of magical joy in the freedom inherent in the music of that time that makes Cherry indispensable to any real conversation of Ornette Coleman’s legacy.**

It would be a mistake to define Don Cherry as simply a product or portion of Ornette Coleman’s musical vision, however. In the 1960s, Cherry lent his pocket trumpet to recordings with almost every other visionary saxophonist of the time. Between 1960 and 1963, he recorded The Avant-Garde alongside John Coltrane, Evidence with Steve Lacy, Sonny Rollins’s freewheeling live set Our Man in Jazz, a handful of recordings with Albert Ayler, and was part of the New York Contemporary Five with Archie Shepp and John Tchicai. In each setting, Cherry found a way to maintain a balance between his very unique and personal sense of music and the diversity of aesthetics presented to him—from the gospel screams of Ayler to the dry lyricism of Steve Lacy.

In 1964, Cherry put together his first consistent group while he was living in Paris. The group featured the young Argentinean saxophonist Gato Barbieri, who, as Cherry did with Ornette Coleman, became an integral part of the sound of Cherry’s compositions and musical vision. The recordings that resulted from this group were released by Blue Note in 1965 and 1966. Where Is Brooklyn?, Complete Communion, and Symphony for Improvisers feature compositional elements that define a certain aesthetic Cherry maintained throughout his life, even as he delved into more experimental forms and collaborations in the 1970s. Among these traits were a predilection for fragmented folk-like melodies from American and non-American traditions, a spontaneity that felt as if a pre-set structure was lacking, and an organic mix of jazz rhythms with pulses from Latin America and Africa.

In the same way that confining our understanding of Don Cherry to his role in Ornette Coleman’s band would be misleading, it is misleading to define him strictly as a trumpet player or even as a jazz musician. Beginning in the late 60s and early 70s, Cherry began to explore new modes of expression that spread his focus onto other musical traditions and instruments. His duo recordings with percussionist Ed Blackwell were more than a drums and trumpet jazz record. Each explored African traditions through use of specific rhythmic and melodic material and, especially in Cherry’s case, with the addition of new sources such as bamboo flutes, piano, and other instruments from Africa and Arabic traditions.

The 1970s was a time of movement for Cherry, musically and geographically. He spent a period teaching at Dartmouth College as well as residing as an expat in Sweden. Musically, his sound found a wider application than ever before. He made a recording with digital electronics pioneer and fellow Dartmouth faculty Jon Appleton (Human Music, 1970), explored more overt aspects of world music on his own recordings Organic Music Society and Eternal Now, combined forces with radical contemporary classical composer Krzysztof Penderecki (Actions, 1971), added rock and funk to his palate with his own recording Brown Rice and a collaboration with Lou Reed, and co-composed the soundtrack to one of the twentieth-century’s oddest films, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain.

The collective trio, Codona, consisting of Cherry, Collin Walcott on sitar, tabla, and percussion, and Naná Vasconcelos on berimbau, percussion, and voice feels like a distillation of the broad influences of Cherry’s music in the 1970s. In the course of three recordings for ECM Records, the trio defined a unique world that combined the sound of post-Eno ambient music with traditional music from Africa and the Middle East and just the right amount of free jazz. If Los Angeles in the 1950s was the perfect kind of energy for someone like Don Cherry to learn and develop in, then Codona was the perfect setting for the culmination of a lifetime of that experience.

As Codona’s short period ended with the untimely death of Walcott in 1984, Cherry returned to the music that launched his career with a new confidence and elegance honed in a lifetime as a global citizen and musical researcher. Beyond another duo recording with Blackwell, the brilliant El Corazón, he participated in Old and New Dreams, which played the music of Coleman (among others) and featured former bandmates Haden and Blackwell. He even recorded with his first bandleader, Clay, on Art Deco—one of his last documents as a leader.

Don Cherry died on October 19, 1995, in Malaga, Spain. That’s not where the story ends, however. His influence as an unofficial world ambassador of music lives on in Sweden, Paris, and Copenhagen. His phrasing and sound lives on as a part of new aesthetic of contemporary musicians such as Taylor Ho Bynum and Josh Berman. His children play music with his spirit.

