Listening Post: Don and Moki Cherry’s Organic Music
If ever an artist were to receive an award for pioneering a genre while defining several others, Don Cherry would be a prime candidate. His multi-instrumentalism speaks to that diversity. While trumpet was his main axe, his contributions on donso ngoni, Indian flute, piano and various percussion instruments embody an unceasing inquisitiveness that would traverse his 40-year multi-media odyssey. His first recordings were with Ornette Coleman's ground-breaking 1958-1961 bands, Alongside drummers Billy Higgins, Ed Blackwell and bassist Charlie Haden. One of these, the 1960 "Free Jazz" date, gave the emerging "New Thing" music one of its lasting appellations. In that vibrant scene, he worked with musicians as disparate as Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins and the New York Contemporary Five. On a 1963 Scandinavian tour with Rollins, he met visual artist and spiritualist Monika Karlsson, later Moki Cherry, and two newly released sound documents from their extensive collaboration will provide the springboard for our discussion. Meanwhile, Don Cherry's travels led him to India, Turkey, Brazil and various points on the African continent. They also informed his work on recordings as chronologically and culturally varied as Carla Bley's Escalator Over the Hill and Heiner Goebbels astonishing and still underappreciated Man in the Elevator. On these, in genre-busting workouts with Ian Dury, Lou Reed, and on the albums under his leadership, recorded between 1965 and 1993, his unmistakable musical voice echoes with that profound simplicity that made permeable every artistic boundary in his life.
Cherry died in 1995. Since his discography was scattered across numerous small labels, and he was more concerned with his next project than whatever he had already done, certain phases of his career have been inadequately documented. One of them is his episodic residence in Sweden. That time, which spans the 1960s and 1970s, and the artistic/domestic partnership with Moki Cherry that made it possible, are the subjects of a book and two archival albums published in 2021 by Blank Forms. The book, Organic Music Societies, includes interviews, scholarly analysis, reprinted publications, photos and reproductions of Moki’s visual art, which adorned their homes and formed the backdrop for Cherry’s performances. While audiences may have perceived Moki as an unobtrusive backing musician as she sat on stage playing a tambura, the performances they experienced would not have happened without her. She articulated the principal, “The stage is home and home is a stage,” created the visual components of that portable environment, and put in the hard practical work that made that principal into a reality. The book describes their desire to escape the jazz club milieu, which aggravated Don’s problems with addiction and was far from family friendly, in favor of happenings and teaching opportunities, which were centered at a former schoolhouse they inhabited in Tågarp, Sweden. The Summer House Sessions is a 1968 session that shows the transition from the free jazz suites that Don recorded for Blue Note in the mid-1960s to a more international conception of music. And Organic Music Theatre: Festival de Jazz de Chateauvallon 1972, by Don Cherry’s New Researches Featuring Naná Vasconcelos, presents a concert in which Don put aside his pocket trumpet to sit at the piano and sing songs of hippy living while puppeteers performed and kids gamboled on stage.
By Bill Meyer
Organic Music Theatre: Festival de jazz de Chateauvallon 1972 by Don Cherry's New Researches featuring Naná Vasconcelos
Bill Meyer: I’m appreciating that even though the book and the two albums are historical documents dealing with work done half a century ago, that work feels pretty relevant to this time. The Organic Music model proposed a way of applying tools found around the world to personal ends without disrespecting the sources. It’s kind of punk because Don didn’t duplicate traditional approaches. Without that model, we wouldn’t have Joshua Abrams’ Natural Information Society, or Hamid Drake and William Parker’s blend of international and jazz elements.
Marc Medwin: Fascinating! I wonder how we can relate this idea very specifically to sound. Do you hear something in the group aesthetics on these albums, or in Don's playing that sounds "punk?" I'm talking about timbre now, which, while it is certainly an important component in any musician's language, plays a large part in Don's approach to his sonic art, especially in the pan geographic diversity you describe.
Ben Donnelly: I, too, have been struck by how relevant this record feels to this time. I've been pondering why this stage in jazz and improvised music has found a broader following in the last few years. Cherry was such an itinerant, and that speaks to where a lot of off-the-beaten track listeners find themselves these days.
