Don Cherry - Don Cherry Live in Stockholm

2013

Trumpeter and world-music pioneer Don Cherry had a very special relationship with Sweden, a place he called home for twenty years. And Sweden had a special relationship with Cherry: the country and its musicians recognized the master in their midst, and in 1972 the state-subsidized record company Caprice put out the double album Organic Music Society (which they reissued in 2012). Now with Live in Stockholm, Caprice has gone into its vaults and pulled out three stunning long-form songs from the same era. Beautifully packaged with crisp black-and-white photos and informative liner notes in English, this release offers a full-bodied experience of Cherry's activities during this fruitful period of his musical journey.

The first two tunes—"ABF Suite, Part 1" and "ABF Suite, Part 2"—have their origin in the ensemble Cherry created while teaching a weekly course at The Workers' Educational Association (Arbetarnas Bildningsförbund, or ABF). But this was no ordinary class: his students included the great Swedish tenor saxophonist Bernt Rosengren and members of his quartet, namely fellow tenorist Tommy Koverhult, bassist Torbjorn Hultcrantz, and drummer Leif Wennerström. Another participant was the renowned Turkish trumpeter Maffy Falay, who like Cherry moved to Sweden in the mid-sixties and worked closely with Swedish jazz musicians. In describing the feeling of this ensemble, Rosengren says, "[Don Cherry] came with a new openness. One should not be afraid to break patterns and forms. He came with a completely new way of thinking, we should 'un-learn' everything we knew and start again from scratch, and not worry about mistakes . . . It was a very free and experimental period and we had a lot of fun."

By this point in his career, Cherry had left behind many of the familiar parameters of jazz. For Cherry, a song was not a group of musicians taking solos based on one melody: a song was a fluid entity created on-the-spot, as the ensemble did at the ABF concert. He had also abandoned the "one person, one instrument" norm; he no longer thought of himself solely as a trumpet player, and on this release he is also credited with flutes, piano, percussion, and vocals. Similarly Falay, Rosengren, and Koverhult are also credited with flutes and percussion in addition to their main instruments. Nor was a concert visually static—in collaboration with his wife, visual artist Moki Cherry, Cherry turned the ABF concert into a multimedia happening with elaborate staging, including wafting incense and a background of screens and projections of paintings by Moki.

The festive quality of the concert is reflected in a review by the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, which proclaimed: "Welcome to Don Cherry's candy store of music! What richness, colors, generosity!" A candy store is a good way to think of these two pieces, which offer a luscious 49 minutes of music. There's a myriad of flavors and sensations, a dancing flow of energy as the stream of ideas and sounds unfold. Different players with different instruments take center stage, following an organic, internal logic specific to this performance. Distinct melodies emerge, but just in slices, which are then fused together, or taken apart, or cheerfully turned inside out. Various motifs arise, perhaps to be picked up by the other musicians, who might then approach things sideways or backward. The dynamics are also up for grabs, a wild thrust of energy suddenly or gradually dropping off into a quieter space, until eventually the silence explodes into a torrent of sound. The mood is a similarly shape-shifting creature, moving from calm to stately to frantic to joyful, and many other hues besides.

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