After a departure from Coleman's quartet, Cherry often played in small groups and duets (many with ex-Coleman drummer Ed Blackwell) during a long sojourn in Scandinavia and other locations. He traveled through Europe, India, Morocco, South Africa, and elsewhere to explore and play with a variety of musicians. In the late 1960s he settled in Tagarp, Sweden with his wife, Swedish designer and textile artist Moki Cherry. In 1968, Don Cherry taught music classes with guest lecturers, performance collaborators, and workshop leaders from around the world at Arbetarnas bildningsförbund (ABF) House, a Swedish labor movement-run education center. For ten years, Don and Moki Cherry lived and worked collaboratively in an abandoned schoolhouse in Tagarp, holding classes and performances, hosting guests and collaborators, and exploring their concept of Organic Music Society.
At the end of the 1970s, the trio Organic Music Theater (with Gian Piero Pramaggiore and Naná Vasconcelos) had an intense live activity in Italy and France.
During the 1980s, Cherry released the recording El Corazon, a 1982 duet album with Ed Blackwell. He also made two albums as bandleader, Home Boy (Sister Out) in 1985 and Art Deco in 1988. Cherry recorded again with the original Ornette Coleman Quartet on Coleman's 1987 album In All Languages,
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
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
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]