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Reviews of Recent Media
Don Cherry
The Summer House Sessions
Blank Forms Editions 024
Don Cherry’s New Researches featuring Naná Vasconcelos
Organic Music Theatre - Festival de jazz de Chateauvallon 1972
Blank Forms Editions 023
This is a momentous year for Don Cherry. After decades of relative neglect, his legacy – one inextricably shared with his life partner Moki Cherry – has been brought threefold into the limelight by the NYC-based arts organization Blank Forms. The centerpiece is a richly detailed compendium of Don and Moki Cherry’s collaborative life-work, Organic Music Societies (see excerpt published in this issue); running alongside the book there’s the ongoing exhibition of Moki Cherry’s tapestries and ephemera from the Cherry universe at the Blank Forms space in Brooklyn; and to top it off, June sees the release of two previously unissued recordings, The Summer House Sessions and Organic Music Theatre - Festival de jazz de Chateauvallon 1972 (OMT).
The two releases are separated by four years – four years that must have felt like four lifetimes. Even measured against the Cherrys’ own highly itinerant standards, this period was a particularly errant one for the couple. Cross-cultural musical workshops in Stockholm; a road trip to Turkey which resulted in a theatrical collaboration with James Baldwin; several seminal recording sessions in New York, Paris, and beyond; a tour of Tunisia with Swiss pianist George Gruntz; a semester teaching at Dartmouth College (leading to the album Human Music with Jon Appleton); and, finally, the purchasing of an old schoolhouse in rural Sweden with a view to starting an experimental school. The tectonic plates of Cherry’s social and political milieux also shifted dramatically over this period. In the US, the black power movement crested, and began to crash and be crushed, creating shock waves that resonated throughout the 1970s and beyond. Europe, at the cross-roads of decolonization and the Cold War, was rocked by waves of popular revolt and a burgeoning counterculture. This was a turbulent period for the Cherrys and the circles in which they moved. Little wonder then that musically speaking these two releases are worlds apart.
The Summer House Sessions was recorded by Swedish sound engineer Göran Freese at his summer house on an island just outside Stockholm in July 1968. And it certainly sounds like summer. Something about the way it was recorded makes the music sounds like sunlight bouncing off rippling water. (In this respect it has something of the strange aquatic quality of some of Sun Ra’s homespun sessions.) The record opens with the sound of a burbling flute – more liquid-like than is ordinarily possible on a wind instrument. It is joined by the chatter of a child, limpid laughter, and gurgling percussion that slides towards an irregular patter. A few minutes in and more flutes join the foray, darting in, out, up, down and around the rhythmic turmoil – “sound variegated through beneath lit” as N.H. Pritchard might have put it in terms as obscure as they are illuminating.
Don and Eagle-Eye Cherry, Sweden, 1971 Courtesy of the Cherry Archive and the Estate of Moki Cherry
In more historical and technical terms, this record can be located at one of several musical cross-roads that provide a sense of the trajectories of Cherry’s itinerant life. Having recorded and released his first major works as leader in New York – a trilogy of albums on Blue Note recorded across 1965-1966 – Cherry returned to Sweden, where in 1968, he led a series of workshops exploring “extended forms, breathing techniques, drones, Turkish rhythms, Indian scales, singing and chanting, silence, and ‘ghost sounds,’ among other pursuits” (to quote from the liner notes). The resulting music can be heard on two releases: the first two tracks of the 2013 release Live in Stockholm (Caprice Records) and now, The Summer House Sessions. Recorded within six weeks of each other, the musical material is essentially the same: a roiling sweep of polyphonic free improvisation, Turkish melodies and rhythms, and distinctly post-Ornette statements that blur and unravel into extended suites. Cherry’s Swedish band provide the core line up for both records, but whereas Turkish trumpeter Maffy Falay was present for the Live in Stockholm session, his absence is made up for on this new release by the addition of drummers Jacques Thollot and Bülent AtesĖ§, as well as bassist Kent Carter.
Despite the large overlaps, the music that makes up this new release is significantly more frenetic and fiery than the Stockholm session. Here, in large part, additional drums and percussion make the difference. The horns are propelled forward by near constant pulse and pounding that gives the album an exhilarating energy. But it’s also Cherry’s doing: he is at the height of his trumpeting powers, playing with a glimmering sharpness that cuts through. His characteristic angular, skittering scrawls are at once anarchic and precise. The record’s meditative moments are relatively few and far between, and all the more moving for it. Take, for example, the 9th minute of track 2, during which Cherry heaves the music into a brief passage of strained rubato contemplation, his trumpet flickering brightly above the sotto voce saxophones. As the record progresses, however, the fire dies down little by little leaving more and more space for the sociality of the time and place to emerge: laughter, chatter – the sounds of summer heard right at the album’s start. Ultimately this is a record of people at play. A serious experiment in the everyday art of living musically that was Cherry’s life.
The second release, Organic Music Theatre, is likewise permeated by the sociality of the setting in which it was recorded – a jazz festival in the South of France. But this is largely where the similarities with The Summer House Sessions end. This album represents perhaps the purest moment on record of what could be called Cherry’s “hippie” phase, or what the liner notes name his “mystical” period. Of course, this phase can also be heard playing out on albums such as Organic Music Society (1972), Relativity Suite (1973), Eternal Now (1974), and arguably others. But there is something about the looseness of the live setting of OMT that makes it a particularly representative sample of the spirit of Cherry’s music at this moment. Cherry sings and plays piano pretty much the whole way through the 70-minute concert. As the liner notes describe, a French television crew captured the scene live on camera as he led his motley musical family through a series of songs stretching across the planet. The French jazz critics of the day were less than impressed. Where was Cherry’s trumpet? And why wasn’t he playing jazz? Certainly, the freewheeling improvisation of the The Summer House Sessions has completely disappeared here, giving way to a slow drift across disparate musical landscapes from South Africa to India to Brazil and beyond, that, strangely, somehow all sound the same. A paradox? Perhaps. But one that can be explained by the way Cherry routes these disparate musics through his deep blues sensibility. Nonetheless, there is a fireside sing-along feel to this music that can grate – especially given that in listening to the record fifty years after the fact we’re at a considerable remove from the fireside. Though that is for each listener to decide upon for themselves.
All in all, these are two important releases that mark a significant pivot point in Cherry’s career. The excellent accompanying essays by Magnus Nygren provide ample background and set the music in its proper biographical context. And the sounds themselves are full of freedom and fascination that will pull in the Cherry fanatic and the causal listener alike.
–Gabriel Bristow