Don Cherry was a true revolutionary and an artist for whom the music came first and was something that everything else was in service of: the technique, the politics, the economics. In his own way, he had the ability to reinvent himself in the same manner that Miles Davis did, although perhaps with fewer fireworks. He was an American original, a one-of-a-kind artist, and an indefinable spiritual presence.

Don Cherry Video Playlist

https://www.artsjournal.com/jazzbeyondjazz/2009/02/in_the_spirit_of_originality_o.html 





Jazz Beyond Jazz

Howard Mandel's Urban Improvisation




A visitation with Don Cherry’s spirit

 
by

Attempts to revisit the music of an extraordinary improviser work all too infrequently, if “work” means evoking something close to the living presence of the player him-or-herself. This is true even when the tribute-payers are the tributee’s collaborators, bearing the best intentions. 

But “In the Spirit of Don Cherry,” an all-star octet organized by pianist Karl Berger was able at a Symphony Space performance a couple weeks back to imbue seldom-heard yet unusually memorable songs with the wit, grace and world-ranging musicality of the man who created them (playing pocket trumpet with Collin Walcott, tabla in this photo by Lona Foote).
CherryWolcottLona4web200x251.jpg
Berger,  the force behind the legendary, influential and under-reported Creative Music Studio of Woodstock — with trumpeter/cornetist Graham Haynes, tenor saxophonist Peter Apfelbaum, tubaist Bob Stewart, guitarist Kenny Wessel, bassist Mark Helias, drummer Tani Tabal and vocalist Ingrid Sertso — performed tunes Cherry included in his great albums of suites Complete Communion and Symphony for Improvisers (both on celebrated Blue Note Records, from 1965 and ’66, respectively) as well as a couple recorded elsewhere, like “Art Deco,” title track of a 1986 album. True to its name, the concert’s operative plan was “in the spirit of . . .” rather than “note-for-note.” The musicians, most of whom had worked directly with Cherry, evoked the beauty, playfulness, pathos, imagination, unforced complexity and constant interactivity he tapped in himself and others by blowing as if they were onstage with him.

I have written about Cherry before, based on several personal encounters. He is probably best known for his collaborations with such indelibly jazz-linked individualists as Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins, Albert Ayler, George Russell, Archie Shepp and John Coltrane — his bits on albums by rockers Lou Reed, Ian Drury, Steve Hillage and Yoko Ono — his close work with drummer Edward Blackwell, electronics composer Jon Appleton, and the indigenous-world-jazz trio Codona — his large ensemble efforts with the Jazz Composers Orchestra, the Haden-Bley Liberation Music Orchestra, Sun Ra and Krzysztof Penderecki. None of them ever overwhelmed him; they depended upon his unique ability to compliment by being distinctly himself. He urged that same empathy in musicians as diversely based as Gato Barbieri, Bobo Stenson, Okay Temiz and Pharoah Sanders. 

Cherry’s playing was rooted in melody and rhythm’s dance; he was fascinated with sounds be they organic, acoustic, amplified and/or processed, and into everything from trad to bop to avant garde, bossa nova to gamelan to raga to punk to noise. It speaks volumes that his ability to inspire others was one of his strong suits, and it’s remarkable that so much of his voice, concept, ok spirit, survives 13 years after his death. The musicians who admire what he did are those who keep him alive, of course, and Berger’s crew did an exemplary job of tossing riffs back and forth, expanding on their unforeseen implications, finding backdrops to underscore each other’s solo, making directly personal statements that blended into the ensemble whole, coloring with intensity, summoning deep and shifting moods but staying buoyant, always buoyant.

Those are the very attributes of Communion, which Cherry recorded with a quartet (Barbieri, tenor sax; Henry Grimes, bass; Blackwell, drums) that seems as busy as a band twice as big, and Symphony, (Barbieri, Grimes and Blackwell with Berger on vibes as well as piano, J.F. Jenny Clarke playing second bass, and Pharoah Sanders playing an amazing piccolo part) that seems transparent, for all the collective improvisation in which its personnel reveled.

