DON CHERRY
RELATIVITY SUITE
Trumpeter Don Cherry had already secured lasting recognition as a member of the Ornette Coleman Quartet, with whom he recorded 1959’s The Shape Of Jazz To Come and This Is Our Music in 1961, before turning his attention to world fusion music in the latter half of the 60s. With the release of Organic Music Society in 1972, he began to fine tune those ambitions and found even more purposeful expression in Relativity Suite. Assisted musically and financially by the Jazz Composers Orchestra Association – led by pianist Carla Bley – and supported by the likes of Charlie Haden (bass), Ed Blackwell (drums) and Dewey Redman (tenor sax), Cherry sought a communal jazz union that defied glib categorisation.
Drawing on myriad traditional sources, from the musicians of Joujouka to Vasant Rai, Relativity Suite embodies a universal language. As evidenced from the outset, where Tibetan bells usher in the contemplative strains of Tantra, Cherry provides carnatic vocals (he was a student of Hindu music) before sounding the hunting horn to commence the album’s musical voyage into space, time and the infinite dimensions beyond.
On Mali Doussn’gouni, Bley supplies a six-note ostinato, allowing Cherry to improvise an unfettered flurry of notes and shredded quavers on his trademark pocket cornet that urge the orchestra to a climatic ennui. The first part of the suite closes with Desireless; underpinned by Bley’s rippling arpeggios, Carlos Ward delivers a delicate, tremulous alto sax solo of immense fragility. Reminiscent of the spiritual musings of Alice Coltrane, its radiance is undiminished by age.
The second half begins in a mystical mood courtesy of Selene Fung who performs a suitably inscrutable solo on the guzheng, also known as the Chinese zither, on The Queen Of Tung-Ting Lake. A practised adept, Fung conjures up hypnotic phrasings that caress the soul in preparation for the trace-like drones of Trans-Love Airways. Haden’s uncomplicated yet critical bass lines enrich this slow-burner and guarantee to give you much more on repeated trips on the astral plane.
Bley, possibly in her forte, explores eternal rhythms in the questing dissonances of Infinite Gentleness, complete with Hitchcockian orchestral accompaniment, while avoiding the operatic excesses of her earlier work. Its calming summation proves the perfect intro to the final track, March Of The Hobbits, a military two-step that owes more to Basin Street than the Shire and offers a sense of form to the otherwise loose-limbed proceedings. Relatively speaking, Frodo’s mojo energises Einstein-a-go-go and equals one quantum leap for music.