Billboard : 02/12/1977

Eclectic trumpeter Cherry combines Eastern and Western musical elements in a very unusual and uncanny program. The material matches mysticism with mordant fluency in terms of melody and rhythmic accompaniment. The quintet setting features two stalwarts of avant gardism: Charlie Haden on bass and Billy Higgins on drums. Best cuts: Brown Rice (with Cherry talking through a filter), Malkauns, Degi-Degi.

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Asbury Park Press
John Devonshire : 03/13/1977

Trumpeter Cherry has long been associated with the avant garde of jazz, with good reason, but this album explores Eastern music as well as more conventional jazz. With Cherry are two long-time associates, bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Billy Higgins. Frank Lowe on tenor sax is on three of the four tracks and Ricky Cherry on electric piano on two. Bassist Hakim Jamil replaces Haden on one of the selections.

The highlight of the album is Malkauns, a Cherry original (they all are) that features a lengthy and eloquent solo by Haden with a tambourra background. Cherry and Higgins eventually enter and the piece becomes a duet between Haden and Cherry and then a trio with Higgins. All are excellent, with Cherry, an underrated trumpet player, in top form. Cherry also uses his voice to good advantage on two tracks, chanting rather than singing. Higgins is a first-rate drummer, who has played with some of the best, and he lays down a solid foundation on all tracks. He and Haden seem ideally suited for the music on this album with its highly propulsive and shifting rhythms. The Eastern rhythms against the sometimes mournful sound of Cherry’s pocket trumpet and Lowe’s wails create a hypnotic effect at times. This is good music, well played by some of the best of the genre and a good introduction to the music of the ever-searching Don Cherry.

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Beaumont Enterprise-Journal
Craig Black : 03/20/1977

There’s a stateliness to Don Cherry‘s horn that transcends his jazz/rock fusion, and his alternately solemn/satirical vocals redefine lyricism. The brass master has produced in his self-titled album (on Horizon) a work as compelling as it is innovative.

In a musical context that often completely dispenses with key centers, consistent tempo and meter, where Third World rhythms meet Western instrumentation. where Eastern mysticism meets mantra modality, the machinization of the melding becomes an integral component of the composition. Which, of course, is a bit out of context if such diahramatic digressions are allowed to overshadow the simple clarity of the music.

The album consists of only four pieces, the opening Brown Rice, a catchy jazz/disco/mantra (?); Malkauns, which features Charlie Haden‘s acoustic base line; and on side two, Chenrezig, a bright/breathy, accentuated/improvisational piece; and Degi-Degi, a sinister, racy suggestion.

Risqué; pungent, piquant. provocative; Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis, John Coltrane: Tibetan, African. East-meets-West; This is the music of Don Cherry. Innovative eloquence.

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Calgary Herald
Randy Hutton : 03/26/1977

Don Cherry has made his first album on a U.S. label in several years with his recording on A&M’s Horizon label, simply titled Don Cherry.

This trumpeter came to prominence in the early sixties, playing with Ornette Coleman. He left the States, both physically and musically, about a decade ago, moving his body to Europe and his music to various parts of Asia and Africa, developing a synthesis of international music styles.

Probably the best example on record of the synthesis is his Relativity Suite, commissioned by the Jazz Composers Orchestra Association, and recorded in 1973. The new album is pale in comparison. It has its moments, such as duets between Cherry and fire-breathing tenor player Frank Lowe, and a lyrical statement by bassist Charlie Haden. But the East Indian-style chanting comes off here merely as postured pretentiousness, and combining a Balinese scale with a disco beat is just more dum dum ditty do wah.

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Cleveland Plain-Dealer
Chris Colombi Jr. : 03/25/1977

Don Cherry finds the co-founder of the ’60s “free jazz” school, then with Ornette Coleman, still working the wide boundaries of expression. Trumpeter Cherry’s groupings of four to seven musicians include drummer Billy Higgins, bassist Charlie Haden, reed man Frank Lowe and Ricky Cherry on keyboards. The music is an intentional mixture of blues and Eastern influences in Cherry’s experimental proportions.

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Glens Falls Post-Star
Unknown : 05/07/1977

This exceptional album is required listening for all avant garde jazz fans, for it is an extraordinary creation.

Trumpeter Don Cherry, disciple of Ornette Coleman but influenced by those with whom he played in his formative years – Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler and Pharaoh Sanders to name a few – has created some extremely innovative and exciting music for this album.