Especially nice little touches from the band Berger assembled (which has performed in Europe and would like to convene again; it’s an project with shifting personnel) included: his own “arranger’s piano” not meant to impress but to serve; Wessel’s guitar swings from country twang to digital effects; Helias’ hardwood tone and clear, fast figures; Stewart’s tirelessly upbeat oom-pah; Haynes’ determination to play what he hadn’t pre-planned; Apfelbaum’s security with the material and willingness to wrestle with it; Ingrid’s warmth and quietly fitting lyrics, Tabal’s seamless beat. The program was varied and fresh, with unexpected interpretations (“Manhattan Cry” stripped down from a roar, as it was recorded, to its ballad essence) and sudden switchups like one of Cherry’s unruly quirky lines delivered by the ensemble quick as a wink with nary a stumble. 

I miss Don Cherry and wish there was a biography of him, because he was a fascinating characgter. He was part Choctaw Indian from Oklahoma, and from an early age loved the trumpet playing of Clifford Brown. He was drawn to fabrics and textiles, using tapestries by his Swedish wife, Moki, for stage dressing or his own clothes whenever he could. I’ve heard stories of him roller-skating around Los Angeles in the ’50s, of him spelunking into sacred Native American caves to play clay ocarinas, of how appeared daily under the cell windows of Angela Davis to serenade her on wood flutes during one of her incarcerations. In the early ’70s he held two weeks of concerts in a geodesic dome in the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark and in the ’90s, not in the best of shape, he dropped into East Village dives to play with all comers. He is survived by musical children, including keyboardist David Ornette Cherry, his step-daughter Neneh Cherry and youngest son, Eagle-Eye. 
ESP Disks has released three volumes of Don Cherry’s band with Barbieri and Berger live at Montmarte, 1966 — they’re preparing the repertoire for Symphony for Improvisers, rough but eager get it right. These recordings, and the vast majority of his others — with Old and New Dreams, with Johnny Dynani, with the Mandingo Griot Society, Trilok Gurtu with Tamma — are enduring gifts. 

Berger recalled Cherry between songs with both awe and rue. The musicians, together, reveled in what he’d wrought. The audience comprised musicians and aficionados who knew him and were slow to leave the hall after the gig because his sound had been conjured. Maybe Don Cherry’s ghost was about. I don’t often think that, but this time I did.

http://www.furious.com/perfect/doncherry2.html



DON CHERRY



Multikulti Soothsayer Player: On a Late Diptych
by W. C. Bamberger
(February 2013)


In July of 1976, I travelled (began as a hitchhiker, gave up and caught a bus in Kansas City) to Boulder, Colorado to attend Naorpa Institute as a summer student. I could only afford two classes, a poetry class with Allen Ginsberg and a jazz class with Don Cherry. In 1968, I had purchased Cherry's Eternal Rhythm because of the presence of outre-guitarist Sonny Sharrock (his first album, Black Woman, remains a favorite of mine; "Blind Willie" remains a constant on my own guitar-playing repertoire, despite the bother of having to go into the eccentric tuning it uses), Cherry's album was filled with clashing metallophones--gamelan orchestra instrument from Indonesia--Sharrock's sproinging guitar, prepared piano, horns, percussionist, all playing free, all clearly being directed by Cherry on trumpet and double wooden flute. The sound was hard on the ears, but even harder to dismiss. Soon after I chanced upon his Relativity Suite (JCOA records, now criminally unavailable), and I was hooked. The piano pounded out repetitive rhyhtms, there were Chinese instruments, shouting, fierce solos. I knew Cherry had played with Ornette Coleman, but I had been "born too late," to find Coleman's music very interesting. I followed Cherry's forward progress instead, album by hard-to-find album, through the hypnotic other-worldliness of Eternal Now, an import, and its more accessible follow-up on A&M, Don Cherry (in reissues now unfortunately retitled Brown Rice). The opportunity to take a class from him (despite the fact that my own instruments, guitar, harmonica, a little primitive piano, were not good fits for his music) was irresistible.

The class was held in a small room with a piano in the middle and seats around the walls. Some of the poets at the school attended--including (after he returned from attending his father on his death bed) Allen Ginsberg, who banged away gamely with his Australian song sticks, evidencing very little idea of where the beat might be. Cherry's long-time collaborator Ed Blackwell, wearing a dashiki, sat to one side, playing a small wooden slit drum. The buoyant "plonk" of the notes of the drum, a sound somewhere between a marimba and a taut trampoline, helped the student crowd keep time. Cherry taught mostly by example. He would play a phrase on his trumpet or on the piano, announce the notes for those who understood notation, and even hang up tapestries made by his thyen-wife, artist Moki, which spelled out the notes in Indian notation. He would then begin to lead everyone through the piece, repeating it again and again until all the players and singers had joined in to the best of our abilities.

