New Book 2025: Eternal rhythm: The Don Cherry tapes and travelations. And his music is alive, he tells a story about … Videos, Photos

The eternal rhythm is the lifeline that connects music through breath to life itself. Don Cherry has certainly lived music. And his music is alive.

When he says that music is breath, he is talking about something much bigger than the breath needed to blow a trumpet.

From his primary instrument, the trumpet, to his beloved ‘ngoni, through flutes, piano and melodica, Don Cherry’s voice is unique; like the man from whom it springs, it is instantly recognizable from any instrument or angle.

THE DON CHERRY TAPES laid the foundation in 1979 for the Cherry Archives that preserve the memory of Don and his extended tribal family. The archive began with a series of recorded autobiographical interviews and a box of memorabilia.

Now, 30 years after his death, those transcribed conversations are finally published, illuminated by Don’s artwork and enriched by author Graeme Ewens’ travel journals and contemporary notes from three decades of collaboration.

The material included here is previously unpublished and constitutes a kind of comprehensive summary of the personal experience of one of the greats of jazz, combining autobiographical background with his mentor Ornette Coleman with objective reporting of some of his later tours and personal anecdotes that offer a unique perspective from the writer who had become Don’s confidant, traveling companion, witness and friend.

They dated in the 1970s and collaborated between 1979 and 1984, collecting and collating material for a multimedia extravaganza Don called ‘The Project’, which was revived in 1994. This would tell his story from the inside out, aiming to glimpse the essence of a cosmic traveller and multicultural ‘organic’ musician, from spiritual highs to jazz lows.

The pages devoted to his later years include personal reflections on his musical traveller contemporaries and reveal details of his collaboration with John Coltrane.

Eternal Rhythm: The Don Cherry Tapes and Travelations is a limited edition book of just 300 copies published by BUKU Press, an independent artisan publisher in Cornwall, owned by the authors. Each book is hand-numbered.

Graeme Ewens spent over 5 years recording interviews with Don Cherry on cassette for this book project – a great opportunity to hear Don’s story in his own words.

 

Here is Richard Williams’s book introduction, taken from his blog Thebluemoment: Wherever, whenever and by whomever the idea of ​​“world music” was invented, it has had no finer exponent, explorer and exemplar than Don Cherry. In a few months it will be 30 years since Cherry died in Malaga of liver cancer, at the age of 58, leaving behind a world in which he was, in Steve Lake’s apt phrase, “a lyric poet, a trumpeter of the open road, whose life was one of free improvisation.” I suppose it was fitting that he died in Andalusia, a region where many cultural influences met in the Middle Ages to create a common ground.

Cherry’s life and work require a full biography, along the lines of Robin DG Kelley’s study of Thelonious Monk. In the meantime, it’s worth welcoming Eternal Rhythm: The Don Cherry Tapes and Travelations, a new book composed mostly of interviews conducted at various locations around the world by author Graeme Ewens, who met the trumpeter in the 1970s and became his “confidant, traveling companion, witness and friend” over the next two decades. They’re augmented by Ewens’s recollections of their time together from Bristol to Bombay, biographical notes and an interesting selection of photos and other visual material.

A useful addition to Blank Forms’s The Organic Music Societies, a Cherry compendium published in 2021, it’s packed with useful stuff. Here’s Cherry on playing with Ornette Coleman in the great quartet that changed the direction of jazz. We heard each other in the silence before we played and then we played. And the first accent, or the first attack, would determine the tempo and temperament of the composition.” And this, which goes to the heart of Cherry’s conception: “One day, when Ornette was working on notation, we talked about how you couldn’t write down human feelings.

For me, there was always this problem of notated music sounding like notated music. In the old days, you never saw black musicians playing with music stands. They would memorize it, which is important. For me, when I learn a song with notes, it takes a while to really memorize it, but it’s important to memorize it because then you’ll know it.”

Cherry tells a story about Miles Davis coming to play with him and Billy Higgins at the Renaissance in Hollywood and borrowing his pocket trumpet.

And then, later in the ’60s, Miles invited Cherry to play with his quintet at the Village Vanguard: “So I played something, the changes from ‘I Got Rhythm’ — AABA — and I stopped my solo just before the bridge, which is the B part, and Miles said, ‘You’re the only man I know who stops his solo at the bridge.’ Then later I heard him do the same thing. And the next time I saw him he said, ‘Hey, Cherry, now I sound a little like you,’ which was a great compliment.”

Especially, one might note, coming from a man who had initially despised Cherry’s playing.