The opening of this record rapidly clears away any sense that this music will fit a genre. The chant, in a literal way, is "spiritual" and perhaps Hindu in a Coltrane sense. But the effect is also like the old Sesame Street theme and "Do Re Mi" from Sound of Music. And it's also goofy like Ella or Louie scatting. There's big simple chords, like Black gospel, but it's kind of cult-like when the commune crowd joins in. Cherry's singing sounds like he's making it up on the spot. But there's a sax following his melody closely.
Then the ocean crash of piano when "Interlude with Puppets" – I can see the marionettes scrambling and scattering around the stage. I love how I can't place this music anywhere on the spectrum of composition and ecstatic creation, or self-expression to theatrical troupe.
Don's singing is pretty punk here — scratchy and carrying simple melodies without worrying about polish, coming up with weird refrains that make sense sideways. So many the timbres here are ragged and banged out.
There's a real arc to this performance that I admire. I can sense the sun setting as it moves along. The frantic and friendly piano pounding in the first half gives way to more drone and the evening rolls along and night breeze moves in. Was this performance outside? It sure feels like it.
Bill Meyer: Marc, I’m not really thinking about timbre, but about an attitude towards one’s tools. One thing that I think connects punk rock and free jazz is that they both break from an accumulated body of knowledge and technique that a musician was supposed to master prior to admission, and instead insist that desire to play and an ability to make sound gets you into the game. Cherry came from free jazz, of course, and took shit for his perceived technical lacks, but was valued by Coleman, Coltrane, Rollins, and so many more because of his ideas. Then he went off and got himself a Malian instrument, the donso ngoni, and rather than learn like he might have if he had grown up in Mali, he learned enough to play it his way and express what he needed it to express.
Ben, I think that the singalongs on the Chateauvallon album connect very strongly to playful, collective singing, whether it’s Sesame Street, grade school music hour, or take your pick of other multigenerational social singing events. The value of a song lies more in the ease with which others can join in, than in the kind of solo you can launch from it. Cherry used it to create an idealized zone for a communion that drew people across generations, races, and cultures, and the nervy thing about doing it at a jazz festival is not just that you had a hippy commune taking over the festival stage, but that Cherry and company were setting out on a jazz stage an alternative to the jazz life.
I haven’t found footage of this concert yet online, but I found a Mahavishnu Orchestra concert from the same year and it looks like it’s in an outdoor amphitheater.
Michael Rosenstein: I wonder how much, if at all, Cherry was influenced by his meetings with Abdullah Ibrahim and Makaya Ntshoko in the mid-1960s. While they didn't utilize traditional African instruments, they certainly brought a sensibility of melding kwela and jazz vocabularies.
William Parker has long espoused Cherry as an influence, going back to the music he was playing in the late 1970s, documented on some of the early recordings he released on his Centering label.
Marc Medwin: Michael, yes, come to think of it, those middle 1970s Parker recordings do have a certain Cherry-esque immediacy and spirit of inclusion, and I really like Bill's Parker/Drake comparison, a duo for all seasons!
Not to mention Parker and those associated with him taking various matters associated with the music into their own hands!
Bill Meyer: My impression from reading Organic Music Society is that Cherry definitely played a lot with Dollar Brand. Copenhagen was actually the nearest big city to Tagarp, where the Cherry family lived, so he would nip down there to join the band when Dollar Brand was there. And he made enough of an impression on Cherry musically for Cherry to include his tunes in sets over the years. But I haven’t yet encountered discussion of a direct musical influence.
Marc Medwin: Bill, I wonder if a certain sonic event is discussed in the book. At 2:35 of Butterfly Friend, do you all hear that little person laugh? I wonder if it's in response to Cherry's bluesily and adorably silly wah-wah electric guitar vocal impression? I think it's an endearing moment!! I should also say how absolutely stunning the recording is! It's alive, gorgeously ambient, and sometimes surprisingly fluid (the audience moves around the soundstage a bit.) With headphones, I'm right there in it!!
Bill Meyer: The young person at 2.35 is not precisely identified, but kids came on and off stage throughout the set. It might be Eagle Eye Cherry or one of the other kids who caravanned with the band and the Danish puppet troupe, but it is definitely not Neneh. I recall reading her state in an interview that she wasn’t on stage that night, since she was out adventuring somewhere else on the festival grounds.
