In the mid-20th century, a steady stream of American jazz
musicians flew the coop to Europe, ditching the restrictions and prejudices of
their home country for a continent where earning a decent living as an artist
seemed more possible.
اضافة اعلان
For renowned trumpeter and multi-instrumentalist Don Cherry —
who settled in Sweden at the end of the 1960s after spending years in New York
as one of the leading figures in avant-garde jazz — life in Europe offered more
than that, too. It was where he began sharing an artistic practice with fashion
designer and textile artist
Moki Karlsson (later Moki Cherry), whose career
would become intertwined with his. It was a launchpad to other places, too:
Turkey, Morocco and countries farther south, all with their own artistic
traditions to uncover.
Europe was also a place from which Moki and Don Cherry — given
just enough public support and surrounded by a community of like-minded artists
— could lead experiments into what they called “organic music.” For roughly 10
years starting in the late 1960s, living mostly in an abandoned schoolhouse
they had bought in the southern Swedish town
Tagarp, the couple taught classes,
held concerts, hosted friends and collaborators from across the globe and made
work.
The Cherrys’ collaborative project during those years is the
focus of an impressive, multipart celebration by Blank Forms, a Brooklyn arts
organization, whose small staff spent years piecing together the hitherto
uncollected strands of Moki and Don Cherry’s lives together, as well as those
of their now-famous musician children: Eagle-Eye Cherry and Neneh Cherry. (Don
Cherry died in 1995, and Moki in 2009.)
What Blank Forms has generated — a gallery show dedicated mostly
to Moki’s artwork, a 500-page book and two archival albums featuring Don Cherry’s
performances from that era — shows how richly the musician came alive during
this period, which is often misunderstood as a footnote to his more
well-documented time on the New York scene but was arguably when he made his
most thoroughly developed work. And it elevates the long-overlooked art of Moki
Cherry, who has never been fully seen for the distinctive creator that she was.
(Her work will be the subject of a separate show in Chicago later this year, at
the Corbett vs. Dempsey gallery.)
The centerpiece of Blank Forms’ project is the book, “Organic
Music Societies,” available on Friday, which collects oral and visual history
as well as critical writing and lustrous photographs of the couple’s milieu in
Tagarp. A series of photos shows the interior of their home, with Moki Cherry’s
plush, wavy tapestries filling nearly every corner, many of them emblazoned with
religious mantras.
A few of those tapestries are on display, now through June,
along with paintings and drawings by both Moki and Don Cherry, at Blank Forms’
small gallery in central Brooklyn. One of her tapestries hangs nearly from
floor to ceiling, the words “Organic Music” stitched in an arc over two
outstretched hands, a heart and a pair of wings.
By the time she made this piece, Don Cherry had started to turn
his musical practice into pedagogy, with a series of master classes for adults
that he began leading in 1968 at Arbetarnas bildningsförbund (ABF) House, an
education center run by the Swedish labor movement, where he brought together
folk musicians from around the world and asked them to teach their traditions.
Experts of Turkish drumming, Scottish bagpipes and Indian vocal technique gave
lectures and engaged in group performances.
In his introduction to the book, Lawrence Kumpf, Blank Forms’
artistic director, writes that Moki and Don Cherry’s projects together “took
Don Cherry’s music out of exploitative and commercially driven jazz circuits
and integrated it into a total art and life project that broke away from
convention.”
This isn’t how Don Cherry is generally remembered. Born in
Oklahoma to a Black father and a Choctaw mother, Don Cherry became famous as a
member of the free-improvising Ornette Coleman Quartet that turned New York
City upside-down in 1959 with the release of “The Shape of Jazz to Come” and
its subsequent 10-week run at the Five Spot Café. For Coleman, Don Cherry was
part foil and part fraternal twin: A harmonically minded improviser in a group
that had left chord structures behind, the trumpeter alternated serenely
between hurried-up phrases and long, patient tones. A tad less evasive than
Coleman’s, his playing — on the tinny-sounding pocket trumpet, Don Cherry’s
signature — was just as playful.
You can draw a line in one direction from that work to “Cherry
Jam,” an EP from an unearthed 1965 radio broadcast in Denmark that was released
earlier this year on Gearbox Records. It shows him swinging through a set of
tunes with a local rhythm section, leading his bandmates constantly into crooked
surprises, all within the context of mainstream jazz.
But he was also moving the other way. On his world travels in
the mid-1960s — first to Europe as a member of Sonny Rollins’ group and then to
Turkey and Morocco, where he spent time with the Master Musicians of Joujouka —
Don Cherry began to understand how the liberated artistic language he had been
working out alongside Coleman could be used to unlock affinities between all
kinds of music. He started playing more percussion and piano, and singing more.
This phase was just starting to flower when he recorded the
first of two albums that Blank Forms will release in June. “The Summer House
Sessions” was made on an island outside Stockholm in 1968, when Don Cherry was
leading classes at the ABF facility. The music here is an outgrowth of those
sessions, blending musicians from Sweden, Turkey, France and the United States.
With two saxophonists, two bassists and three drummers, the group is really a
combination of separate bands Don Cherry had been leading in New York and
Sweden.
The horn players all trade themes and motifs in a star burst of
high-velocity improvising, sometimes coming together into cohesive, beboppish
lines, like an ornate assemblage being thrown together on the roof of a
fast-moving car.
The other album, “Organic Music Theater,” captures the first
performance that Don and Moki Cherry led under that name, in 1972. Years
earlier the couple had begun presenting interdisciplinary shows using the name
Movement Incorporated, with Moki Cherry’s tapestries ensconcing a diverse cast
of musicians, dancers and puppetry performers (Moki Cherry also played the
tanpura, a droning Indian string instrument). Later in 1972, they would record “Organic
Music Society,” an underappreciated gem of Don Cherry’s recorded career,
turning global folk musics into a kind of unified popular language of its own.
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