BLP 4226

Don Cherry - Complete Communion

Released - 1966

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, December 24, 1965
Don Cherry, cornet; Leandro 'Gato' Barbieri, tenor sax; Henry Grimes, bass; Edward Blackwell, drums.

1675 tk.2 Complete Communion: Complete Communion
                Complete Communion: And Now
                Complete Communion: Golden Heart
                Complete Communion: Remembrance
1674 tk.3 Elephantasy: Elephantasy
                Elephantasy: Our Feelings
                Elephantasy: Bishmallah
                Elephantasy: Wind, Sand And Stars

Session Photos

Gato Barbieri

Henry Grimes

Photos: Francis Wolff

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Complete Communion:	Don Cherry	December 24 1965
Complete Communion And Now Golden Heart Remembrance
Side Two
Elephantasy:	Don Cherry	December 24 1965
Elephantasy Our Feelings Bishmallah Wind, Sand And Stars

Liner Notes

DON CHERRY describes his intent as a composer in the two compositions:

COMPLETE COMMUNION:
"This is the way in presentation and performance for each sound to have a completeness in emotion and color to connect the overall oneness, which makes up our complete communion."

ELEPHANTASY: "A fantasy dealing with direct emotion, loosely controlled, leaving each listener the freedom to bring his imagination into play."

For several years, it was difficult for Don Cherry to get listened to as Don Cherry. He had come East in 1959 with Ornette Coleman, and so volcanic was Coleman's impact on the jazz scene that Cherry at first was heard mainly as an adjunct of the man with the plastic alto. Gradually, as Cherry went his own way playing for a time with Sonny Rollins and then leading and co-leading his own groups, it became apparent that Cherry's jazz voice was a singular one.

As Sonny Rollins has noted, "Don is a very individual musician. For a time I had the tendency to lump Don and Ornette together. But now I've discovered that Don is a musician in his own right."

The odyssey of that musician began in Oklahoma City on November 18, 1936. His parents — his father Negro and his mother of Choctaw Indian descent — had originally come from Muskogee. In Tulsa, Don's father was a bartender in his own bar and almost from the time they could walk Don and his sister were performers. Dancers at first. In 1940 the Cherrys migrated to Los Angeles, and there Don's father was head bartender at the Plantation Club where such big bands as those of Jimmie Lunceford/Billy Eckstine and Artie Shaw played.

After taking piano lessons, Don started on cornet in junior high school. In 1950, with his friend alto saxophonist George Newman, Don formed a combo. In the group at various times were such later jazz postgraduates as Billy Higgins, Lawrence Marable and bassist Harper Cosby. While in high school, Don studied under Samuel Brown, a music teacher at Jefferson High School in Los Angeles, who had instructed Frank Morgan, Art Farmer, the late Wardell Gray and Hampton Hawes, among other jazzmen on the ascent. Don also gained experience through playing in Brown's band.

From Ornette Coleman's wife, Janie, who lived in his neighborhood, Don was exposed to a flow of the seminal modern jazz recordings of the time, and he soon met Ornette. Don was sufficiently a pro at this point to take his first road job with James Clay, and they toured the West Coast and Canada. Returning to Los Angeles, both Clay and Cherry began studying with Ornette. Don's association with Coleman became strengthened as he played with him on Ornette's first jazz engagement (in Vancouver) and then participated in Ornette's first recordings.

For some six years, Cherry was an integral part of the Coleman microcosm. Then he joined Sonny Rollins, went to Europe, and now is a major force on the European musical scene, touring extensively from Lapland to North Africa.

As listeners have learned to hear Don Cherry as himself, the man's musical and personal qualities have become clearer. The two, of course, are extensions of each other, and an astute description of those qualities appeared in Jacques Creuzevault's review of Don in Jazz-Hot "Don Cherry is animated by a joy in living and an extraordinary capacity for enthusiasm. He thinks only of playing. He immediately, moreover, put everybody at ease by his graciousness....it is a pleasure without price to meet an American musician who does not regard himself as a 'star' and for whom the only things that count seem to be music and friendship."

And it is that quality — an openness to life and to the music in life — that I remember for my first talks with Don on the West Coast in 1958. Later, I would see him in New York. He was scuffling, there were few if any jobs, but when we met, he'd talk enthusiastically about a new piece he was writing or a new musician he'd heard. And now that he is finally getting at least some of the recognition he merits, that graciousness of which Creuzevault speaks continues to characterize Don's personal style.

The music on this album came from Cherry's European travels and from his experiences during those journeys with all manner of people of different races and from different countries. "Nowadays," says Don, "you can bring the whole world into one room, and this capacity for unity is an element that jazz has always had for me. Even more so now that I've had all these different experiences."

The essence of both these compositions, "Complete Communion" and "Elephantasy," is Don's conviction that jazz is indeed an international language and can thereby, if it is played with open feeling, bring people together. "Even in prehistoric times," Don points out, "before there was song or music of any kind in any formal sense, people — even though they fought for food — would still come together and hum in togetherness."