I shared the piano bench with poet Diane de Prima's son, Alex--he got the bass side of Middle C, and I got the treble. We played and played over an insistent two-chord pattern (Dm and C) in 9/8 which turns up under several titles on Cherry's later albums, and a tune in E with a two-note bass line and a simple four-note melody played round-style. This last piece included singing, with Cherry leading the group in "Oh, oh-oh-oh-oh, Oh, oh-oh-oh-oh, oh Su-ma-la...." This is as close as I can come to transcribing the word he sang; I have never found this piece on any of Cherry's recordings (I still play this compelling little mystery piece, either on piano or guitar, at least once a month. A brief snippet of this can be heard somewhere on YouTube, in a Cherry video I once chanced upon but have never been able to find again; the internet IS Borges' "Book of Sand." Another song we played turned up in a funkified version on Cherry's album Hear and Now, known in the vernacular as "Disco Don." Horrible).

Each class was supposed to last two hours, but Cherry rarely played beyond fifty minutes or so. He did stay after class and talk to students, so I was able to speak with him briefly one afternoon. He was standing against a wall smiling, and he told me, "This has been the greatest day of my life." When I asked him why, he replied that he had been granted an hour-long personal audience with the Rinpoche. Chogyam Trungpa, The Rinpoche, a Tibetan holy man in exile from his home country, was the founder of Naropa and its spiritual leader. The Rinpoche was a controversial figure. He rode around Boulder in a Mercedes, accompanied by bodyguards, and was an obvious alcoholic. The year before, on Halloween, there had been a notorious incident where he had ordered his guards to strip poet W. S. Merwin and his girlfriend naked during a spiritual retreat (when I asked Ginsberg about it after the Cherry class one day, he got a pained-looking smile on his face and said something to the effect that even the best teachers are not immune from human mistakes. I didn't press the matter).

With all the world travelling Cherry had done, with all the tremendous music he had made, and all the brilliant musicians he had played with, to hear him say that his audience with the Rinpoche was the greatest thing that had ever happened to him was, for me, as jarring as finding out, one early Sunday morning, that William S. Burroughs wouldn't cross an empty street against a DON'T WALK light. This certainly says more about my spiritual limitations than about Cherry.
In addition to the class, Cherry and Blackwell played a couple of concerts at the school. Their 1982 duet album El Corazón captures much the same spirit and interplay as those concerts. Their tour in support of this album was the last time I saw Cherry. The concert was held in a low-ceiling second-story loft, with wooden walls and ceiling. Blackwell created a constantly shifting rhythmic base that allowed Cherry to wander from piano to his dusso-ngouni (the African instrument from Mali that he had been playing since his stint in Scandanavia in the late 1960's and 1970's) to his trumpet, or to just sing as he prowled the small stage. Between sets Blackwell walked to the refreshment bar to get a water; Blackwell had been ill for years and his hands shook so badly that he could hardly hold the bottle, but when he had drum sticks in his hand his movements were sure and precise. While I never saw him perform again, I continued to keep up with his recordings--to the point of buying Lou Reed's 1979 The Bells, on which Cherry figures prominently. A fine album, in fact.

In 1988 and 1990, Cherry released two albums on A&M Records. These amount to a diptych portrait of the entire span of Cherry's career to that point (he would live five more years. He died of liver cancer in Spain in 1995). The first of this pair, Art Deco, gathers together musicians he first played with in California in the 1950's, in the bop combo The Jazz Messiahs. Drummer Billy Higgins, in fact, first met Cherry when they both attended a "problem student" high school in East Los Angeles. The bassist is Charlie Haden, with whom Cherry played in the classic Ornette Coleman Quartet in the late 1950's and early 1960's. The fourth member of the Art Deco group is tenor player James Clay. Clay had arrived in Los Angeles from Dallas, Texas in the mid-1950's, and Cherry and Haden were both taken with what they felt was his progressive approach. But after a short period of practicing Coleman's music with Cherry and Higgins in the Jazz Messiahs period, Clay moved in a more conservative direction, recording a straight-ahead album with fellow-Texan David "Fathead" Newman, and playing in the saxophone section of Ray Charles' big band for a time. In his contribution to the liner notes, Clay makes it clear that he is uncomfortable playing in even a mildly free context; suggests he feels lost with no piano guiding the chord changes. His playing here doesn't betray this discomfort: it is assured, particularly on the ballads, although nothing here makes clear what Haden and Cherry's excitement was about.

