And Who is Don Cherry?

 

A crux, the moment Jazz became more than just a genre through the spiritual movement to a complete numinous experience. Heralded of course by the Coltranes, Pharoah and Liston. Don took it up a notch by adding prayers, mantras, chant, and vocalization in jazz into what would be the abridgment between music and spirituality. Open and organic music: Whose goal was to create music from it annals, something like what this New Age music would have been in the Jazz form, obviating the fecundity of the man's mind. 

In the album Orient you could see that Don Cherry was using the Om mantra and Oh Ohs chant to get people to be involved in the spiritualistic nature of musical participation. By creating music in its most potent form, and spicing the experience up with a trumpet that stairs the climb. Music when it is from within you, vessels and resonate within and without in a sea of sounds The organic nature of the music and scattered form is jazz in sense to sense impression and explanation, it is the coalescing of worlds, from the sudden fall of the tambourine to cough, phlegm and uhumn, Everything is music.  

And that rawness speaks to the blood of us, the effort, the frailty and gives the album that much power and feel. You pick up the fallen tambourine and hear it whine before it is smacked across the palm of the hand in continued singing. Its all in there where I left it my poetry in motion.
There is a reason Don Cherry worked mostly with Sun Ra, and would have done marvelously well with Fela is that he understand that spontaneity and instantaneous action of music?  For him it was almost like breathing, which is why I think his instrument of choice was the pocket trumpet. Music is the sound that continues forever? Assisted by Moki, he used Acapella and make the album like Om Shanti Om feel that much eclectic, potent and everlasting. A full prayer session.
I'd say he headed the sound of sounds and knew that, that which came from the opening of our trumpet carries the gurgles and waves that are reflective of the struggle of its creation, in chanting I pour out my colors and also join in the chanting even when it is done from within me, and the trumpet adds the fire that makes it all intense.

There is something potent about art in the raw form; Isao Takahata calls it mikanse, which means incompleteness. Art like an ellipsis, starting and ending with elipsis contained in between for quantity but not completely seen or encircled.
Like our body that is permeated by these inviolable body that envelops us and we too are a part of it, even if you are in the crux of it all. It comes and go but the crux is… like Chenrezig! Yes like Chenrezig you get that we are more than just the tips of our fingers. 
Sound have got to permeate and be permeated, and why  enclose it, the hoarse drifting of the singer, off key ukulele, the drifting trumpet, the cough of intent, fall of tambourine, children, and laughter sound in music ending and music un-defiled. That life itself is turbulence and it takes a god to be it's conductor, We appreciate the mind that got close to doing it.

 
My favourite albums are Om Shanti Om, and Brown Rice, which can be downloaded HERE

 

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