His sidemen are the best of the modernists – Charlie Haden, Billy Higgins, Frank Lowe, and others.

The music is indescribable – for it must be heard to be fully appreciated. It is spacy, lowkey, throbbing and ingeniously structured material which defies most traditional concepts but insults none of them.

This album will be the avant garde sensation of the year.

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Houston Post
Bob Claypool : 03/27/1977

One remembers him well – a startling image from the avant-garde jazz scene in 1959, a thin figure blowing his tortured lines from toy-like pocket trumpet behind Ornette Coleman‘s plastic saxophone lead.

Cherry‘s work with Coleman (which lasted little more than a year) brought him to national prominence and established his reputation as one of the most innovative “free jazz” trumpeters.

After Coleman, Cherry worked with Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, Pharaoh Sanders and was a member of the New York Contemporary Five. Then came travels in Europe, Africa and the Far East.

Considering his background, it is no surprise to find Cherry still at the forefront of the avant-garde on his debut horizon LP. He is still making multitextured “free” music that is full of wildly changing tempos, heavy African and Eastern overtones and rich, deeply emotional colorations.

Backed by an incredible group that includes Charlie Haden on acoustic bass, Billy Higgins on drums (with Cherry, they make up two-thirds of the old Coleman quartet), and occasional contributions from tenor saxophonist Frank Lowe, electric pianist Ricky Cherry and others, Don produces some intensely spiritual celebrations that are quite in line with his own groundings in Eastern mysticism. Often, Cherry vocalizes chants to his deities – in Chenrezig, it’s the traditional “Om Mani Padme Hum”; in Degi-Degi he offers original lines of praise to the subject of the song, “the goddess of music.”

And, as always, there are the sparkling lines from the Cherry pocket trumpet – solos of sharp tone and great clarity, urged on by Haden’s probing bass and Higgins’ subtle, yet forceful rolls.

The result is a sound created out on the edge of technical prowess and spiritual adventure, music that puts continuous improvisation first and makes no concessions to earthbound fads. It is not an album, but a redemptive experience, mystical, indefinable, beautiful.

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Kitchener-Waterloo Record
John Kiely : 04/21/1977

If you are discussing legitimate jazz artists with any fan of the music, the name Don Cherry will surely come up early in the conversation. The 41-year-old trumpeter-singer-pianist-composer is one of the most creative figures on the avante garde jazz scene. His album entitled simply Don Cherry finds him in some suitable company including bassist Charlie Haden from his old Ornette Coleman days and the music is exciting, always unpredictable and 100% Don Cherry. The music isn’t for everyone, but if you enjoy new jazz, you’ll love this album.

Cherry gets a pure, lilting tone out of his little pocket trumpet and sings (or chants) in a smooth, clean voice. Cherry is strongly influenced by Eastern musics. He was studying the music of Tibet and India well before it became the trendy thing to do. He’s a musician of tremendous integrity and for all the musical madness that occasionally goes on, he is a player who can rattle your emotions with the best of them.

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Newsday
Bob Micklin : 02/27/1977

There are musicians who find a groove early in their careers and settle comfortably into it – often with excellent results. But Cherry, once a promising post-bop trumpeter, has never stopped exploring new musical paths. He was part of Ornette Coleman‘s revolutionary jazz quartet of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and later plunged into avant-garde music with utter sincerity while living and working in Europe. Now, at 41, he is a unique artist who makes music of an extremely personal nature which combines free jazz with African and Eastern techniques and concepts. He plays a pocket-sized trumpet, sings and also handles the piano with distinctive style. This album demonstrates his uncompromising and always eclectic search for means of individual expression. The music transcends categories. It simply is, and with the aid of such good musicians as drummer Billy Higgins, bassists Charlie Haden and Hakim Jamil and saxophonist Frank Lowe, it is often fascinating.

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Port Talbot Guardian
Unknown : 04/14/1977

Don Cherry is still best remembered for his work with Ornette Coleman, which culminated in 1961 with the Free Jazz album – and revolutionized Western music.

From there he went to join Sonny Rollins, then John Coltrane, then Albert Ayler and then he slipped into obscurity. But his time out of the public eye has been well spent, and this album could well provide new direction for jazz.

