Born in Oklahoma City (Oklahoma) in 1936, Don Cherry is well known as the trumpet player of Ornette Coleman during his successful attempts to revolutionize jazz music. Mind, my readers: we won’t discuss here the principles of harmolodics, thing we hope we’ll face in the future, even if we’ll talk diffusely about the records our two heroes gave life together. For the moment it is important to stress that, if Coleman played a plastic saxophone in order to utilize the microtones – do you remember what we were discussing some months ago when talking about soprano saxophones and straight horns? – to create a freer music in comparison to bebop and the previous jazz music, Cherry used a pocket trumpet, an instrument with a nasal and a less chrystalline sound than an usual trumpet.
One thing that always hit me when I think about Coleman and Cherry’s instrumental choices, and an example I want to use to explain myself better, is that of those photographers who, in the digital i.e. in an extremely precise era, go back to Polaroids and toy cameras. Leaving some processes to the accident, to a form of creative chaos – as the saturation of colors, the impossibility to control contrast through different films and papers or, in the case of music, the difficulty in controlling instruments that are not thought to be heavily precise – is a good way to play a music in which there is no wrong note in a given process since it depends from what will follow.
So, what Coleman and Cherry were trying to obtain was an extreme freedom starting from extreme constrictions. If Something Else!!!, the first album by Ornette Coleman (Contemporary, 1958) shocked the audience of that time for its extreme freedom, it is true that it is an album full of beautiful, recognizable and memorable melodies. Mind about Jayne, third track of the album: trumpet and alto go at a nice unison before soloing, with Coleman producing himself in his typical ‘laughters’ before playing a melody with an undefined and mocking tonal center.
Things change a little with the following album Tomorrow is The Question! (Contemporary, 1959) where piano is excluded from the palette, which increases in tonal and harmonic freedom. Coleman is taking bebop revolution to its extreme. If Charlie Parker and his peers were playing with dissonances resolution trying to give life to a more and more complex game, defying the listener and the other musicians involved, the music of Ornette Coleman instead is prone to give into new directions.
Once John Coltrane, a Parker’s enthousiast during his younger age and a contemporary of Coleman, told an interviewer that he was, during his ‘sheets of sound period’, trying to express one sentence going in two different directions at once; Coleman himself wanted to reach with his music every possible direction. What we have here is a conscious attempt to go beyond the limits of an intellectual experience as bebop became in the end, trying to open new paths to the musicians who wanted to follow this new road even if at risk of not being understood.
There’s in fact a huge tradition of musicians who not only did not dig Ornette Coleman’s idea and practice of music, but also a great quantity of musicians who imagined the jazz Coleman and Cherry were creating was only a sum of incoherent, unrepeteable melodic lines in which dissonance had the effect of destroying the musicians ability to change chords and play with different intonations. Coleman music was taken by many – by Charles Mingus as an example: take for instance his interviews contained into the book Mingus Speaks by John F. Goodman where the bassist and composer talks diffusely about the music of Albert Ayler and others – as an attack to the seriousness and complexity of music itself.
If we try to observe better how things happened, we will notice, instead, that a huge amount of musicians from the end of the 1950s until the end of the following decade dedicated their energies to sort out of the shallows of a more and more intellectual drift in order to obtain always more freedom of expression. Albery Ayler with his ‘speaking in tongues’ melodies, Coltrane with his ‘sheets of sound’ and then with his collaboration with Pharoah Sanders in order to obtain the unpredictability of a music driven by two different musicians instead of one, Archie Shepp with his rawness and fierceness, and so on.
And even if tracks like Peace and Focus on Sanity are less anguishing, the unpredictability of where the horns will go was leaving the linstener of that time with a potent sense of disorientation. Things are going even worse – but we prefer to say: even deeper – with Free Jazz (Atlantic, 1961), an album where two quartets, one led by Coleman and the other led by his friend and pivotal figure of that time Eric Dolphy, are intersecting each other in a disorientating stream of consciousness of about 37 minutes.
Notably, the previous album This is Our Music (Atlantic, 1960) features a Coleman composition titled Beauty is a Rare Thing that in a way anticipates the trumpeter’s future enterprises as you can hear through Mu, a collection of two LPs issued by Actuel in 1969. But let’s keep on following the tracks in the right order. Obviously Ornette Coleman’s music not only encountered solid oppositions, but also arose curiosity at a point in which another contrasted innovator, the above nominated John Coltrane, in 1961 wanted to record an entire album of Coleman compositions alongside with his partners Don Cherry on pocket trumpet, Percy Heath and Charlie Haden on bass, and Ed Blackwell on drums.
