An archival interview with organic music master Don Cherry from Musician Magazine in 1983.

I went to Morocco in 1964. That was my first big adventure, the first time I entered a foreign land and felt like I was entering an earlier period of history. The peripatetic pocket trumpeter Don Cherry is recalling for me some of the far-off places his travels have taken him, as he sits eating a breakfast of scrambled eggs on toast in a downtown Manhattan diner the morning following his forty-sixth birthday. “No, I didn’t have any jobs lined up when I went. I just went, and that’s the way to do it if you’re going to meet all the musicians and learn melodies and rhythms from them, if you’re going to see all there is to see.

“Two years ago, I did a State Department tour of West Africa. I played concerts, did workshops, but I didi’t get to see anything.” He scoops the ice out of his water glass, then drops in a crescent-shaped multivitamin he says is manufactured in West Germany. It fizzes like Bromo, looks like Tang, and Cherry reports it tastes like mango, sadly adding that he has only two more tablets left. “I did that tour because I just had to get to Mali,” he continues, “because that’s where the guitar I’ve been playing the last five years— the doussn’ gouni—comes from. A master had shown me the traditional rhythms, but I hadn’t been there, so, you see, I had to go.

“When I got there, all the doussn’ gouni players were in the bush! It was their season for hunting, and if I had gone there on my own and gotten there two weeks earlier, I could have gone on the hunt with them. I met many kora players, many balafon players, but not one doussn’ gouni player, so I’ll go back there someday soon.

“But anyway, at the first concert, as soon as I started playing that guitar, right away the people recognized that sound and started clapping the rhythm. Then, all of a sudden, they slowed it down, and their mouths just opened. They were looking at me and wondering, ‘But how is it possible for him to be playing this if he’s from America?’ Then after awhile, they just started clapping along again anyway,” Cherry laughs. “They didn’t care. It was so incredible!”

“I was playing for goat herders who would take out their flutes and join me and for anyone else who wanted to listen or to sing and play along. It was the whole idea of organic music— music as a natural part of your day.”

It’s momentarily disconcerting to hear Don Cherry say that he and his Swedish wife Moqui live with their youngest son Eagle Eye “right between the tunnel and the bridge, next to the river in Long Island City,” even if he’s not exactly telling me anything I don’t already know. It’s just that based on everything else I know about him I find it difficult to imagine this limber and wiry reddish brown string figure living any one place in the world in particular.

Like most musicians, Cherry— born in rural Oklahoma and raised on Material Highway in Watts—has spent the greater portion of his adult life on the run. He first arrived in New York in 1959 as the diffidently lyrical trumpeter in the quartet with which Ornette Coleman forever distended the shape of jazz to come, and he gradually emerged as a confident if still cautious harbinger of change himself, serving as the sweet voice of moderation to Albert Ayler and Archie Shepp during their angry rampages through Europe and America in the early days of free jazz in the early 60s. Presently, Cherry divides his road time almost evenly between the superb Coleman alumni band Old and New Dreams and the world music trio Codona. There are also special projects such as the tour of Europe with Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra which he’s just returned from, and the tour of France with African pop star Manu Dibango which will begin in two days. Not too long ago, Cherry even made all the stops on the rock circuit, in support of Lou Reed.

Most musicians are happy enough to go wherever business takes them, but Cherry has made a conscientious effort to see the world. Moving to Sweden in 1970, for instance, and setting up residence in an abandoned schoolhouse, he purchased a camper and embarked on what he describes as “an acoustic expedition” of Europe and the Middle East. “I wanted to play different instruments in environments not man-made for music— natural settings like a catacomb or on a mountaintop or by the side of a lake. I wasn’t playing for jazz audiences then, you realize. I was playing for goat herders who would take out their flutes and join me and for anyone else who wanted to listen or to sing and play along. It was the whole idea of organic music— music as a natural part of your day. Moqui and the children and I would sing and play and camp out and live in the bus. We were never stationary the four years we were in Sweden.”