Cherry has studied alternative musical approaches (Eastern and African) from the inside, and has returned with something entirely new. The barriers between instruments, and between words and notes, are not pliable. And though he employs metric, often repetitive bass lines, the music goes beyond time.

As a trumpeter, Cherry takes a back seat (Frank Lowe‘s tenor sax features mostly as solo instrument). But as a kind of vocal director he creates new worlds. It is a music of mental participation, and it is music of new life.

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San Francisco Examiner
Thomas Albright : 03/06/1977

Cherry is joined by bassist Charlie Haden, drummer Billy Higgins and Tenor Saxophonist Frank Lowe (among others) in an unfortunate mélange of jazz, funk and folk, with lots of mantras, echo effects and outerspace electronics. Cherry’s trumpet can still intone some of the most poignantly beautiful blues lines imaginable, and Haden is Haden, but they all get swallowed up in a puffy cloud of mysticism.

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San Francisco Examiner
Thomas Albright : 04/17/1977
Bassist Haden is Working His Way Back into the Music World

On the windowsill stood a statuette presented by the Japanese jazz magazine, Swing Journal – its prestigious Album of the Year award for his superb 1976 duet release on the Horizon label, Closeness.

It added a note of piquant irony to the fourth floor room at Mount Zion hospital where Bassist Charlie Haden was again fighting a battle which he overcame once before in the middle 60s: Kicking a heroin habit.

The time was late last month; Haden has since entered Delancey House, where he expects to remain for the next year or two, incommunicado for several months, then gradually working his way back into the music world via benefits and other local performances.

Even as he spoke of an onslaught of personal, domestic and health crises over the past five years, Haden projected a quiet self-possession and optimism. Near at hand was a cassette recorder, and a tape of four duet tracks that will comprise a sequel to his last LP: With Archie Shepp, Hampton Hawes and Ornette Coleman (playing trumpet). There are writing projects he is eager to get to, as well as returning to performing when the time is right. “I have ten clean years in my favor,” he said. “And a lot of good friends.”

Serious and intense, the 39-year-old bassist and composer is a musician for whom the word “dedication” means a great deal. Haden’s own compositions have almost always been inspired by, or dedicated to, a specific person or event – from the classic Song for Che, on his 1969 Liberation Music Orchestra LP, to, on his new album, Ellen David, Haden’s wife, from whom he separated a year or two ago.

“I can only play the music I believe in,” he said. “When our first child was born eight years ago, I was just out of Synanon and needed money, so I bought a second-hand Fender bass and recorded two or three commercial jingles. Each time, I’d go into the bathroom and throw up. I felt I was contributing to the very people who are destroying creative music.

“Music, just like painting, is a language, and you have to dedicate your life to it. When I first heard jazz, I didn’t know what it was, but I knew I wanted to play it.”

Haden grew up as an Ozark mountain singer of “hillbilly music.” His father, Carl Haden, was a guitarist who put together a family act; from the time Charlie was two years old, they traveled the Midwest radio circuit, finally landing a weekly TV show in Omaha. Charlie occasionally experimented with his brother Jim’s string bass (“he was a big musical influence on me; he works now in a Reno house band”). A bout with bulbar polio when he was 15, ended Haden’s singing career and after being graduated from high school, he saved up $300 by selling shoes to buy his own bass.

Haden taught himself enough to tape a minuet that garnered a scholarship to Oberlin but, instead of accepting it, he hopped a Greyhound bus in response to a magazine ad by a school in Los Angeles. It turned out to be considerably less than he expected. Soon, Hayden – at 17 – was gigging with Art Pepper and then Paul Bley, a job that lasted until Ornette Coleman appeared in 1958.

“One night, (Drummer) Lenny McBrowne brought Ornette to the Hillcrest club, and he asked me to his apartment,” Haden recalled. “He had just separated from his family and was living in this one room. It was literally covered with manuscripts. He put some music on the stand, and I couldn’t believe how complex the changes were. But he said to just listen and follow and I did what I’ve always done – relied on my ear.”

Haden began to rehearse in day time hours with Coleman, Cherry and drummer Billy Higgins, and Bley later fired McBrowne and Vibist Dave Pike to incorporate the three newcomers into his group. “We tried to pretend Paul wasn’t there,” Haden said of this six week period, during which they developed their new, free approach. The initially large audiences gradually dwindled to a solid core of “people who felt close to the music, mostly musicians,” and when the clubowner decided to end the gig, Haden, Coleman, Cherry and Higgins recorded The Shape of Jazz to Come and then left for New York, to make history with their 1959 opening at the Five Spot.

