Don Cherry was right there at the front lines of jazz music’s last great revolution in November 1959, burning the jazz rulebook alongside Ornette Coleman during their residency at the Five Spot in November 1959. Buoyed by the churning, buoyant rhythmic support of bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Ed Blackwell, Cherry’s tiny pocket cornet and Coleman’s plastic alto blasted their way into the future and those seismic recordings that the Ornette Coleman Quartet made revealed that jazz no longer needed chord changes, predetermined notions and harmonies of where the music could go. Your mind and its wandering curiosity was all the music needed to follow. (Just listen to something like “Beauty is a Rare Thing” off of This is Our Music. A gorgeous atmosphere is created by Coleman and then Haden’s bowed bass, Blackwell keeps a subliminal pulse under it all, while Cherry chirrups like a sparrow that flew into the studio.) Facing stresses both external and internal –with Coleman labeled as a heretic in the jazz press while Haden, Blackwell, and Cherry struggled with heroin addiction– that iconic group soon disbanded and scattered to the winds.
But the tenets learned from that brief time with Coleman would inform Don Cherry’s music for decades after. Through the 1960s, Cherry worked at the vanguard of jazz: Sonny Rollins, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, and the like. But as the decade wore on and the strife of life in America as a Black man grew onerous, Cherry made his way to Sweden and envisioned an entirely new way of putting that open musical dialogue to practice in new environs, inspired by the freedoms of the hippie lifestyle and new experiments in living. Forward-thinking, adventurous, fearless, open-eared musical travels lay ahead for Cherry and his longtime partner, artist/ musician Moki Cherry. Cherry now mapped the freedoms first expressed by Coleman across all manner of musical cultures and heritages, peregrinating around the globe, always seeking common ground between the musicians he encountered and their disparate histories. Future international jazz luminaries like Argentina’s Gato Barbieri, South Africa’s Abdullah Ibrahim and Johnny Dyani, Germany’s Karl Berger, Brazil’s Naná Vasconcelos, Sweden’s Christer Bothén,Turkey’s Okay Temiz, and others all play crucial early roles in Cherry’s ad hoc groups. Throughout Cherry’s recordings and collaborations, the underlying truth is that music truly is the universal language.