A specific illustration of musicians of vastly different backgrounds being able to come together in jazz is the presence on this album of Leandro "Cato" Barbieri, a tenor saxophonist who is originally from Buenos Aires. He met Don in Rome in 1963 when Cherry appeared there with Sonny Rollins. On hearing Gato play, Cherry felt immediately that his was a musical voice with which he could join in what he regards as complete communion. Cato's background comprises experience in classical and folk music as well as in jazz. Now based in Italy, Barbieri has performed frequently at European jazz festivals with a wide range of leading American jazzmen, from Woody Herman to Art Blakey. He is now a partner of Don's in the latter's current combo, and Cherry regards him as "one of the leading jazz musicians emerging from the European scene because of the originality of his conception." The two other participants, Henry Grimes and Edward Blackwell, are among the most resourceful and flexible musicians involved in the new jazz.

As for the music itself, it is Don's belief that the listener ought not to have detailed guidelines drawn for him. The basic way to listen is with one's emotions. The foundation of the new directions in jazz is feeling. As Albert Ayler has pointed out, "It's not about notes anymore. It's about feelings." Of course, notes are still part of the grammar of the new music, but analysis of those notes and how they are interrelated should be subsidiary to a listener's capacity to be as open in his emotions as the players are.

When Don, for example, played in Amsterdam a couple of years ago, the knowledgeable British critic, Michael James, described that night for Jazz Monthly. Of the artistic value of the performance, James wrote: "I would say without hesitation that it was substantial, but hasten to add that this is in part an emotional reaction and that I should need to be exposed to this music for somewhat longer than a single evening if I were to be able to rationalize to the fullest extent my instinctive enthusiasm." Fair enough. But I don't see any need to hasten the time when full rationalization takes place. I would suggest, therefore, that you listen with your emotions, with your instincts. And, as happens in any expressive medium, each listener will find in this music different connotations, different visceral reactions. Just as each player brings to his music the kind of person he is, so does each listener. And, in that respect, the communion which Cherry emphasizes is a communion of individuals linked by experiencing the same music, but each experiencing it his own way.

Accordingly, I will not attempt here an analytical description of this album but rather an indication of my own — emotional — reactions. The exhilarating feeling, for example, of continual dialogue, real dialogue, throughout Complete Communion: Between the horns, between the horns and the rhythm section, between each soloist and the rhythm section. To be sure, all previous jazz has been dialogue in whole or in part. But in the new jazz, as here, the conditions for conversation have been greatly extended. The previous ground rules — of harmony, of "permissible" textures, of melodic development, of beat — have been stretched to the expressive capacities of each player.

Don's playing reveals the incisive lyricism that marked his work from the start, but he has grown in assurance. Not only technical assurance, but in the self-assurance that has come from finding himself through his travels in recent years and also from finding existentially that music is in fact a bridge between men of divergent backgrounds. Don is now playing cornet, an instrument he prefers because "the metal's softer, you get a far better sound." And on that instrument, he has acquired a remarkable flexibility — of line, of texture, of time.

Barbieri is immediately impressive — the surging thrust of his attack, the freedom with which he explores those speech-like sounds which increasingly heighten the impact of the new jazz, and the way he is able to move authoritatively through time on the strength of a secure inner pulse. And, as is also common in the new jazz, the bass and drums are free to bring their individual conceptions into full interplay in the dialogue. Blackwell and Grimes do much more than keep time. They are full-scale contributors to the dialogue inside the steadily evolving, undulating time of this particular collective musical experience.

For this listener, part of the fascination of the new jazz is the unexpected convergences of the voices: their subsequent departure in separate directions that are still part of the whole; and throughout, the sustaining of a cohesion that is fundamentally emotional rather than programmatic or technically blueprinted.

"Elephantasy,' is another extended conversation, but not an anarchic one. Like "Complete Communion," its perpetual sounds and shapes of surprise hold together with a buoyant ease. The convergences of the horns, as in the first piece, are like semi-colons as the dialogue flows on, soaring, slowing down, accelerating, turning back on itself, leaping ahead. Again, the command of Barberi — his exuberant assurance in this new jazz language — is an extraordinarily convincing demonstration of Cherry's belief that through the added freedom of the new jazz it is even more possible to bring the whole world into one room. Note too, in "Elephantasy' as in "Complete Communion," the supple use of dynamics — both in ensemble passages and in solos. They too are part of the subtle punctuation of this free — but organically structured — jazz language.

And for those who mourn, as always happens when new directions are being taken, that the old "values" have been jettisoned, listen! The "cry" of jazz still powers these horns. As do the imperative textures of the blues. And what of swing? Listen again to the whirling pulsations within pulsations within pulsations. The beat is now in fact more natural, more like breathing, changing as the emotions change, intersecting with individual internalizations of time — and all within an overall sharing of this time and this place. This experience of direct, complete communion.

— NAT HENTOFF