The album opens with its most memorable track, Cherry's composition "Art Deco." One of the pocket trumpets Cherry owned had previously been played by a member of Josephine Baker's jazz band, and this track deliberately evokes the slightly ticky-tack rhythms and changes of that period. "Art Deco" opens with Cherry's open trumpet playing a staggered melody line, one with a gently stuttering rhythm, and then as the tune moves into a steadier rhythm he quickly slips a mute into his horn and plays the rest of the piece muted. This gives the trumpet a beautiful vocal quality and Cherry's solo is one of his most teasing and beautiful. Cherry played "Bemsha Swing," Thelonious Monk's joyful, body twisting late-bop tune throughout his career. The take here shines with the pleasure the group takes in its leaping lines. 

"Body and Soul" begins (as would be expected, considering the tune's jazz pedigree as a Coleman Hawkins classic) with Clay's breathy descent into the melody. Clay solos for the first four minutes, then turns it over to Haden, who plays beautifully filigreed variations on the melody for one chorus. Clay then returns and closes the track. Cherry doesn't play a note. "I've Grown Accustomed to Your Face," another ballad standard, is also dominated by Clay, with another Haden solo. Though Clay's playing here is a little more disjoint than on "Body and Soul," it still comes across as warm, romantic music--full of cigarette smoke and starlight. Again, Cherry sits out the track.

"Folk Medley," Haden's short solo feature, is dominated by a melody that sounds like "John Henry"--or like Leadbelly's subtly syncopated "John Hardy." Higgins and Cherry each take an unaccompanied solo outing as well. The album is fleshed out with three of Ornette Coleman's tunes, and at this remove they come across as very much in the bop lineage. By the 1980's, it had become difficult to remember why Coleman's music was once seen as revolutionary. The tunes are solid, particularly "The Blessing," and "When Will the Blues Leave," both of which Cherry also played regularly for years, but these recordings don't remain long in the memory. 

Aside from the title track, Art Deco comes across as an exercise in nostalgia, a nod to Cherry's early influences. The follow-up album, Multikulti, banishes nostalgia entirely, and only a few old friends--Ed Blackwell, Karl Berger, Nana Vasconcelos--participate. The album begins by building music from the ground up: Cherry plays "Trumpet" unaccompanied, showing listeners how melody and rhythm, swing and power can all be carried by a single player. Cherry then takes up the Doussn' gouni and, accompanied by some quiet but rattling percussion (including, so it sounds, a kazoo!) and trumpet overdubs, tells the story of going into the shop of a soothsayer to try to get some remedy for his "troubles with his honey." In a hilariously dry recitation, Cherry tells us that she sells him magic powders, roots, miracle candles, some gold dust and more; "Then we went to the till, where I paid my very, very large bill," he says. She tells him to come back next week for "part two, of what you must do." This is musical of wry self-identity--Cherry showing himself possessed of a contemporary ironic attitude and yet squarely in the grand African Griot tradition. Cherry then offers another solo piece, this time on wooden flute.

Track four is a brilliantly rhythmic electro-acoustic piece titled "Birdboy." Synthesizers and drum machines sent up a polyrhythmic variation on a reggae beat, and Cherry plays a lovely spare line that scoots over the hopping and skittering rhythms with great confidence. The use of the mute here moves the timbre of the trumpet closer to that of the electronic sounds, a very interesting blend. This track was producer by Cherry's son, David. Cherry follows "Birdboy" with a solo on melodica, a keyboard that is powered by the player's breath. 