In an official telex note after a concert in Yaoundé in 1981, during a US State Department-sponsored tour of Cameroon, a consular official writes: “Cherry and his companions were true ambassadors of goodwill: courteous, patient, curious about the country, irrepressibly friendly… the only trouble was trying to move them from place to place, as they kept striking up conversations in the street.” On page 132 we learn that the pocket trumpet Cherry was playing at the time of his conversation had belonged to Boris Vian, the writer and critic, and perhaps before him to Josephine Baker. On the next page Cherry mentions an occasion in the 1950s when he and Ornette went to hear Stockhausen perform at UCLA.

The book doesn’t shy away from the social conditions in which the music was born, or the heroin addiction that began for Cherry in the 1950s and continued on and off for the rest of his life. Here, as part of a long disquisition on the changes in the heroin trade, is an insight, from the perspective of 1981: “…you always try to keep some morale. There were some influential white people who were running dope, and so I would snitch for them, and that was how I survived. But now on the Lower East Side, anyone can go and snitch. Anyone. Sometimes they ask you to show them your marks (on your arm) before they let you into the building. That world is a different kind of world. You can’t compare that world to people who only smoke pot, because you’re fighting for your life to survive.”

World music had not yet been invented, or codified as a marketing category, when Cherry left his jazz background. He had risen to fame through his association with Coleman, followed by three wonderful albums of his own for Blue Note (Complete Communion, Symphony for the Improvisers, and Where Is Brooklyn?), and through his work with Albert Ayler, the New York Contemporary Five, the Jazz Composers Orchestra, and Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra.

His new direction rejected nothing of his past, but incorporated elements from other cultures, exemplified by his use of bamboo flutes, gamelan, and doussn’ gouni, the West African six-stringed hunter’s harp.

His concert at the 1968 Berlin Jazz Festival, released by MPS as Eternal Rhythm, gave a clear indication of where his music was heading. Further evidence came from collaborations with Turkish drummer Okay Temiz (Orient on BYG and Organic Music Society on Caprice), his duo albums with Ed Blackwell (Mu Pts 1 and 2 on BYG, El Corazón on ECM), his guest appearance on Swedish drummer-composer Bengt Berger’s essay on African ritual modes and rhythms, Bitter Funeral Beer (also ECM), and the three ECM albums by Codona, a trio with multi-instrumentalists Collin Walcott and Nana Vasconcelos, recorded 1978–82 (and re-released in 2008 as The Codona Trilogy).

Elsewhere, refusing to be limited by notions of idiom and genre, he’s turned up on Lou Reed’s The Bells , Rip Rig & Panic’s I Am Cold , and a delightful half-hour impromptu duet with Terry Riley, bootlegged from a 1975 Riley concert in Cologne. In the early ’80s, he toured with Sun Ra’s Arkestra and Ian Dury’s Blockheads.

I want to share a short, pithy description of Cherry’s playing that I just read in a Substack post celebrating pianist Ethan Iverson’s 1972 Ornette album Science Fiction : “Folk music, surrealism, blues, avant-garde, deep intelligence, primitive emotion.” It’s beautiful. And as much as I love his work with Coleman, Albert Ayler and Gato Barbieri, my favorite Cherry albums are probably the ones that best encapsulate the full range of those qualities and his imagination.

These are Eternal Rhythm, 1973’s Relativity Suite (on JCOA, never reissued in any form since its initial vinyl appearance) and the wonderful Modern Art: Stockholm 1977, a concert at the city’s Museum of Modern Art, which appeared on the Mellotronen label in 2014, with Cherry and a nine-piece band playing wonderfully rich acoustic versions of material from his then-recent album Hear & Now, produced by Narada Michael Walden.

It includes a spellbinding duet with Swedish guitarist Georg Wadenius on a pretty Coleman ballad called “Ornettunes,” and an ecstatic transition from the sweet groove of “California” (a reworking of Donald Byrd’s “Cristo Redentor,” with Cherry on piano) to the little prayer for transcendence of “Desireless” (first composed as “Isla (The Sapphic Sleep)” for Alexander Jodorowsky’s 1973 film The Holy Mountain and then re-recorded under its new title for Relativity Suite).

It’s easy to imagine that there’s probably never been music played by anyone, anywhere, at any time, from the prehistoric hunters of the Eastern steppe to whatever Kendrick Lamar, Billie Eilish, or Nils Frahm are doing next, to which Don Cherry couldn’t have made a noteworthy contribution. And the secret to that must have been his openness.

“I’m self-taught in a way,” he says in the book, “but I’ve always been open to learning, because I don’t think a lifetime is long enough to really learn music.”