For too long the popular “jazz” narrative ascribed to the trumpeter, composer, and master improviser had been weighed down by a subjectively bad rap. Yes, Cherry was always noted for his presence at the beginning of so-called “free jazz” as a member of Ornette Coleman’s legendary quartet, but for much of his time as an omnivorous, global-minded musician, Cherry was also written off as eccentric, unreliable, and inconsistent. This can be read as backhanded references to the drug addiction with which he struggled for much of his life. But they’re also institutional critiques of what a successful career in “jazz” was meant to sound like and achieve. And Cherry, very intentionally, and early in his career, left behind those simple definitions and expectations of musical purposes. In fact, you could clearly say that it was his time with Coleman’s band (1956-1962, but also sporadically for the rest of his life) that initiated Cherry’s notion that music needed to be free, open, and able to move between cultures. Few 20th-century musicians jumped into as many sonic, cultural, and borderless milieus as Don Cherry did between the mid-1960s and his death in 1995. A short, incomplete list of his collaborators includes Albert Ayler, the Master Musicians of Jajouka, Allen Ginsberg, Terry Riley, Steve Hillage, Lou Reed, Ian Dury & the Blockheads, Bongwater, Sun Ra, Neneh Cherry (his stepdaughter), as well as countless legendary musicians from South Africa, Turkey, Brazil, and various Scandinavian countries—just some of the legends left off the list of tracks below. Cherry’s musical perspective was both omnivorous and collectivist, fueled by a desire to gain and share knowledge and then to put it into practice with as many people as possible (and the more “amateur” the better). How do you adequately sum up a body of work like that? You can’t; but you can point in directions, lay down stepping-stones which build a life’s ark. It’s the least that a musical journey as epic as Don Cherry’s deserves.
Ornette Coleman – “Lonely Woman” (The Shape of Jazz to Come, 1959)
One can't convey Don Cherry's story without telling Ornette Coleman's; initially, the pair, alongside the forever rhythm section of bassist Charlie Haden, and either Billy Higgins or Ed Blackwell on drums, were partners in upending jazz's norms—always playing in agreed-upon time and harmonic structures. Ornette's music did not. It was, in a word, "free." His group's recordings from 1958–62 map jazz being remade, and Cherry's trumpet was the harmolodic foil to Ornette's alto in this musical cartography. "Lonely Woman" off Coleman's Atlantic debut is one of the most popular exhibits of their musical dialogue, their two horns melding on funereal melody, part dirge, part escape. It's rough-hewn but deeply emotional, an abstract blues spiritual both familiar and foreign.
John Coltrane & Don Cherry – “Focus on Sanity” (The Avant-Garde, 1960)
Recorded in 1960 (but not released until '66), this session documented a meeting of two blazing comets in jazz's night sky. Trane was well on his way toward godhead status while Ornette's group were new to New York, deeply polarizing opinions with their free playing. The five tracks here (Percy Heath of the Modern Jazz Quartet replaces Haden on three) show the different strategies, with much of the time spent seeing whether Trane can keep up with Cherry and Blackwell on Ornette's tunes. The best result is "Focus on Sanity," where Blackwell and Heath are off to the races as Trane's regal tone stays with them step for step, before he passes the baton to Cherry, whose slurred notes and scratchy pitches echo the title's instability. At around the midway point, the whole tune changes and a gorgeous Arabian blues emerges, with Cherry's horn abstractions a music colorist's blessing; when the theme returns, it sounds like a completely different song.
Ornette Coleman Double Quartet – “Free Jazz (Pts 1 & 2)” (Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation, 1961)
There's no end to how much the sounds of this session—which would go on to name not so much a genre as a movement and one of 20th-century music's great ideas—forecasts a chapter of Cherry's own career, as well as his notions of large-scale collective improvisation. The all-star assemblage (Ornette's regulars, plus Freddie Hubbard on a second trumpet, Scott LaFaro on second bass, and Eric Dolphy on bass clarinet) flies high and continually for over a half hour. It's fair to say that Cherry's input is not as omnipresent as Hubbard's, nor as sound-affecting as Dolphy's (who pulls out wild, amphibian notes), but he's almost always right by Ornette's side, harmonizing or playing off him. Because one other thing "Free Jazz" reinforces is how, from the very beginning, Cherry was a great instinctive collaborator for whom the group result always seemed to serve a grander purpose than the solo flight.
Sonny Rollins – “Oleo” (Our Man in Jazz, 1962)
Newk's short-lived quartet, where his soon-to-be-longtime bassist Bob Cranshaw was augmented by Cherry and Ornette quartet drummer Billy Higgins, is a little bit of jazz history "what if"—the moment Rollins could've leapt fully into the free music then being called "the New Thing." Instead, he only dipped a toe—but oh, what a dip. Just look what this quartet does to Rollins' well-worn standard "Oleo" on a February night at New York's Village Gate, stretching it to 25 luxurious, hyper-tensioned minutes, all hard, driven boogie. Rollins of course controls the proceedings in a virtuoso performance, but it is Cherry and his fills and asides that egg him on. In many ways the sheer length of this version is Don's doing. What's more, Cherry's quoting of bop melodies here, a clear nod right back to Rollins' style, shows he could play the traditional game any time he wanted to. He just didn't.
The New York Contemporary Five – “Cisum” (The New York Contemporary Five, 1963)
Ornette's group may have disbanded but it never broke up, all members playing with each other and the composer for much of the rest of their careers. More importantly, each member of that group carried Coleman's greater propositions about music onward, raising an international community. Before Cherry had ever led a session, he played with almost every historic experimental and free jazz figure in the Big Apple. The New York Contemporary Five was a short-lived group featuring, among others, John Coltrane saxophone acolytes Archie Shepp and John Tchicai. The mostly live sides they recorded with Cherry were deeply indebted to Ornette's music, especially this composition captured in Tchicai’s native Copenhagen. As drummer J. C. Moses and bassist Don Moore set off on a double-time, James Brown-like tempo, Cherry's clarion call leads the saxophonists on flights that string together phrases that flutter and soar in and around each other.
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