Marc Medwin: Man, I don't know how you remember all that!!
Bill Meyer: I wish I recalled my source for Neneh opting out of that concert, but I’ll give the pdf of Blank Forms 023 a look tomorrow and see if there’s more to add to this part.
Marc Medwin: And is it possible this thing was binaurally recorded?
Bill Meyer: I don’t think that’s how French TV did it.
Marc Medwin: Yeah I doubted it, but whoever did it captured quite an environment!!
Bill Meyer: The CD’s booklet provides information about the original recording, as well as the digitization and restoration of the master tapes. There’s no mention of binaural recording, and since it was done for French TV, I seriously doubt that they would have used an outlying audio technology such as binaural. As for who was there, the booklet describes the Cherry clan and caravan numbering thirteen adults and eight kids in two vehicles. Once they got to France, they set up a camp marked off by Moki’s tapestries. There, they played continuously, and Don is reported to have played his pocket cornet. So, it’s worth noting that his horn’s absence from the Chateauvallon concert is an aesthetic choice. This was his first recording on which he did not play brass.
Marc Medwin: This is actually the first time I'm hearing it with headphones, and I'm tripping out a little to the sound of what might be a cowbell moving behind my head!!
Nope, not a cowbell.
I have heard very few albums, even live albums, which benefit so much from headphone listening, ratchets the fun factor sky-high!
Mason Jones: As an aside, there's an interesting piece about Don & Moki Cherry in the latest Maggot Brain magazine: interviews with Terry Riley and Hamid Drake about their experiences with them.
Bill Meyer: I am a bit behind on my Maggot Brain purchases, but I should get that one.
Marc Medwin: Thanks Bill! I went back to Orient and Blue Lake, two very roughly contemporaneous Cherry live albums, and while the recordings are certainly atmospheric and immersive, they don't capture such a vivid perspective.
Bill Meyer: Yeah, those are both from 1971, and both feature the rhythm section of Okay Temiz (from Turkey) and Johnny Dyani (from South Africa), who were frequent accompanists of Don’s around the time. The albums you mention are both oriented to sounds from around the world, but they’re closer to free jazz than Chateauvallon concert. If you’re putting Don Cherry’s development on a timeline, they are a developmental musical link between The Summer Sessions and the Organic Music Theatre concept, but they lack the multidisciplinary/ multigenerational inclusiveness of the full Organic Music Theatre experience. I think that part of what makes the Chateauvallon concert significant is that it introduces that concept to the world outside of Stockholm, where it had been presented in 1971 during Don and Moki’s residency in a geodesic dome on the grounds of the Museum of Modern Art.
Marc Medwin: Multi-disciplinarity is a good way to frame the concert we're discussing, especially as the music often switches geographic locations in a way that could be construed as pedagogical. I certainly don't mean that in a negative or stuffy way, and the sense of fun in the exploration is palpable. There's a similar element in the other live Cherry documents, especially Blue Lake's titular piece. In all cases, it's obvious that there's nobody more excited to be involved than Cherry himself, and that enthusiasm, I don't know, just makes me feel better about everything somehow!
Bill Meyer: Cherry’s ability to project joy through his playing was a constant, from his recordings with Ornette onward. And he was involved with education from a variety of angles. In the late 1960s, he taught at Dartmouth for a brief spell. The Summer Sessions date from a time when he was doing workshops for the Workers Educational Association; most of the musicians on the session were participants in the workshops, which contributes to their empathy with what he was doing at the time. And he and Moki played for/with kids in primary schools throughout Sweden. The Organic Music Society book has a lot to say about these episodes.
Ben Donnelly: It’s very interesting how these details explain the incongruities in the music that are so striking when listening to it with less context. It really demonstrates how vital breaking out typical performing and composing methods can be if you want to discover new sounds.
Bill Meyer: For Don and Moki, I think the question was not just how to discover new sounds. It was how to have a creative life and a family. When Don left California for New York to play at the Five Spot with Ornette Coleman in 1959, he had to leave his kids with his mom, and it was years before they had much time together again. He also dealt with addiction issues throughout his life, and performing in jazz clubs meant walking into temptation. The lines he sings about eating health food relate to his personal efforts to live a cleaner lifestyle. So, when he and Moki decided to be a family, but also remain on an artistic path, they decided to make every space they occupied, whether it was the inside of a van, a geodesic dome, or the schoolhouse they bought in Tagarp, both stage and home.