Given such a utopian, back- to- the-land philosophy, Long Island City seems like an especially incongruous place for Cherry finally to hang his hat. “I still live in Sweden three months each summer,” he points out, “but living in Sweden to me is like living in the forest. Because that’s what it comes down to, no matter where you live— either you’re living in the forest or you’re living in a metropolis, and I guess I need the balance of living in both. Everyone thinks of Long Island as a suburb, but the part I live in is more like an industrial city, and Manhattan is right outside my window.

“But if you were to go to our schoolhouse in Togarp and then come out to our loft, you’d see it was just like walking from one room of a house into another, because Moqui is a designer, and she creates the same environment no matter where we are. But, yes, it is hard adjusting all the time. At first, whenever you come back to New York, you get diarrhea!” A smile reapportions the furrows and long planes of his handsome, angular face, and his dark, prominent eyes dart quickly around, as they do whenever he realizes he has said something funny or he wishes to underline a point.

“I became very conscious of diet in Sweden. I was a vegetarian the four years we lived there year-round. I planted all my own food. Then I ate nothing but brown rice for a while, to remind myself there were starving people in the world. I’m still careful of what I eat, and I think you assimilate more energy by eating very little. But it’s difficult to remain a vegetarian when you’re on the road all the time, unless you’re traveling the way we were in the camper.

“So I’m always adjusting to the pace of wherever I am at the time,” Cherry sighs. “The impressions of being in the city are totally different, and I can hear that even in my compositions. Why I moved back here, it’s difficult to say, except that I seemed to be here all the time anyway doing different musical projects around ‘ 74 or ‘ 75, and New York has always seemed like home to me, in a funny way, from the first day I came here with Ornette.”

“My willingness to play different kinds of jazz is what led to my interest in ethnic music. I’ve had so many wonderful experiences playing music in Europe, Asia, India, Africa and South America.”

We’re in a basement dressing room in the Public Theatre now; Cherry is due upstairs in an hour or so to begin rehearsal for the Liberation Music Orchestra’s American premiere this evening. In the meantime, he’s mugging for the Musician photographer, using his battered, tarnished horn as a prop—tucking the pocket trumpet in the pocket of his coat so that it appears to be shyly peeking out; holding it up lengthwise to his chin and stroking it gently, rather as if he half-expected a playful, purring kitten to come pawing up out of the bell. Between rolls of film, he puffs his cheeks into giant bubbles and blows a few bars of Ornette Coleman’s “Beauty Is A Rare Thing” through the horn. All the twisting motion and running colors of Coleman’s classic meditation for quartet are hauntingly encapsulated in this impromptu solo rendition.

“I think of it as a tonsil,” he says of the truncated horn. “I use it to sing. I mean, I wouldn’t want to be thinking of playing trumpet to the point where the instrument begins to control me. This horn’s a light instrument, and its timbre’s close to the sound of my own voice.

“The first pocket trumpet I owned I got in the San Fernando Valley around the time I met Ornette. It felt good for my size and the kind of music I was playing. It was made in Pakistan, and I remember it cost a hundred dollars, and I only had twenty-five. But Red Mitchell, the bass player, loaned me the rest. I’ll always be grateful to Red for that.

“This pocket trumpet I have now was made in France and used in a spectacular that Josephine Baker was in. Its bell is even smaller than other pocket trumpets, and you can see it has jade on the top. The first trumpet I ever owned was a Sears Silvertone – I guess everything Sears sells is named Silvertone! Fats Navarro and Clifford Brown were the trumpeters I adored around that time, but I realized that I’d never be strong enough to get a big, full sound like theirs. Miles Davis became very special to me— he didn’t need vibrato, his tone was so pure. And Sweets Edison impressed me a lot too; I especially liked his humor and his approach to accompanying singers.”

Cherry was caught up in music even before settling upon these favorite trumpeters. As youngsters, he and his sister would roll back the living room carpet and jitterbug to the hits of the 40s, and on Sundays, the entire family would sing in the Baptist church. His grandmother had played piano in a silent movie house before he was born, and his father tended bar in a Central Avenue jazz club. Still, Cherry’s decision to become a professional musician met with some family disapproval. “From what he saw on the job, my father believed playing jazz was the first step to drug addiction,” he affectionately jests.

