The Book Cooks
Excerpt from
Organic Music Societies
Edited by Lawrence Kumpf with Naima Karlsson and Magnus Nygren
(Blank Forms Editions; Brooklyn, New York)
Don Cherry, 1972, Courtesy of the Cherry Archive, the Estate of Moki Cherry
In 1992, New York’s WKCR radio station hosted a weeklong Don Cherry festival, likely the most comprehensive documentation of Cherry’s career to have been undertaken in his lifetime. It echoed Cherry’s years of involvement at the station, and the research carried on long afterward. Fifteen years later, in December 2007, multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee visited the station to help annotate the broadcast of a newly restored recording of Cherry’s original 1972 “Relativity Suite” performance. This essay synthesizes the findings of both the festival and the later interview on WKCR’s daily program “Jazz Alternatives,” hosted by Ben Heller and Ben Young.
Relativity Suite names multiple projects by Don Cherry: a standalone composition, a New York City workshop with the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra (JCO), and a 1973 Jazz Composer’s Orchestra Association (JCOA) LP that unites those two items. This essay summarizes the way these different iterations speak to one another, and situates the Relativity Suite within Cherry’s broader vision of Organic Music, realized, loosely, from 1970 to 1976. As archival Cherry recordings are released, we can fill in more and more detail from every step of his musical journey. Volumes like you’re holding are both evidence of the recent increase in interest in Cherry’s work and further resources for navigating his nonlinear path.
“Convergence” is a central concept of Relativity Suite and of Don Cherry’s entire working method: he brought disparate elements into unison. From his home base in Sweden, Cherry traveled around the world, convoking or joining thousands of musical environments, putting artists in touch with one another, and bringing the harvest of his travels – new friends and their musical systems and instruments – into his own music. Bridging, uniting, enveloping – converging. Skim the surface of his musical output and the titles tell you what he’s got in mind: Togetherness – Complete Communion – Total Music Company – Eternal Rhythm – “Whole World Catalog” – “Sound Ritual” – Organic Music Society. Across the period from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, he expresses convergence verbally through those slogans. Each bears its own musical direction.
Composing for the JCO
Cherry occasionally camped in one place long enough to design and build an edifice. Half a dozen times in this period, he ballooned his open concept to work with large clusters of improvisers from around Europe. But when Cherry was commissioned to write for the JCO in 1970, there was still very little on tape – and nothing on record – to indicate how he would use a large group. In Sweden he had built something special, but that specific magic was shared with US audiences on only a few occasions, of which “Relativity Suite” is the key example. If the piece were to be staged as new work today, the promotional copy would subtitle it an “experience”: not so much a program of songs as an evolving ritual, an engulfing wave that upsets our senses of form, genre, and the passage of time. Cherry’s presentations in the early seventies were all about that sort of experience.
The album Relativity Suite was a portable souvenir of that experience, like the folio of postcards brought back from a vacation: vivid, well-focused pictures of some natural phenomena, captured from a closer point of view than you’d be able to get from a trail. But freezing those frames sacrifices the panoramic experience of being present in the biosphere. On the LP, catalog number JCOA 1006, there are clearly compartmentalized pieces built around individual soloists; the melodies and choice of instruments clue us in to the sources animating Don Cherry’s musical catalog.
Cherry was always hungry to learn about the world’s musical cultures – this spirit would later lead to his adopting a “Multikulti” brand identity for his band and its records. It is difficult to isolate the different musical traditions that inspired Cherry. Broadly speaking, at the start of the seventies he was exiting a period characterized by the influence of Turkish music. In Relativity Suite, South Asian music is paramount. It’s the obvious referent in “Trans-Love Airways” and the opening track “Tantra.” Then comes East Asian music, as played by Selene Fung on the Chinese zither ching (or zheng) in “The Queen of Tung-Ting Lake.” The title of the second track, “Mali Doussn’gouni,” refers to an instrument from Mali, also spelled donso ngoni, that was Cherry’s latest fascination. (More on that later.)
