MUSIC HISTORY 101 NOVEMBER 18, 1936 - Born on this day in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma: Jazz master DON CHERRY (d. October 19, 1995) Cherrys father (who also played trumpet) owned the Cherry Blossom Club, which hosted performances by Charlie Christian and Fletcher Henderson. In 1940, Cherry moved with his family to Los Angeles, California. They lived in the Watts neighborhood, and his father tended bar at the Plantation Club on Central Avenue, which at the time was the center of a vibrant jazz scene. He began playing trumpet in high school in Los Angeles, where he was brought up, but made his earliest public appearances as a pianist in rhythm and blues bands. He adopted a small B-flat pocket trumpet made in Pakistan as his preferred instrument, and it became his trademark, although he went on to play a wide range of ethnic instruments, notably the doussngouni, a hunters guitar from Mali, which he used extensively in performance. Cherry recalled skipping school at Fremont High School in order to play with the swing band at Jefferson High School. This resulted in his transfer to Jacob Riis High School, a reform school, where he first met drummer Billy Higgins. By the early 1950s Cherry was playing with jazz musicians in Los Angeles, sometimes acting as pianist in Art Farmers group. While trumpeter Clifford Brown was in Los Angeles with Max Roach, Cherry attended a jam session with Brown and Larance Marable at Eric Dolphys house, and Brown informally mentored Cherry. He also toured with saxophonist James Clay. At the age of 17, Cherry met Coleman in a Los Angeles record store on 103rd Street. Coleman had been working on a different approach to jazz improvisation. Coleman called this approach harmolodics, a philosophy that states that melody, harmony and time all share the same value. Cherry was drawn to Ornettes ideas and began rehearsing regularly with him. At the time, Cherry also regularly performed with the intermission band at the Lighthouse, a Los Angeles jazz club. Cherry became better known in 1958 when he performed and recorded with Coleman, first in a quintet with pianist Paul Bley and later in what became the predominantly piano-less quartet which recorded for Atlantic Records. During this period, his lines ... gathered much of their freedom of motion from the free harmonic structures. Cherry co-led The Avant-Garde session which saw John Coltrane replacing Coleman in the Quartet, recorded and toured with Sonny Rollins, was a member of the New York Contemporary Five with Archie Shepp and John Tchicai, and recorded and toured with both Albert Ayler and George Russell. His first recording as a leader was Complete Communion for Blue Note Records in 1965. The band included Colemans drummer Ed Blackwell as well as saxophonist Gato Barbieri, whom he had met while touring Europe with Ayler, and bassist Henry Grimes. After leaving Coleman, Cherry often played in small groups and duets (many with ex-Coleman drummer Ed Blackwell) during a long sojourn in Scandinavia and other locations. He later appeared on Colemans 1971 LP Science Fiction, and from 1976 to 1987 reunited with Coleman alumni Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden, and Blackwell in the band Old And New Dreams, recording four albums with them, two for ECM and two for Black Saint, where his subtlety of rhythmic expansion and contraction was noted. In the 1970s he ventured into the developing genre of world fusion music. Cherry incorporated influences of Middle Eastern, traditional African, and Indian music into his playing. He studied Indian music with Vasant Rai in the early seventies. From 1978 to 1982, he recorded three albums for ECM with world jazz group Codona, consisting of Cherry, percussionist Nana Vasconcelos and sitar and tabla player Collin Walcott. Cherry also collaborated with classical composer Krzysztof Penderecki on the 1971 album Actions. In 1973, he co-composed the score for Alejandro Jodorowskys film The Holy Mountain, together with Ronald Frangipane and Jodorowsky. During the 1980s, he recorded again with the original Ornette Coleman Quartet on In All Languages, as well as recording El Corazon, a duet album with Ed Blackwell. Other playing opportunities in his career came with Carla Bleys Escalator Over The Hill project, and recordings with Lou Reed, Ian Dury, Rip Rig + Panic and Sun Ra. In 1994, Cherry appeared on the Red Hot Organizations compilation CD, Stolen Moments: Red Hot + Cool, on a track titled Apprehension, alongside The Watts Prophets. The album, meant to raise awareness of the AIDS epidemic in African-American society was named Album of the Year by Time Magazine. Cherry died on October 19, 1995, at the age of 58 from liver cancer in Málaga, Spain. Cherry was inducted into the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame in 2011. Miles Davis was initially dismissive of Cherrys playing, claiming that anyone can tell that guys not a trumpet player – its just notes that come out, and every note he plays he looks serious about, and people will go for that, especially white people. According to Cherry, however, when Davis attended an Ornette Coleman performance at The Five Spot, he was impressed with Cherrys playing and sat in with the group using Cherrys pocket trumpet. Later, in a 1964 Down Beat magazine blindfold test, Davis indicated that he liked Cherrys playing Cherrys stepdaughters Neneh Cherry and Titiyo and his sons David Ornette Cherry, Christian Cherry and Eagle-Eye Cherry are also all musicians. READ MORE: encyclopedia/topic/Don_Cherry.aspx musicians.allaboutjazz/doncherry jazz/encyclopedia/cherry-don-donald-eugene jazzhouse.org/gone/lastpost2.php3?edit=920558579 amacord/jazz/doncherry.html allmusic/artist/don-cherry-mn0000796166/biography nytimes/1995/10/21/arts/don-cherry-is-dead-at-58-trumpeter-of-a-lyrical-jazz.html en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Cherry_%28trumpeter%29
Posted on: Wed, 19 Nov 2014 00:20:00 +0000
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