Haden’s first run-in on narcotics charges came during the Five Spot date, and the next several years involved stints in federal hospitals at Lexington and Fort Worth (where he played extensively with Hawes), along with retreats to the family home in Missouri and sporadic dates with Coleman in New York and various groups around L.A.

Finally, Haden joined Synanon, first in San Diego, later moving to Santa Monica and, in the mid-60s, to the Bay Area to help establish the Synanon house at Seawall. He worked with Charles Lloyd, John Handy and formed a trio with Denny Zeitlin and Jerry Granelli that played regularly at the Trident in Sausalito. In 1966, he returned to New York, and he has since toured with Archie Shepp, rejoined Coleman and, as Ornette began to withdraw from performing to concentrate on composition, teamed with Keith Jarrett, Dewey Redman and Paul Motian in the highly successful quartet which lasted until last year.

Haden also played and recorded with such musicians as Alice Coltrane, John McLaughlin, Cherry and David Leibman, before going into the studio in 1976 to cut only his second LP as a leader.

“I don’t believe in putting out albums on an assembly line basis,” he explained. “In general, the musicians who are putting out vast numbers of records don’t seem to have been putting all of themselves into the music.

“The whole thing since Herbie Hancock – you begin to wonder if these musicians who are putting out such shallow records were ever really dedicated to music as an art form in the first place. It takes generations for an art form to develop. That’s why this particular language is an art form and rock is not. Superstars happened overnight, because young people needed a music for their culture and their era, but the musicians almost didn’t have a chance to even think about dedication.

“There was so much they could have done. The majority of people live in a world of shallow values. A minority is learning and creating new values. I feel a responsibility to help turn these values around.”

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St. Paul Dispatch
Carl Diltz : 05/12/1977
Don Cherry’s Music Has Far-Flung Sources

Some artists find universal as well as unique forms and feelings in their own backyards, while others have to explore or migrate to find sources which inspire them. Don Cherry, 40-year-old trumpeter and veteran of Ornette Coleman‘s jazz revolution, is definitely an explorer.

His knowledge of music, musicians, and instruments of Europe, Africa, and Asia is now the dominant force in his playing and composition.

In his new album, titled Don Cherry, on the Horizon label, he brings that knowledge home to America as a gift of beauty and passion with the help of people like Frank Lowe on tenor saxophone, Billy Higgins on drums, and the incomparable Charlie Haden on bass.

This is not the pure folk music of Eternal Now (Sonet) nor a dramatic production like Relatively Suite (JCOA). Each song on the album is like a pyramid – as is revealed by the “graphic score” of Brown Rice inside the deluxe cover.

These pyramidal songs are built on foundations of rhythms and chanting. Cherry’s vocals range from sounding like a string instrument to the jet hisses of “Doussn’ Gouni, from Mali, Af-fri-ca” on Degi-Degi, a tune also featuring some soaring tenor from Frank Lowe.

On Malkauns and Chenrezig Cherry’s trumpet is energetic and fluid, even in screeching flurries of notes maintaining a continuity and progression through climax after climax. On Malkauns Haden plays an extraordinary bass solo.

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Down Beat : 05/19/1977
Howard Mandel : 4.5 stars

Cherry still wears the multi-purpose mantle he displayed on his early LPs as a leader. As a trumpeter, he’s as accessible as any folk musician, with a warm, inviting tone more concerned with possibilities than pyrotechnics. As an improvisor, Cherry is inexhaustible. He has familiar turns, but no cliches. His secret is that he absorbs beauty from the world around him and plays it back, making his own sense of it. This inspires his sidemen, so he’s a valuable leader, too.

The music here is to the East of Ornette Coleman. Brown Rice sounds like Kool and the Gang meeting a gamelan orchestra. Who but Cherry could fuse menacing r&b pulses to chimes playing a simple mode and end up with a musical object of mystery? His success is not a matter of faith but his endeavor seems intuitively right, just as his puff-cheeked solos on the eccentric pocket trumpet are impulsive but always tasteful, giddy up high but never lost in the ozone.