Cherry was not so easily deterred, however. He learned chord changes from a bassist named Harper Crosby. “I was just improvising from the melody until Harper hipped me there was more. He taught me so well that Ornette used to call me the chord man, because I was always so fascinated by chord patterns.

“It was Jayne Cortez who introduced me to Ornette. Jayne was my guru when I was a kid, the one who would turn me on to the latest records and books. She later became Omettes first wife, and now she’s a highly regarded poet. Omette was being persecuted even back then, and not just because of his music either. He was the first man I ever saw, white or black, with long hair. There’s resistance to him even now, even from some black musicians, because of his electric band. It’s amazing, isn’t it?”

It’s nothing compared to the controversy that circled over Coleman’s head during his tenure at the Half Note in 1959. This was probably the closest jazz has ever come to Beatlemania: everyone in New York it seemed, jazz fan or not, had something to say pro or con about Coleman’s potential effect on jazz and on Western civilization in general ( there’s a funny, fictionalized account of the hysteria in Thomas Pynchon’s first novel, V). If little of the debate surrounding Coleman extended to Cherry at first, it was because the trumpeter was initially deemed unworthy either of such approbation or advocacy. Understandably, Cherry let the leader dominate their unison skirmishes, and, to some listeners, Cherry’s solos often sounded like timid paraphrases of the Coleman solos that preceded them. It became apparent only in retrospect that Cherry was commendably striving to maintain “the intensity and brilliance of Ornette’s solos and his written lines, that sparkle Ornette’s music has that is almost like a shining diamond and that you have to keep going from the beginning of the piece until the end,” as he astutely puts it. It has also become obvious in retrospect that Cherry succeeded in this objective more often than not.

Following an altercation long since forgotten by both men, Cherry left Coleman’s group and returned to Los Angeles. “And it was Sonny Rollins who rescued me, who got me out of L.A. and took me to Europe for the first time. When I was in Paris with Sonny in 1963, I’d go sit in with the gypsies and play the standards Django Reinhardt had recorded. I’d find the Dixieland groups and play with them too. And when we went to Denmark, I looked up Don Byas and Dexter Gordon, and I heard Albert Ayler for the first time there too.

“My willingness to play different kinds of jazz is what led to my interest in ethnic musics, I guess. I’ve had so many wonderful experiences playing music in Europe, Asia, India, Africa and South America, and I’ve been fortunate to study with the masters in all those places too. You know, to study with a man like Ustad Zia M’Digar in India, you have to humble yourself in a certain way. You have to demonstrate your respect for him and for the tradition that’s been handed down in his family for two thousand years. It’s like fine wine— you don’t offer it to someone who isn’t going to savor it, who can’t tell the difference.

“It’s funny. In many of the countries I’ve visited, the young people are more interested in Western music than in the music of their own culture. That’s why it’s important for me to go to Africa, say, and play the doussn’ gouni. The young people realize the importance of their own music if they hear a Western musician playing it. It’s happening here in America, too, with young black kids. If you look at the schools teaching improvisation, you’ll see the students are mostly white. That’s why I applied for a grant from the NEA last spring and went to work with the kids growing up now where I grew up in Watts. I tried to expose them to Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, both of whom I revered as a kid, and to Ornette Coleman, whose music I was able to contribute to.

“You asked me how it is that my kids are involved in music?” Cherry’s eighteen- year-old daughter Nonah sings with the British punk band Rip, Rig and Panic, and his other three offspring all play instruments.” It’s because they’ve been taught they’re part of a culture and that they have a responsibility to keep it alive. Same thing with Jim Pepper, the saxophonist who went to West Africa with me. Jim’s an Indian whose father is a singer in the pow wows,” says Cherry, who is one-quarter Choctaw himself. ” The response in Africa was tremendous when Jim would play one of the pow wow pieces he had written— from the people in the Embassy, especially. They realized that here was something truly American.”

Western musicians have been infatuated with the musics of the Third World at least since the Great Mystical Awakening of the 60s, but few ever have been able to resist the urge to conquer and colonialize. Don Cherry has been a notable exception. A kind of musical Marco Polo, he has introduced many exotic fabrics and spices to jazz. But it is not in Cherry’s nature to plunder. He’s determined always to offer something of equal value in trade for whatever bounty he decides to take on board. And most important of all, recognizing that a people’s music is but one strand in the web of ceremony and custom that makes their experience unique, he is careful to leave that web intact.