The Summer House Sessions by Don Cherry
We haven’t had much to say about the Summer Sessions album yet. Does anyone want to comment on that one? Or have more to say about any aspect of the Cherry family business?
I’ll start. The Summer Sessions doesn’t capture a moment of change quite so starkly as the Chateauvallon set, but I’m really enjoying it, too. It’s like a looser version of the music Cherry made for Blue Note in the 1960s, free and joyous, but the references to Anatolian folk music point it towards the music he would do with Okay Temiz and Johnny Dyani. The Scandinavian horn players, Bernt Rosengren and Tommy Koverhult, had been attending Cherry’s ABF workshops, so they hang with him through twisty-turning, Ornette Coleman-style themes way more faithfully than you would expect from a session that was pretty spontaneously organized. And the three drummers fuse into a rolling surge that’s way more forceful than the rhythms in a lot of Cherry’s 1960s music, or Ornette’s for that matter.
Jennifer Kelly: My first impression of the Summer House Sessions was that they were more of a conventional performance and less of a "happening," to use the 1960s cliche, than the Chateauvallon music (which I loved). You have a real sense of kids running around and people drifting in and out and maybe animals. There's a real communal vibe in the Organic Music tracks. There's a nice bit in one of the interviews about creating a sense of unity through group drone--and then you can hear them do it together — in voices of various timbres and volumes and degree of training and skill — in "Interlude/Brazilian Ceremonial Hymn."
But now that I'm listening to it again, The Summer House Sessions have a good bit of that same warmth and immediacy, too. You don't have the group participation, but there's a wonderful sense of play and cross cultural collaboration in these cuts. How far along were other jazz musicians at this point in bringing in African and middle eastern instruments?
I also really enjoyed the art in the booklet, which seemed to reflect the music in its colorful-ness and inclusivity. It must have been a very joyful place up there in Sweden.
Bill Meyer: At the time of the Summer Sessions, Cherry was rather new to African sounds himself. He first visited North Africa c. 1964, and his first international band, which included people from Argentina Germany, Italy, and Denmark, played in Paris in 1966. Around that time, Don was just playing brass instruments, but he was listening to music from around the world on a shortwave radio. One of his gifts was the ability to play a tune after hearing it once, and he started including the sounds he heard into his performances. His proposed curriculum for the ABF workshops included visiting musicians from India and Turkey, presumably people who were already on hand in Sweden, but it’s not clear how much of the curriculum was actually applied to the workshops. So Rosengren and Koverhult would have been exposed to those ideas in some form or another, and one Turkish musician, drummer Bülent Ateş, was present.
Cherry actually learned the donso ngoni from a Swedish musician, Christer Bothén, who is one of the players at the Chateauvallon concert.
Marc Medwin: Bill, again, you bring an admirable historical sweep and its relationship to individual contributions to the discussion. Jenny, as a blind person, I'd love to hear you talk a little bit more about your observations concerning the visual art, maybe even give a few details that stood out to you. I was also really intrigued by the way your take on the Summerhouse music veered between the conventional and the transculturally innovative. That duality is captured in so many moments! Check out the beginning of the B-side, where the "Bebop" aesthetic of virtuosity is at the service of entirely different modes of inquiry. There are the scales and melodies, but that fantastic rush as the tempo increases really drags any traditional preconceptions beyond themselves! For me, listening to this music is increasingly about listening between whatever lines of boundary, chronological or otherwise, I thought I needed to frame it. The more I hear both of these releases, the more completely I appreciate their existence and understand the Cherry’s' desire to fuse various modes of expression!
Jennifer Kelly: Marc, I know you won't be able to see these photos, but I'll describe them, too.
The first is a photo of a young bassist, playing outdoors in a crowd of people, all sitting on the ground. There are several different groups, an umbrella against the sun, people playing hand drums and flute. To me it speaks volumes about the juxtaposition of very serious music in a very casual, natural setting. You know, looking at the photo, that some people are listening, others are talking, maybe some are eating, maybe there are dogs and kids just out of the frame. It looks like paradise.