Next up is "Dedication to Thomas Mapfumo." Mapfumo is a Zimbabwean singer and guitarist whose political songs forced him into political exile in the U.S. "Dedication" is the first track that resembles a "jazz tune" as we usually think of such, but it has differences. Twin marimbas and Vasconcelos' shaker evoke Mapfumo's music, placing the tune somewhere along the path between Africa roots music and jazz. Carlos Ward (a Coltrane veteran and long-time associate of Abdullah Ibrahim) and Peter Apfelbaum play saxophones here, and Ward and tuba player Bob Stewart are carried over onto the next track, "Pettiford Bridge," also written by Ward. This is the first straight ahead jazz tune, a very bop track with the kind of leaping, rhythmic lines that Cherry favored. Cherry, however, seems a little absent here, a little tired on his first chorus. Ward's soloing is much better, pushing against the bar lines but never losing his melodic sense. Cherry plays a second, shorter solo with more energy and invention. Cherry follows this with "Piano/Trumpet," an overdubbed duet with himself. This is a slow, bluesy piece with Cherry's muted trumpet again taking on a vocal quality.

At the time this album was recorded, Cherry was spending much of his time on the West Coast. There he met up with Apfelbaum, a former student. Apfelbaum plays piano and tenor saxophone, and is a prolific composer. On the two tracks that follow, Cherry plays with Apfelbaum's group, the Hieroglyphic Ensemble. The first of these is "Until the Rain Comes," the longest track here at more than twelve minutes. This begins with a sway, a slow stroll with a descending highlife-style guitar part over Apfelbaum's piano and Cherry's muted trumpet. Ingrid Sertso begins telling a story about a romantic scene and as she finishes, repeating the title over and over, the band--saxophones, brass, guitars, percussionists, organ, fourteen players in all--slowly enter. After a brief knot of free noise, the track more than doubles in speed and tears along with solos from Cherry and Apfelbaum on tenor. The playing is energetic, the rhythm infectious, but it is the lovely sway of the opening that will stick with you (and this may be the point to mention that Cherry was particularly fond of the alap section of an Indian music performance, this being the slow, contemplative opening where the player investigates the possibilities of the composition before beginning the improvisations).

The second track with the Hieroglyphics Ensemble is "Divinity-Tree." This is a more Latin-influenced version of the same sound as "Until the Rain Comes," and is the weakest band track. This is followed by a rootsy, out-and-out Latin shout, "Rhumba Multikulti." Here Apfelbaum and Cherry overdub themselves to form the band, and this is reinforced by a choir that includes Karl Berger and Allen Ginsberg. This too begins with a slow, contemplative section, with Cherry's trumpet tone coming straight out of mariachi school. They then drop into a section of chanting and clapping. The Latin rhythms slip over one another with hard-to-count but easy to dance to overlaps. Cherry's trumpet interjects here and there rather than dominates.
The final track is again Cherry multi-dubbed. He plays Doussn' gouni, chants and plays muted trumpet and percussion (there is also an uncredited synthesizer rumbling below his instruments, but it adds nothing; someone's mistake...). On this quiet but rhythmic note the album draws to a close.

The ECM album Dona Nostra from 1994 is often listed as Cherry's last album, but there he shares co-leader credit with Lennart Åberg and Bobo Stenson and most of the tracks are group compositions. The album features some fine playing by Cherry, but it lacks his distinctive stamp and it's more reasonable to see Art Deco and Multikulti as the last true Don Cherry albums. For me, they are Cherry's gathering in of his legacy, his hopes and his ambitions. The first tells us where he came from, but the second tells us where he still hoped to go and, more importantly, how he hoped to travel: with all tributaries of music flowing into his work, with friends old and new, in a collaborative spirit where he didn't have to write all the music nor take all the solos, where he could as easily be a sideman as a leader, just as easily a singer as a trumpet player, as easily a folk musician as an "avante-garde jazz musician." Viewed as individual albums, these two are solid, though perhaps for the most part unremarkable, entries into the continuum of jazz history. Taken as musical expressions of where Cherry's journey into the many facets of the world's music and his own humanity had led and would still lead him (he played new music with new people almost to the day of his death), these are the summation and explication of a long and remarkable passage.

