Cherry released his debut album as bandleader, Complete Communion, in 1966. In the 1970s, he became a pioneer in world music, with his work drawing on African, Middle Eastern, and Hindustani music. He was a member of the ECM group Codona, along with percussionist Naná Vasconcelos and sitar and tabla player Collin Walcott.[2] Chris Kelsey of AllMusic called Cherry "one of the most influential jazz musicians of the late 20th century."[3]
By the early 1950s Cherry was playing with jazz musicians in Los Angeles, sometimes acting as pianist in Art Farmer's group.[11]: 134 While trumpeter Clifford Brown was in Los Angeles with Max Roach, Cherry attended a jam session with Brown and Larance Marable at Eric Dolphy's house, and Brown informally mentored Cherry.[7] He also toured with saxophonist James Clay.[12]: 45
Cherry at Park Le Cascine, Florence, Italy, September 1975
After leaving Coleman's quartet, 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 traveled through Europe, India, Morocco, South Africa, and elsewhere to explore and play with a variety of musicians. In the late 1960s he settled in Tågarp, Sweden with his wife, Swedish designer and textile artist Moki Cherry. In 1968, Don Cherry taught music classes with guest lecturers, performance collaborators, and workshop leaders from around the world at Arbetarnas bildningsförbund (ABF) House, a Swedish labor movement-run education center. For ten years, Don and Moki Cherry lived and worked collaboratively in an abandoned schoolhouse in Tågarp, holding classes and performances, hosting guests and collaborators, and exploring their concept of Organic Music Society.
In the 1970s, Cherry ventured into the developing genre of world fusion music. Cherry incorporated influences of Middle Eastern, 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 Naná Vasconcelos and sitar and tabla player Collin Walcott.[9]
At the end of the 1970s, the trio Organic Music Theater (with Gian Piero Pramaggiore and Naná Vasconcelos) had an intense live activity in Italy and France.
In 1982, Cherry released the duet album El Corazon with Ed Blackwell. He also released two albums as a bandleader in the 1980s: Home Boy (Sister Out) in 1985 and Art Deco in 1988. He recorded again with the original Ornette Coleman Quartet on the first disc of Coleman's 1987 album In All Languages.
Cherry was married to Monika Karlsson (Moki Cherry), a Swedish painter and textile artist, who also occasionally played tanpura with him.[18] His stepdaughter Neneh Cherry,[18] his step-granddaughters Mabel and Tyson, and his sons David Ornette Cherry, Christian Cherry, and Eagle-Eye Cherry, are also musicians. David Ornette Cherry died from an asthma attack at the age of 64 on November 20, 2022.[19]
Cherry learned to play various brass instruments in high school.[11]: 134 Throughout his career, he played pocket cornet (though he identified this as a pocket trumpet), trumpet, cornet, flugelhorn, and bugle.[22][23]
Cherry began his career as a pianist, and continued playing piano and organ as secondary instruments throughout his career.[22]
After returning from a musical and cultural journey through Africa, he often played the donso ngoni, a harp-lute with a gourd body originating from West Africa (see ngoni). During his international journeys, Cherry also collected a variety of non-Western instruments, which he mastered and often played in performances and on recordings. Among these instruments were berimbau, bamboo flutes and assorted percussion instruments.[22]
Technique and style
Cherry's trumpet influences included Miles Davis, Fats Navarro, Clifford Brown, and Harry Edison.[22] Journalist Howard Mandel suggests Henry "Red" Allen as a precedent (given Allen's "blustery rather than Armstrong-brazen brass sound, jauntily unpredictable melodic streams, squeezed-off and/or half-valve effects and repertoire including novelty vocals")[24] while Ekkehard Jost cites Wild Bill Davison.[11]: 138
Some critics have noted shortcomings in Cherry's technique.[9][11]: 137 [22]Ron Wynn writes that "[Cherry's] technique isn't always the most efficient; frequently, his rapid-fired solos contain numerous missed or muffed notes. But he's a master at exploring the trumpet and cornet's expressive, voice-like properties; he bends notes and adds slurs and smears, and his twisting solos are tightly constructed and executed regardless of their flaws."[22] Jost notes the tendency for writers to focus on Cherry's "technical insecurity", but asserts that "the problem lies elsewhere. Perfect technical control in extremely fast tempos was more or less risk-free as long as the improviser had to deal with standard changes that were familiar to him from years of working with them.... In the music of the Ornette Coleman Quartet—a 'new-found-land' where the laws and habits of functional harmony do not apply—there is no use for patterns that had been worked out on that basis."[11]: 137
Miles Davis was initially dismissive of Cherry's playing, claiming that "anyone can tell that guy's not a trumpet player—it's just notes that come out, and every note he plays he looks serious about, and people will go for that, especially white people."[24] According to Cherry, however, when Davis attended an Ornette Coleman performance at the Five Spot Café in Greenwich Village, he was impressed with Cherry's playing and sat in with the group using Cherry's pocket trumpet.[24] Later, in a 1964 DownBeat blindfold test, Davis indicated that he liked Cherry's playing.[25]