Listening to the album The Avant Garde released by Atlantic is a strange experience. One can hear Coltrane trying to fit Coleman melodies with his peculiar style, not following harmolodic rules – harmolodics is the name of the music theory Coleman gave shape through his playing and thinking – but his own path. In a way this is comprehensible since no jazz musician can play as someone else and everybody has to stay as close as possible to his or her world of reference, but in another way this album seem to me as a wasted opportunity since there is not a real encounter between Coleman and Coltrane worlds, only a juxtaposition of compositions and styles into one album.
Anyway, soon Don Cherry started figuring out how his own music would sound, and soon he signed a contract with Blue Note producing his own trilogy in which one can hear how playing with two giants saxophonists helped him developing his own conception of art. Cherry’s trilogy embodying Complete Communion (Blue Note, 1965), Symphony for Improvisers (1966) and Where is Brooklyn? (1967) is one of the most accomplished statements in the realm of improvised music.
The concept is similar for each of the three records: there is a theme introducing a ‘tutti’, a unison, and then there is place for every soloist in order to express himself. If Complete Communion, featuring Gato Barbieri on tenor, Henry Grimes (from Albert Ayler combos) on bass and Ed Blackwell on drums, divided into two different parts, one for each LP side, it’s the most airy and catchy, relatively speaking, while the ending of the trilogy is left to the most newyorican, groovy and nervous Where is Brooklin?, where Cherry is supported by Pharoah Sanders, increasing his debt with Trane idea of sound and music.
Symphony for Improvisers, the album that stays in the middle of the trilogy, is possibly the most complex. The line up is comprised of Cherry on pocket trumpet, Pharoah Sanders and Gato Barbieri, Henry Grimes, Karl Berger on piano and vibraphone – possibly after the removal of these melodic instruments from the Coleman groups Cherry would love to know how they could be reintegrated into the music without loosing that peculiar stream of consciousness his pal gave life to – and the resulting music is aggressive, intimate and fluent at the same time.
But Cherry is the kind of person who don’t sleep on other people’s music theories, and by 1968-69 he starts exploring new territories in music, thanks also to a fruitful collaboration with Terry Riley, giving life to a previously unheard mix of improvised, ethnic music, art rock and psychedelia (not all the subgenres are always present together in the same project, but they convey into Cherry’s music as far as their essence, leaving every album and every project free to develop where the particular moment and musicians involved can make the sound fluorish).
More theatrical than his previous music, as one can see through different live performances recorded live and reproducible online, Don Cherry’s new path will be harshly absorbed by jazz intellighentzja, but important tracks will be visible in artists like Sergeij Kuryiokhin, a musician we talked diffusely last year. Mu – First Part and Mu – Second Part (BYG, 1969 and 1970) are possibly Cherry masterpieces, together with Symphony for Improvisers. Featuring the trumpeter accompanied only by Ed Blackwell on drums in a series of beautiful duets where Don Cherry plays time after time his pocket trumpet, a bamboo flute, piano, his own voice and a series of small percussions, this couple of records helped the musician in finding his own most personal voice.
Not ascribable exclusively to the realm of improvised music nor to that of exotic or world music but living a life of its own somewhere in the middle, this music is the higher point in Cherry’s career, not easily replicable as the less accomplished El Corazon (ECM, 1982) will show and an inspirational source for musicians to come, as the double CD Piercing The Veil (AUM Fidelity, 2007) by Cherry’s enthousiasts bassist William Parker and drummer Hamid Drake will show you.
Don Cherry’s releases at this point in his career become discontinuous and sometimes repetitive even if in a way fascinating. Orient and Blue Lake (both BYG, 1971) are attempts to broaden the landscape adding tampoura – played by his wife Moqi Cherry – and other instruments to the palette of the two Mu, but partly for the repetition of some formulas partly because of a lesser compelling inspiration the result is discontinuous.
A fascinating result is, instead, Brown Rice (Horizon, 1975) where Cherry, at his own pocket trumpet and also at Yamaha keyboards is accompanied by Frank Lowe on tenor saxophone, Charlie Haden on bass, Billy Higgins on drums and Ricky Cherry at acoustic and electric piano, giving live to a music similar to the so called krautrock explored in the same years by Can – raised by Irmin Schmidt, a student of Karlheinz Stockhausen, where psychedelia and trance are scratched by Lowe’s statements and sweetened by Don’s caressing but at the same time determined voice.
During his last years, Cherry’s music was issued by Manfred Eicher’s ECM, a label famous for his peculiar sound design: Cherry encountered old friends like Charlie Haden and new accolites like percussionist Nana Vasconcelos, producing a less adventuros but better recorded music coherently in line with his Theatre of Eternal Music idea. Passed away on October 19, 1995, Cherry’s music is one of the most intriguing and personal statements of one of the most creative of XX Century.