The next is of Cherry playing pocket trumpet in front of a bright, colorful wall hanging, with abstract organic forms (you could make them into flowers or plants or sea animals if you squint) in blue, pink, and purple. It looks vaguely Asian, like the dragons in Chinatown at New Years, but the artwork has a definite sense of movement and rhythm and organic growth. It would be very easy to make a connection to the music we hear. Sort of exotic, but in a bright, colorful, child-like way. Cherry appears to be wearing some sort of a tiger suit.
Here's one inside, everybody again sitting on the floor in bright clothing, wall hangings behind them, looks like plenty of non-professional participation. There's a super communal vibe. Not sure what the thing on the floor is, looks like a pillow or stuffed animal.
Anyway, I know it's easy to idealize this period, and clearly one reason Moki took her family all the way to rural Sweden was to get away from the drugs, but it looks like a very welcoming, creative environment.
Marc Medwin: Perfect!! Thank you so much, visual art of varying types is such an important part of this multimedia project (really of everything Blank Forms does!) and of the "vibe" this extraordinary couple instilled in everything they did. What you describe complements absolutely what I'm hearing, to one degree or another, in both recordings. I love your description of internals and externals regarding frame, doesn't that also describe the music itself and sum up what we've been saying about it?!
Bill Meyer: In response to these photos, it’s worth noting that the first photo, with Torbjorn Hultgren playing bass, took place on the grounds of Stockholm’s Moderna Museet. The last was taken a year later at the geodesic dome that Koki and Don turned into an ongoing happening/installation. The vibe in these photos was a totally created one, and Moki’s banners were an essential tool for creating that vibe in places where it might not otherwise exist.
Michael Rosenstein: I keep going back to try and figure out why these two releases are just not resonating with me. I can certainly appreciate what they represent from an historical perspective of a truly mercurial musician. His music with Ornette and Rollins, but equally as important, his run of releases on Blue Note as a leader in the late 1960s (along with the various live recordings), his duos with Ed Blackwell, the large ensemble Relativity Suite and even his album Brown Rice are just so drilled into my listening over the past four-plus decades and these two on Blank Forms just don't quite end up measuring up. I certainly realize that this is very much due to my sensibility when I was initially listening to those early recordings as opposed to where my musical interests are currently.
What is particularly interesting about considering these two recordings though, is that like Cherry's entire career, they simply represent a stop along the way rather than a specific departure or radical change. Less than a year before The Summer House Sessions, he was recording with the Jazz Composers' Orchestra and with Charles Brackeen. A year after, he was in Paris recording the Mu sessions with Blackwell and off to Dartmouth College to record Human Music with Jon Appleton (not amongst my favorites of his music.) A few months after Organic Music Theatre he recorded a great trio with Abdullah Ibrahim and Carlos Ward and a few months after that was in New York recording Relativity Suite. And he kept that pace up right through the 1980s, playing in reunions with Ornette, with Old and New Dreams, in a great quartet with Steve Lacy, Dave Holland and Masahiko Togashi. And all of that barely skims the music he was part of.
I expect that if I had spent time with the book and the accompanying liner notes, I might get more out of these. And in any blindfold test, there's no question that these would jump out as Don Cherry which says a lot right there.
Jennifer Kelly: Michael, I think that goes back to my idea about concert performance versus happening, maybe? This stuff was more inclusive and, I think, about a shared experience, maybe not so much about sheer instrumental prowess? I'm no expert obviously, but it seems like if you bring in kids, there's going to be some diminution in quality.
Bill Meyer: I appreciate your observation, Michael. Each of these albums, as well as the ones Cherry was able to release back in the day, captures a moment in a fluid process of creation and existence that was happening every day. And each record intersects with the listener’s timeline, which influences their own receptivity, as well. Both of the Blank Forms releases are documents that didn’t make it into wider or recurrent circulation at the time. Would Summer Sessions have hit people’s ears differently and made a different impact if it had come out in the early 1970s, when Cherry struck up his relationship with Caprice? It was in the running, but he decided to put together Organic Music Society instead. I think that the Chateauvallon concert can be seen as a companion to the Organic Music Society album; there’s some overlap in material, personnel, and it comes from around the same time. But Cherry chose to make a collage-like document at the time instead of putting out a concert recording, which he could have done.
