Don Cherry (trumpeter)
Donald Eugene Cherry (November 18, 1936 – October 19, 1995)[1] was an American jazz trumpeter. Beginning in the late 1950s, he had a long tenure performing in the bands of saxophonist Ornette Coleman, including on the pioneering free jazz albums The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959) and Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation (1960). Cherry also collaborated separately with musicians such as John Coltrane, Charlie Haden, Sun Ra, Ed Blackwell, the New York Contemporary Five, and Albert Ayler.
Don Cherry
Donald Eugene Cherry
November 18, 1936
Oklahoma City, U.S.
October 19, 1995 (aged 58)
Málaga, Spain
Musician
Cornet, trumpet, wood flute, tambura, gamelan
Cherry released his debut album as bandleader, Complete Communion, in 1966. In the 1970s, he became a pioneer in world fusion music, drawing on traditional African, Middle Eastern, and Hindustani music. He was a member of the ECM group Codona, along with percussionist Naná Vasconcelos and sitar and tabla player Collin Walcott.[2] AllMusic called Cherry "one of the most influential jazz musicians of the late 20th century."[3]
Early life[edit]
Cherry was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, to a mother of Choctaw descent and an African-American father.[4] His mother and grandmother played piano and his father played trumpet.[5] His father owned Oklahoma City's Cherry Blossom Club, which hosted performances by Charlie Christian and Fletcher Henderson.[6] In 1940, Cherry moved with his family to Los Angeles, California.[6] He lived in the Watts neighborhood, and his father tended bar at the Plantation Club on Central Avenue, which at the time was the center of a vibrant jazz scene.[7][8] Cherry recalled skipping school at Fremont High School in order to play with the swing band at Jefferson High School.[7] This resulted in his transfer to Jacob Riis High School, a reform school,[7] where he first met drummer Billy Higgins.[9][10]
Death and legacy[edit]
Cherry died on October 19, 1995, at the age of 58 from liver cancer in Málaga, Spain.[5]
Cherry was inducted into the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame in 2011.[17]
Family[edit]
He was married to Monika Karlsson (Moki Cherry), a Swedish painter and textile artist, who also occasionally played tamboura drone on his recordings and jams.[18] His stepdaughter, Neneh Cherry,[18] his step-granddaughters Mabel and Tyson and his sons, David Ornette Cherry, Christian Cherry, and Eagle-Eye Cherry, are also musicians. David Ornette Cherry died from an asthma attack at the age of 64 on November 20, 2022.[19]
Instruments[edit]
Cherry learned to play various brass instruments in high school.[11]: 134 Throughout his career, he played pocket cornet (though he identified this as a pocket trumpet), trumpet, cornet, flugelhorn, and bugle.[20][21]
Cherry began his career as a pianist, and would continue playing piano and organ.[20]
After returning from a musical and cultural journey through Africa, he often played the donso ngoni, a harp-lute with a gourd body originating from West Africa (see ngoni). During his international journeys, Cherry also collected a variety of non-Western instruments, which he mastered and often played in performances and on recordings. Among these instruments were berimbau, bamboo flutes and assorted percussion instruments.[20]
Technique and style[edit]
Cherry's trumpet influences included Miles Davis, Fats Navarro, Clifford Brown, and Harry Edison.[20] Journalist Howard Mandel suggests Henry "Red" Allen as a precedent (given Allen's "blustery rather than Armstrong-brazen brass sound, jauntily unpredictable melodic streams, squeezed-off and/or half-valve effects and repertoire including novelty vocals")[22] while Ekkehard Jost cites Wild Bill Davison.[11]: 138
Some critics have noted shortcomings in Cherry's technique.[9][11]: 137 [20] Ron Wynn writes that "[Cherry's] technique isn't always the most efficient; frequently, his rapid-fired solos contain numerous missed or muffed notes. But he's a master at exploring the trumpet and cornet's expressive, voice-like properties; he bends notes and adds slurs and smears, and his twisting solos are tightly constructed and executed regardless of their flaws."[20] Jost notes the tendency for writers to focus on Cherry's "technical insecurity", but asserts that "the problem lies elsewhere. Perfect technical control in extremely fast tempos was more or less risk-free as long as the improviser had to deal with standard changes that were familiar to him from years of working with them.... In the music of the Ornette Coleman Quartet—a 'new-found-land' where the laws and habits of functional harmony do not apply—there is no use for patterns that had been worked out on that basis."[11]: 137
Miles Davis was initially dismissive of Cherry's playing, claiming that "anyone can tell that guy's not a trumpet player—it's just notes that come out, and every note he plays he looks serious about, and people will go for that, especially white people."[22] According to Cherry, however, when Davis attended an Ornette Coleman performance at the Five Spot, he was impressed with Cherry's playing and sat in with the group using Cherry's pocket trumpet.[22] Later, in a 1964 DownBeat blindfold test, Davis indicated that he liked Cherry's playing.[23]