Don Cherry’s New Researches
★★★★
Organic Music Theatre: Festival De Jazz De Chateauvallon 1972 BLANK FORMS. CD/DL/LP
Landmark transitional world-fusion live recording by legendary jazz trumpeter.
THE ORGANIC Music Theatre was conceived in the late ’60s by Don Cherry and his wife, the Swedish visual artist Moki, as a collaborative space for music, art and communal family life. Originally broadcast on French TV in 1972, this inaugural
OMT performance at Chateauvallon Festival de Jazz finds Cherry in transition from the free rhythmic chaos of 1970’s
“Mu” to the unbounded world music drift of Organic
Music Society. On-stage with multiinstrumentalists Christer Bothén, Doudou Gouirand and Naná Vasconcelos swapping horns for berimbau and Malian guitars, Cherry abandons trumpet for piano and vocals for an ethereal collection of religious chants, ceremonial hymns, plus a gorgeously untethered cover of Jim Pepper’s Witchi Tai To, all interspersed with the cries of children and wild glossolalia from an on-stage puppet troupe(!). It is the sound of deep communion and mystical contemplation, an exhortation to total spiritual surrender that is difficult to resist.