Cherry learned much from the musicians with whom he performed. He was captivated as well by sounds from Brazil and South Africa, each interest sparked by a musician from those countries. Brazilian Naná Vasconcelos was very much a part of Cherry’s European vision at this time; he was even part of Cherry’s workshop at NYU (though absent from the record). What Cherry learned from the South African pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, also known as Dollar Brand, is as complex as a double helix, but Ibrahim’s compositions and folk tunes had an immediate effect. Since Relativity Suite was commissioned to be Don Cherry’s music, he left Ibrahim’s songs out of the picture, but we still get a remarkable cameo from an Ibrahim collaborator, the alto saxophonist Carlos Ward, on “Desireless,” a short track showcasing Carla Bley’s piano playing. As much as we now understand how essential Ward was for Ibrahim and Cherry, going into the Relativity Suite project, his history was more closely entwined with the JCOA than with either of them. The other featured saxophonist on the album, Frank Lowe, also stuck with Cherry for years to come. Lowe and Cherry met no later than when Cherry was a guest observing the September 1972 sessions for Lowe’s Duo Exchange (Survival Records, 1973) with Rashied Ali. Lowe’s rasp and fire were cast in the role pioneered by Albert Ayler and Gato Barbieri as the complement to Cherry’s lead voice.
The record concludes with “March of the Hobbits,” showing off the New Orleans parade chops of Ed Blackwell with a blithe, bulletproof melody reminiscent of Albert Ayler. It’s the first song on the concert’s set list. It had played passim across Cherry’s musical oeuvre and surfaced in performances with Ibrahim and elsewhere, at least as early as 1968. The concert version of “Relativity Suite” has much in common with the one on the record, but pieces of the composition are arranged in a different order, played for longer or shorter lengths, and repeated more often. At least one of the recurring themes from the performed version was left off the recording. On the LP, individual tracks have names and timings; start and end points are clear. On side B, there are even spirals – the physical separators visible on the disc – to delineate the tracks.
Much of the ensemble playing on this project came from the standard personnel of the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra. The Orchestra had grown out of the Jazz Composer’s Guild, for which Carla Bley and Michael Mantler had written in 1964–65. Their aim was to unify the Guild’s players into an orchestra that would feature members of the greater group as soloists and, eventually, to commission some of those same figures as composers who would write for the whole orchestra. Bley and Mantler maintained remarkable momentum on their live and recorded projects, with each feeding into the work of the other through the early seventies. They launched the JCOA label in 1968 and eventually developed that into a business framework called New Music Distribution Service. By the early 1970s, the principle had broadened such that the JCO could be the vehicle for records by affiliated musicians, including Clifford Thornton, Roswell Rudd, Grachan Moncur III, and Leroy Jenkins, and for shorter and longer commissions from composers not steadily part of the organization: Sam Rivers, Bill Dixon, Alan Silva, Wadada Leo Smith, and others.
“Me and Mike were just asking our favorite players if they wanted to write a piece,” Bley recalled, “and I think they all said ‘yes’ ... I think Don was the first person we asked. ... The Jazz Composer’s Orchestra paid for it; it wasn’t an outside thing ... either me or Mike begging Timothy Marquand for the money. The one Don did for JCOA was one of my favorite albums.”[1]
Each of the JCOA guest composer records evolved through public “workshop readings.” Instead of rehearsals toward a concert, these were open rehearsals where the general public was invited in to witness the process. “Relativity Suite” was developed over four nightly sessions, each from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m., and then performed publicly on the fifth night – Friday, December 1, 1972 – for free.