Malkauns is a particular success. Wife Moki’s drone is very richly recorded, and Don’s melodies spurt recklessly over Higgins‘ rhythms that change from Asian to hard 4/4 and back. Haden‘s bass solo is the one he was saving for Cherry’s appearance on his own Closeness album.

Comforting as it is to have one’s trusted sidemen and immediate family on a session, Cherry can play with anyone, or everyone (most remarkable is his leadership of several fine Europeans on Eternal Rhythm – they seem to follow his ideas naturally). Tenorman Lowe has performed on Cherry’s JCOA album Relativity Suite and seems like the logical choice for the sax chair that Gato Barbieri first sat in. Lowe contributes some vicious blasts on Rice, and solos on side two, but he doesn’t yet engage with Cherry in give and take. Or is this a recording problem? There’s a little too much echo, a bit too much space between the instruments, for my ears. I’d rather they were knocking up against each other. That’s half a star, perhaps indulging a taste.

To indulge the other four and a half stars of taste – you’ll like this album. It’s romantically exotic, understandable and real, another good one from the Horizon series. Stanley Crouch’s notes are informative (Cherry used to gig as a pianist, did you know?), and the graphics are plenty to look at while you’re listening. These aren’t sounds one gets tired of – rather, you try to grasp them, remembering fragments, eager to listen again.

And will anyone with information about the Cherry album on Philadelphia, discographied in Horizon’s selective list, please contact me through this magazine?

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Liner Notes by Stanley Crouch
09/13/1976

There is joy laced with confidence in this music, and sadness, or pathos, that is as much connected to the Blues as it is to the huge yearning of that sound in Eastern music. That it would come from a man like Don Cherry is very fitting because one of his classic performances with Ornette Coleman, Lonely Woman, pointed to a direction that Cherry was to follow years later. Coleman’s composition not only suggested Eastern music, but set up ideas of rhythm (the rhythm section moving fast and the line slow) that you will find developed in the music on this record.

Don Cherry is much more than a disciple of Ornette Coleman, but the Texas genius has had more than a little influence on the Oklahoma born brassman. It was from Coleman in Los Angeles that Cherry began to understand that a music could be made that had its greatest connection to Western music only in the instrumentation. Coleman had dispensed with key centers, consistent tempos and meters in favor of a music that would shape itself on the basis of individual and collective imagination. In 1959, Coleman came to New York from California to open at the Five Spot with Cherry, Billy Higgins and Charlie Haden. They turned the Jazz world over and began a new age in African-American improvisation, a school that became known as “Free Jazz.”

Cherry left Coleman a little over a year later and went to work with Sonny Rollins, record with John Coltrane, push his sound up in the air next to that of Albert Ayler and eventually join one of the finest bands of the sixties, The New York Contemporary Five. After that band dissolved, Cherry left for Europe, Africa and the Far East. During this period Cherry began a gypsy life that was focused by his great love and curiosity. He learned many scales and rhythms from all over the world and then worked out a musical collage formed of systems, lines, scales, rhythms, instruments and feelings from as much of the musical globe as he has been able to get to. His music takes the listener all over the world and through many different sensibilities. This particular record begins with a mantra and ends with the dancing rhythms of an African string instrument. Throughout the record, one can hear the melding of Third World music and mysticism with western instruments. This recording also shows how well Cherry has developed as a trumpet player, and as a singer who can be satirical, joyous or solemnly religious. Whether one is as involved in Eastern mysticism as Cherry happens to be, should have no bearing on how well one likes the music, because the sounds that human beings make are as much for communication as for conversion. The lyricism, tenderness, power and stateliness of this music, held together by a sorrow that gradually rises to a sober joy, should give you a feeling of being lifted up, which is the purpose of most music.

To play this music of perpetual transformation, Cherry has picked some very fine artists. Billy Higgins is one of the greatest drummers of the century, possessing an extremely sensitive touch and the ability to swing any ensemble he plays with. If you listen closely, you will hear him lifting the band and focusing the improvisation with subtle accents – rolls that carry Cherry’s trumpet runs through the air and undulating cymbal strokes that change sound with the clarity of a piano. What can one say about Charlie Haden? Listen to him play the line of the second composition on side one. Another very great musician, Frank Lowe‘s calculated shrieks, staccato accents and lovely, breathy sustained tones add shock, percussive drive and lyric cross currents. Ricky Cherry really punches the piano and gets a percussive joy going that is more important than the harmonic significance which is minimal in music whose emphasis is color, melody and rhythm. Like Haden, Hakim Jamil has a fat, dark sound and, beneath Cherry at the beginning of the second side, he is reminiscent of John Lee Hooker, a reflective boogie or a muted cry that is one of the most interesting sounds on the record. The rest of the band does what is needed, and does it well, adding more rhythm and color to the mixture of sound Cherry wants.