Michael Rosenstein: Agreed with both Jenny and Bill's comments. I often wonder who the audience for recordings like this is. Certainly, Cherry completists will grab them. For others who don't know his music as well, I do wonder who is drawn to them and whether they will just stop there or if it will lead to further investigation.
Marc Medwin: All excellent points. I hold these types of interstitial documents in high regard. I happen to rank them very highly on musical terms, and I'm much more satisfied by either than by Organic Music Society, but that's just my take. As a historian, I thrive on accessing what has fallen between the cracks, whether it's a concert, a studio session or home recordings. The fact that the documentation has been prepared with such attention to detail is gratifying and, frankly, unique. I'm thinking of the posthumous Coltrane releases and wishing similar love would have been put into more of their accompanying material. Don't get me wrong, there have certainly been fine essays to be read over the years, but this assemblage is a parallel and multileveled discourse. Who's it all for? Putting on my teaching hat for a second, now there are three more resources for the student interested in Don and Moki, individually or in their points of artistic intersection not to mention the various musics on which they draw.
Bryon Hayes: I for one was a Cherry neophyte going into this. I was only familiar with his music with Ornette and the Holy Mountain soundtrack. I was intrigued enough by these two records to snap up a few other releases. So far, each one is unique but intriguing in its own right. My limited exposure leads me to believe that he traveled down a wide variety of musical paths throughout his career.
Bill Meyer: He sure did.
Marc Medwin: I don't know about the other Cherry fans here, but I recommend the Codona discs should you want to explore further. It's Don Cherry, Nana Vasconcelos and the wonderful Collin Walcott, a member of Oregon before his tragically early demise. All on ECM and conveniently boxed.
Bill Meyer: These are definitely a boon for people who want to take a deep dive into a phase in the artistic life of a figure that was influential and/or valuable to key figures of the day, but unlike his peers and contemporaries in certain of his concerns, practices, and values. The Summer Sessions probably exerts the most attraction on people who want to know about Don Cherry’s evolution, and particularly his presence in Sweden. But I can imagine some people being drawn to the Chateauvallon concert because they’re into the spiritual jazz aesthetic, and he is an outlier creating his own scene in a way somewhat similar to Alice Coltrane. Also, that concert situates Cherry’s work within a family and a community; without either of them, he could have just been an interesting free jazz horn player. The family/community emphasis drives a constructive challenge to the “jazz life” narrative. That difference creates its own attraction, just like Alice Coltrane’s uniqueness makes her attractive to people who aren’t primarily jazz fans.
You know, I absolutely love the first Codona LP, but I didn’t give the other two much time when they were released and have never gone back to them. I probably should do that now. I’m also thinking that I need to pick up that 1976 Italian concert, Om, before it goes out of print again. Although there’s something to be said for checking out the YouTube edition of it, because then you get to see Neneh and Eagle Eye performing with Don and Moki.
Marc Medwin: The first Codona album is magic, the one I return to the most!!
While I'm tangenting, but closer chronologically to our two recordings, I have to mention Escalator over the Hill again. The fifth and sixth sides (yeah, I still think of it as vinyl!) have Cherry all over them, including some of that fantastic yodeling and him riffing on the word "again." If someone else's album summed up much of what Cherry was about, and many other parts of that permeable era, it was Escalator! If you've never heard it, try to seek out the vinyl mix. There’s something there for everyone!
Ben Donnelly: One of my favorite Cherry excursions comes right out of this Swedish hippy collective culture, as it evolved a bit in the early 1980s and formalized into an exploration of African music: Bengt Berger's Bitter Funeral Beer. There's a lot of marimba-like percussion, and chanting, with a full bank of horns. The video footage of the project is fantastic too, and you can see Cherry's sartorial choices leading him back towards New York while the rest of the community is untucked and pajama'd.
Bill Meyer: That is one of those records that you have to ask, why hasn’t it been reissued? It seems like a no brainer. I have a download, and I also have the concert recording issued by Black Truffle a couple years ago. Great stuff.
Marc Medwin: Well Ben and Bill, this one was new to me, but it's as great as you say, thank you!!
