Home Boy, Sister Out

Album review

After leaving the Ornette Coleman Quartet, Don Cherry launched his solo career halfway through the 1960s. Having worked with John Coltrane, Albert Ayler and Gato Barbieri, he quickly earned a singular place in the avant-garde jazz scene, but also elsewhere. Elsewhere indeed, like on the oddity Home Boy, Sister Out, probably his most unique albums… Released in 1985 and produced by Ramuntcho Matta, it is being rereleased in 2018 by Wewantsounds (with a few unheard bonuses), showcasing the album’s eclectic casting: Laurie Anderson, the Talking Heads, Arto Lindsay, Elli Medeiros, poet Brion Gysin and drummer Abdoulaye Prosper Niang! Altogether, a collective that perfectly symbolises the punk-funk, post-punk, no-wave and avant-garde-jazz era of New York and Paris at the time. The vibrations of the African diaspora living in the French capital and in downtown Manhattan so dear to Jean-Michel Basquiat and the Lounge Lizards delivered delicious rock’n’world mishmash. An orgy of jazz, reggae, rock, hip hop and pop on the same album that would fit right between the Talking Heads’ Remain In Light (1980) and Laurie Anderson’s Mister Heartbreak (1984)… © Marc Zisman/Qobuz