All in all, Don Cherry, with that poignant trumpet tone that moves from absolute clarity and warmth to impassioned and blurred yelps of scalar melodies, with a whispering, chanting and shouting singing style and a sense of international non-European music made into one force by improvisation, has come up with another recording that will have a special place in your collection. Just kick back and listen to the sounds change; they are often very beautiful.

Biography:

Don Cherry was born in Oklahoma in November 1936. His family moved to Los Angeles when he was four years old. His father being a bartender at an important club in the black community resulted in young Don getting his first taste of the world inhabited by the people whom Duke Ellington called “night creatures.” Cherry and his sister, by the time they were in junior high school, were dancing at parties their father gave, with people throwing money and applauding for the children.

But his musical career began through the husband of his grandmother who was a pianist as well as a wrestler. Cherry went with him to the places he worked and started becoming acquainted with the life of the working musician, an idea his mother liked but that his father was against. His father was against it because it was the age of heavy drugs and the musician, who once had been seen in the black community as a professional as respectable as a doctor, pharmacist or lawyer, was then seen as low life.

Don Cherry, however, like most determined musicians, made it over his father’s warnings and objections. He also made his way over to Jefferson High School by cutting the sixth period at his own high school. This came about because at the time Samuel Brown had the swingiest of high school bands, complete with the most up to date bebop repertoire. Brown was known to encourage young musicians and used his band as a spawning ground for talents like those of Frank Morgan, Charles Lloyd and Horace Tapscott. Cherry not only received good musical experience there; he was also caught and sent to a school for students with disciplinary problems – where he met drummer Billy Higgins.

Cherry became more and more a professional, working in bands that featured the like of James Clay and George Newman. When he wasn’t working as a trumpet player, he was getting jobs as a pianist. Playing a bebop repertoire, his career was apparently set and it seemed that he would become a good trumpet player in the tradition of Fats Navarro and Miles Davis. But he met Ornette Coleman and changed his whole direction. Don began to listen to what the alto-saxophonist and composer was doing. Coleman’s trumpet player was Bobby Bradford, but Bradford was soon to be drafted, leaving an opening in the band which Cherry found himself filling.

Ornette Coleman was then the most controversial musician in Los Angeles. He was considered anything from an idiot and charlatan to a genius and innovator because he was working on a music that didn’t use chord changes, key centers, or constant tempos as had the music of Charlie Parker and every Jazzman who preceded that innovator. But controversy and rejection didn’t stop Coleman. He built himself a powerful unit, using Cherry, bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Billy Higgins. As the result of a few recording sessions for Contemporary Records, Coleman sparked some interest outside California and took the band to New York, opening at the Five Spot where they generated a revolution that split the whole tradition of jazz. No longer would jazz be a music using European modes of order as it had before. After the fall of 1959, there were other choices.

Cherry was to leave Coleman’s band a little over a year later. He worked, recorded with, or co-led bands with the most important saxophonists of the decade – Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp and Pharaoh Sanders. But work in New York in the sixties was not plentiful for musicians associated with the avant garde, so Cherry left for Europe, where he was to build many bands and influence more than a few European musicians. There he met Gato Barbieri, formed a band with him, and brought it to New York. Cherry returned to Europe and went from there through Africa and the Far East, learning musical systems that were different, picking up various instruments and making friends for himself from all backgrounds. After this he could develop a musical concept that would make it possible for him to use all of the music he knew.

Since that time Cherry has become very interested in Eastern mysticism and often makes use of mantras as parts of his compositions, which range from Blues feelings to Tibetan chants, underscored by rich percussion ideas. Don is now looked on as one of the few contemporary musicians who knows non-Western systems from the inside rather than from ethnic records. His knowledge has allowed for the creation of works that are so rich in suggestion and application that they have influenced a number of contemporary players and composers. Consider his development as a singer and you have a fine and versatile musician.

Don Cherry: Innovative trumpeter, composer, singer, organizer.