https://jazztimes.com/reviews/albums/don-cherry-complete-communion/




     
 By Bill Shoemaker
  JazzTimes 


 Don Cherry: Complete Communion


 In the late ’50s and early ’60s, Don Cherry was largely defined by his associations with Ornette Coleman and Sonny Rollins. Complete Communion began to permanently change that. With this album and its follow-up, Symphony for Improvisers, Cherry articulated an avant positivism that still has many esteemed adherents. While the buoyant, often folkish themes of these two LP sidelong suites are decidedly user-friendly compared to much of what was happening in 1965-Coltrane’s Ascension; Ornette’s Chappaqua Suite; Ayler’s Bells-this is adventurous music even by today’s standards. The interplay between Cherry, who plays cornet on the date, Leandro “Gato” Barbieri, Henry Grimes and Edward Blackwell is beguiling, as it pushes the envelope with an effortless flow instead of a relentless intensity.

https://jazztimes.com/reviews/albums/don-cherry-modern-art/
    
By David Whiteis
JazzTimes 


Don Cherry: Modern Art


This limited-edition CD and LP, recorded at Stockholm’s Museum of Modern Art in 1977, includes selections from trumpeter Don Cherry’s 1977 Hear & Now, a fusion-tinged outing that generated some controversy when it was released. Although it doesn’t quite live up to its billing as “Hear & Now unplugged” (only five of the 13 songs-“Universal Mother,” “Eagle Eyes,” “Karmapa Chenno,” “Mahakali” and “California”-are from that LP), Modern Art provides a rare opportunity to hear Cherry reinterpret that material in a primarily acoustic setting.

 Despite its pervasive spirituality, this is no exercise in New Age navel-gazing. Cherry ascends and soars, firing off multi-note fusillades with spitfire ferocity and blatting out tongue-stop-toughened extended phrases. As he did on Hear & Now, though, he also lays out frequently, letting flutist Tommy Koverhult and guitarist Georg “Jojje” Wadenius take the spotlight. According to percussionist Per Tjernberg’s liner notes, Koverhult arrived at the gig late, unfamiliar with most of the material, but he was a longtime Cherry compatriot and fit in seamlessly. Brilliant, full-toned and as improvisationally fearless as Cherry himself, he also summons a powerful rhythmic thrust alongside Tjernberg and fellow percussionists Peter Ek, Moki Cherry (Don’s wife) and Lena Ahlman. Wadenius alternates feathery leads with resonant chording, and he contributes chants, prayers and wordless imprecations throughout the set, seemingly having mastered not just the vocabulary but the rhythmic syntax and vocal timbre of traditional Indian devotional singing.

 As is now widely acknowledged, Don Cherry was playing “world music” long before it was called that; even aside from the historical significance of the five Hear & Now offerings, this set gives us an essential glimpse of this facet of his legacy.

THE MUSIC OF DON CHERRY: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH DON CHERRY:

DON CHERRY, Symphony For Improvisers Part I and 2


 


Complete Communion: Complete Communion/And Now/Golden Heart 

Don Cherry Complete Communion - Stuttgart 1966 -Live performance



Don Cherry - Old and New Dreams - w/ Ed Blackwell , Dewey ..

 

Don Cherry - Live in concert 1971

 


Don Cherry - Don Cherry / Brown Rice (1975) FULL ALBUM 

 


Don Cherry - Organic Music Society (1972) [Full Album]

 


Don Cherry "Brown Rice” 

 


Don Cherry - Live at Empire Theatre, Paris 1979

 


Don Cherry & Organic Music Theatre  

 


Where Is Brooklyn A (Don Cherry) 

 




Date: December 14, 1986
Location: New York, NY
Duration: 0:31:27

1. Don Cherry Talking Jazz Interview

Don Cherry Talking Jazz

His language like his life is free flowing, a stream that follows the lay of the land and rushes forward from a source of nature. He is full of joy and enthusiasm and his ideas often run ahead of his speech. Thus a conversation with Don Cherry is not a linear, organized event. It takes many contours, and it describes the journey of a remarkable mind and spirit. Just as his music encompasses the ethnic expression of cultures as far flung as the hills of North Africa and the Watts ghetto of Los Angeles, the New York art scene of the ‘50’s and the free community of the diggers in Sweden during the ‘70’s, Don Cherry has always played his own way, a very personal music. Starting as a trumpet player and then moving to the "pocket trumpet" which he made famous while working with Ornette Coleman's band, Don moved on to flutes, double reed instruments, African string instruments (such as the "hunter's bow") and even became a singer in order to set free his musical voice. Don Cherry is a pioneer in the field of "world music", which, ironically, has led him back to the classical jazz scene in the United States.