Don Cherry - 1975 - Brown Rice

Don Cherry 

1975

Brown Rice

01. Brown Rice - 5:15

02. Malkauns (Bengt Berger, Don Cherry) - 14:02

03. Chenrezig - 12:51

04. Degi-Degi - 7:06

Don Cherry - trumpet, piano, electric piano, vocals

Frank Lowe - saxophone (tracks 1, 2 and 4)

Ricky Cherry - piano, electric piano (tracks 1, 2 and 4)

Charlie Haden - bass (tracks 1, 3 and 4)

Billy Higgins - drums

Verna Gillis - vocals (track 1)

Bunchie Fox - bongos (track 1)

Hakim Jamil - bass (track 2)

Moki - tambura (track 3)

Recorded at The Basement Recording Studios in New York (tracks 1, 2 & 4) and at Grog Kill in Woodstock (track 3).

After the seismic 23 months (1959-1961) in which the Ornette Coleman Quartet flipped the jazz world on its ear, Coleman, drummer Ed Blackwell, bassist Charlie Haden, and trumpeter Don Cherry scattered to the winds. In the decades that followed, Coleman jammed with everyone from the London Symphony Orchestra to his ten-year old son Denardo to the Master Musicians of Joujouka. Ed Blackwell drummed for Eric Dolphy and Yoko Ono while Haden wed Spanish Civil War folk songs to jazz. And Don Cherry set about traversing the globe in search of what he deemed organic music.

Today, you can find the word organic in any Kroger or corner bodega, but in the early 70s it was as alien as yoga, world music, and a macrobiotic diet, all concepts that would inform Cherry s approach to music for the rest of his life. Uprooted from Oklahoma to the Watts ghetto in California when the oil boom destroyed the family land, Cherry was attuned to societal ills from an early age. And while his work was rooted in jazz improvisation, Cherry sought a level playing field in his work that could unite Indian classical, African township jive, Indonesian gamelan, Arabic folk, electric Miles, early minimalism, orchestral music, skronky noise, and more, sometimes all at once. Cherry s childlike vision of inclusiveness pioneered what would soon be known as world music. But rather than a sippable caf soundtrack, Cherry s music was sprawling, free, ecstatic, and devout.

Most of his 70s albums came in the form of concert recordings that captured him in the heat of the moment, but 1975 s Brown Rice is a thrilling exception. Cut across two studios in New York, the four compositions here present the most focused vision of Cherry s muse, resembling his wife Moki Cherry s carefully assembled tapestries rather than the paint splatters of live performance. Featuring Haden on bass, old Coleman drummer Billy Higgins, fiery saxophonist Frank Lowe, and Moki on tambura, with glints of vocals and electronics, the album is searing and psychedelic, pulsing and deeply hypnotic. Abstract, visceral, and deeply personal (the cover photo shows Cherry at Watts Towers), Brown Rice anticipates the boundary-free future of music. But it wasn t always easy to hear; never reissued on CD in the US, this vinyl reissue comes some 40 years after its original release.

In the opening minute of Brown Rice, Cherry s world-embracing vision is made clear. An ode to a time in Cherry s life when he subsisted only on brown rice to remind myself there were starving people in the world (though Julian Cope suggests it might be about heroin instead), it speaks to the two extremes of Cherry, that of the spiritual seeker and the junkie jazz musician. Two electric keyboards chime in tandem, emulating either Chinese classical music or gamelan, while Haden s wah-wah bass interlocks with electric bongos and forms a groove. Vocalist Verna Gillis purrs an inviting and skin-prickling ooh. As it all starts to percolate and cook, Lowe s bluesy outbursts lance the tapestry and Cherry calmly utters the titular phrase and other ingredients like miiiiso, his intonation making that bulk grain sound at once wholly sensuous and slightly sinister.

Malkauns references one of the oldest raga forms in Indian classical music. Moki Cherry s tambura acts as a resting breath beneath the expansive composition, slow and deep, as Haden takes an extended solo that s contemplative, poignant, and unhurried. When Cherry and Higgins enter nearly five minutes in, the piece moves from calm to urgent, casting off the strictures of Eastern and Western musical forms and cresting towards a sumptuous peak.

Chenrezig is the closest Brown Rice ever gets to sounding like straight jazz, though purists might disagree. Nearly as long as Malkauns and with a gaze similarly affixed towards infinity, it s named for the most revered of all Bodhisattvas (the Dalai Lama is considered to be his reincarnation). After opening chimes and Cherry s growled incantation set the ritual in motion, his trumpet flutters around Lowe s melodic, vibrato-heavy solo, leading towards a tranquil center some 8 minutes in. The piece then turns ferocious; ecstatic blues chords from pianist Ricky Cherry urge the song forward and Lowe plows ahead with a shrieking, stratospheric solo, Don Cherry joining him with high-register runs and vocal ululations.

Closer Degi-Degi suggests a liminal space between German kosmische, Afrobeat, jazz fusion, and electric funk, powered by Haden s incessant bass and Cherry s high-arcing solos and whispers about the goddess of music. Relentless and incandescent, it rebuffs the notion that spiritual music must be placid. Much like Coleman, Albert Ayler, and John Coltrane did in the 60s, Cherry suggests as Alice Coltrane did in the same era that true spiritual awakening stems not always from a state of peace but from tumult and upheaval. In its balance of noise and bliss, beauty and chaos, Brown Rice is true world music.