In 1972, multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee had taken part in a performance by JCO of work by his colleague Clifford Thornton. (Look closely at the photograph on Clifford Thornton and the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra’s The Gardens of Harlem [1975], and you’ll see McPhee pictured as one of the players in the concert.) But he wasn’t able to make it to the studio for the 1974 recording of it; he couldn’t get the time off from work. McPhee also missed out on the recording session that became the record for Cherry’s JCOA project. Later, he would say:
Ironically with the Relativity Suite, after about a week or so of preparation, it came time for the recording. Because of rationing, there was a problem getting gasoline: You could only buy gasoline on odd or even days, depending upon what your license plate was – odd or even, or however it worked. I wasn’t able to get gas, so I couldn’t make that recording session either. For me, that’s tragic.[2]
Instead, McPhee takes us to the workshop environment: “Don was up on the stage,” he says, “from the very beginning, he spoke to us a bit about the piece, and what he intended to do. And then he had a series of banners that were created by Moki, his wife. Each day there was a different banner.”[3]
Paul Motian took down the personnel for the first of the workshop sessions – a slight variation from the ensemble that played the final performance, and significantly different from the ensemble that played on the record:
Leo Smith, Enrico Rava, Joe McPhee (trumpet); Sharon Freeman, Bob Carlisle (French horn); Brian Trentham, Jack Jeffers (trombone); Howard Johnson (tuba, baritone saxophone); Carlos Ward, Pat Patrick, Dewey Redman (reeds); Leroy Jenkins, Jan Cherry, Nan Newton, Dave Holland, Charlie Haden (strings); Carla Bley (piano); Ed Blackwell, Paul Motian, Nana Vasconcelos (percussion); Mocqui Cherry (tanbura [sic]).[4]
Mike Mantler was listed as “conductor,” but that role appears to have been logistical more than musical. He did, however, play trumpet during the final performance, at least. Note also that Frank Lowe, a very prominent soloist on the record and during the end-of-week concert, was not, apparently, part of the lineup as the workshops began. McPhee again takes us to the floor of the rehearsals: “All of the parts were sung to us. There were no written charts or anything. Don sang a section, and we would repeat it; it went back and forth like that until we had it internally.”[5] Cherry’s method asked for a different level of investment from the players. Some might be at other jobs between the workshop sessions. For “Relativity Suite,” they needed to do more than just come prepared with a folder of sheet music or notes; they had to adapt to a new system of perceiving and retaining the guidelines. McPhee again: “I don’t remember a name being given to any section at the time; those came later. We realized after days of this that a certain visual image represented a certain section of the work. The musicians had to remember all these modulations for each piece – as identified by the banner. The flags were large – they weren’t little things that he waved, but these big tapestries. There were hand signals as well. It’s quite complex.”[6]
Cherry’s method of communicating is reflected in one of the more readily available video documents of his music from this era, an Italian broadcast from 1976. He directs the studio audience’s attention to the tapestry behind him, then actually stands up and crosses over to it, indicating how words and rhythm correlate based on the “Om Shanti” text that Moki had sewn into the fabric. The tapestry was the symbol, score, and at times lyric sheet for the music. (And, as we know, sometimes the record cover, the clothing, and more.)
JCOA’s original plan had been to record audio of the “Relativity Suite” concert and edit it down for the LP. But recording so many voices in the round spoiled the clarity, and further line noise on the tape sealed the deal that it wouldn’t be useable. McPhee: “It was so exultant. Every time Don got up on the stage and showed us those various parts, there was such a glow about him. It was a family experience.” Having open rehearsals eroded the division between the preparations and the performance. And yet the goal was still to have one culminating event that was a continuous reading of the piece:
Each day we worked on just one piece that was identified by the banner for that day, but it all came together for the last night. After a week of putting all these disparate parts together and saying, “How’s this going to work? How are we going to remember all that? What do these images mean?” But then it became very clear: The night of the concert, there was no problem about that.[7]
What we hear on the recordings mirrors what the players would have seen in the switch from one of Moki’s tapestries to another one. For example, the record echoes Cherry’s use of strings for maintaining continuity between the concert’s different sections. In the words of John S. Wilson, reviewing the performance for the New York Times, “Strings have always been a stumbling block in jazz groups, but Mr. Cherry has managed to find a very valid place for them.”[8] The entrance and exit of the strings section aids the transition from one part of the piece to the next.