Inevitably, some of what Cherry wants to tell us about the world is garbled in the translation. Sometimes he and his colleagues in Codona ( Colin Walcott and Nan Vasconcelos) remind me of small children cupping seashells to their ears: they mistake the rush of their own hearts’ excitement for the roar of the great ocean that washed such a treasure up. There are times when the sense of one-world optimism they labor to convey strikes me as wishful and self-deluded. And it’s difficult for me to shake the longstanding prejudice that musicians like Cherry shortchange themselves and their audiences in those moments when they eschew their natural instruments and discipline for dabblings with ethnic instruments and doctrines.

But it’s possible to forgive the most brilliant trumpeter of his generation any amount of good-natured doodling the moment he finally lifts the trumpet to his lips. Blessed with an immaculate sense of form from the very beginning, Cherry’s solos have gained even greater compression, I think, as a result of his examinations of musics in which the rules of improvisation are far more constricting than the make-it up-as-you-go-along philosophy governing self-expression in too much contemporary jazz. If it seems that Cherry has been adrift on a musical odyssey these last twenty years, it’s good to remember that an odyssey is a round trip, after all.

Homecoming is the theme that pervades his music now. One of the many pleasures of hearing Old and New Dreams, for example, is sensing the obvious pleasure Cherry, Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden and Ed Blackwell still take from hearing each other, even after having played together off and on in various combinations for close to twenty-five years now. Each member of O&ND is an Omette Coleman alumnus, and classic Coleman still accounts for roughly half of the band’s live repertoire. ” And some of those pieces I was playing with Ornette in California, long before we ever recorded,” Cherry says. It is unlikely Coleman would ever have changed jazz as profoundly as he has, had he not enlisted players as sympathetic to his cause as Cherry and the others. Coleman’s music is their music too, and they perform it with a keening edge of heart and purpose that can literally make you tingle.

Tonight’s concert is something of a reunion too, of course. Few records of the era conveyed the musical and political upheaval of the late 60s as powerfully as Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra date did; now, many of Haden’s original co-conspirators have begun to reassemble in this small room. Looking at them now, it’s discouraging to think how little the world has changed for the better in the intervening years, but heartening all the same to see that the rebels have aged so well. Obviously eager to greet old acquaintances and perhaps to have a few moments to himself before rehearsal, Cherry is growing restless with his interviewer, who asks one final question. Has Cherry ever played music indigenous to the part of the world he was in and gotten an angry or indifferent response?

“Yes, yes! With this very band in Spain, when we played one of the Spanish folk tunes that Charlie and Carla had arranged.”

“The audience sat there thinking, “We hear this crap on the radio all day, man. We came to hear jazz,” explains Carla Bley, who walks in on the conversation as if on cue.

“After it was over, someone yelled, “SHIT!” laughs Cherry, and something— perhaps the political content of the music he will perform this evening— reminds him of another story, which he tells us as he gathers his belongings to take upstairs. ” I played a left wing festival in Milano once, and Gary Rubin?… Jerry Rubin?… Abby Hoffman?… one of them… jumped onstage in his birthday suit just as we were ready to go on and started babbling for an hour at least. The promoters told us, ‘Wait, wait,’ but the audience- 90,000 kids in a stadium, man, and some of them had been roughed up by the cops outside— started chanting, ‘ Play! Play! Play!’ So I went up to the microphone and said in my best Italian. ‘Senti, senti, my name is Don Cherry… situation is simply music.’ We started playing this lilting melody Nana Vasconcelos had written, and everyone out there started lighting pieces of paper and holding them up like torches. The whole stadium was glowing! It was one of the most beautiful reactions I’ve ever had, much better
than people just applauding, you know?

“Then there was another episode in Italy when Moqui and I were wounded by the police during a student riot. But that’s another story. I’ll tell you about it next time I see you….” And before I can register shock or curiosity, he is out the door and on the go again.