Even if not hi-fi enough for LP, the tape was good enough to air on New York’s WBAI radio station a few days later. On an aircheck from this broadcast, the radio announcer, likely Candy Cohen, can be heard describing, with some bewilderment, another spontaneous element: an unidentified man had entered the studio and played an unidentifiable instrument. “He told Don before the performance that he had been sent from God to play this instrument during the performance. About an hour into the performance, you hear something that sounds like a human voice, but definitely isn’t a human voice; that’s the Man from God playing ... I think it’s a ram’s horn of some sort.” This particular random emanation was a novelty at best; surely concertgoers had better things to remember.
The stranger’s presence is useful to us, though, for two reasons: One is to introduce the spirit of the 1970s, for those who weren’t there. It’s likely that the surprise guest at the Cherry concert of December 1, 1972, was the Moondog-like character affectionately known as “Recorder Wade” – or, less respectfully, as “Crazy Wade.” Wade was ubiquitous in the early seventies. He showed up at avant-garde jazz shows to make himself heard, usually joining on flute from the audience. That this mascot existed as a given part of free jazz culture in the Loft Era, and that he was accepted into the show is ... well, remarkable, at least. The vignette also says something about the artistic stance of Don Cherry, whose output embodies what producer Tom “47” Greenwood once described to me as “Wide Open Music.” If not outright welcomed, this walk-on figure could be folded seamlessly into Cherry’s show – playing a solo that sounds not too far off, in terms of timbre, from Dewey Redman’s signature projection on tenor. Ornette Coleman also attended the “Relativity Suite” concert – not joining in, but hearing his own style reflected in a remarkable alto solo that must have been played by Redman. Cherry’s hut, again, was the place where all tribes converged.
The creative process leading to Relativity Suite, no matter whether you regard the live concert or the studio recording as the definitive version, had been gestating for some time. Let’s peer into the plasma out of which it arose. The first stop is only a few days before the first session: for probably the first time in the United States, Don Cherry performed under the billing Organic Music Theater at a broadcast of the WBAI Free Music Store, apparently on November 24, 1972.[9] On this post–Thanksgiving Day weekend, the Aboriginal Music Society had cancelled a Free Music Store appearance at the last minute. Cherry was asked to fill in, and he reached out to some of the same players who would join him the following week for “Relativity Suite.” Of all the music adjacent to the suite, this WBAI event was closest, content-wise, to what Cherry might offer in an ordinary concert. Guest vocalists (including some Cherry had met shortly before at a music class with Pandit Pran Nath) sang and read from stories collected by Sufi writer Idries Shah. The set began with a handful of pieces by Ibrahim, with on-the-fly instructions to direct new friends and initiates in the improvised flow. Audience members were given a standing invitation to sing along and join in the fun. And it was fun – for the whole family. This broadcast was young violist Janice “Jan” Cherry’s performance debut alongside her father.
Don Cherry had been at Artists House for a late September weekend, performing with Ornette Coleman’s quintet in a reunion of sorts. He would borrow every single member of that group, save Coleman, to be principal soloists for his December orchestra project. He returned there a month later to perform one weekend with Abdullah Ibrahim; Ed Blackwell was the only other common ingredient for both the Coleman and Ibrahim shows. Going into the Relativity Suite projects, Cherry had just finished an autumn’s worth of performances in the US and Europe with Ibrahim, where he and Carlos Ward had skated on top of the underlying net of Ibrahim’s piano. As the Free Music Store appearance attests, the pianist’s pieces were as likely as Cherry’s own to be performed at these concerts.
Footnotes:
[1] Carla Bley in conversation with the author, June 2, 2020.
[2] Joe McPhee, interview by Ben Heller and the author, Jazz Alternatives, WKCR, December 19, 2007.
[3] McPhee, interview.
[4] Paul Motian, 1972 datebook. Shared by Cindy McGuirl / Paul Motian Archives.
[5] McPhee, interview.
[6] McPhee, interview.
[7] McPhee, interview.
[8] John S. Wilson, “Jazz: ‘Relativity Suite,’” New York Times, December 3, 1972, 85.
[9] The date of this event is sometimes recorded as November 25. While possible, this is unlikely, as Motian, for one, was on 10th Street until 7:20 p.m. that night at one of the sessions for his ECM leader debut, Conception Vessel (1973).
© 2021 Ben Young
