Don Cherry
Organic Music Society

§ 1.

With a wanderer’s flair, rough hands and a sunburnt face facing the edge of the horizon, eyes fixed on the disappearance of every drawn border, he imagines sonic territories and human settlements. A novel mingling, light as a cloud, of places, people, and sounds.

This vault of heaven in which we find ourselves lost,

appears to us as a magic lantern.

The sun is the candle, the world the lantern,

and we are like the images that rotate around it.*

For someone like Donald Eugene Cherry (1936 - 1995), who has an ancient whimsy and a polyphony in his veins—the mother was a Choctaw amateur pianist from Mississippi, the father an African American trumpeter—it comes naturally to devote oneself to sonic disjunction and perpetual restlessness.

The wandering itinerary of Don Cherry is the tireless quest for a dynamic balance, from the youthful hunting frenzy of the future jazz form to the quiet immediately abandoned and each time stirred of world-music. The eternal rhythm was only the first landing, from Coleman’s New Thing (1958-1961) to the everlasting disparity, of this new way of thinking music both daughter and natural dissolution. Not to mention mu, a free dialogue of wind and percussion with long-time companion Ed Blackwell, not just a landing but a doorway with gilded hinges to another unfathomable horizon. The Sixties were ending; and Donald Eugene, a raconteur of mellifluous rhythms, would find—cloud driven by eastern winds with a pocket cornet under his arm—new sonic universes soon to come.

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§ 2.

This dynamic equilibrium (neither indistinct amalgam nor mosaic but concordia mundi) takes the form of an arcane weave: a warp and woof ever-changing.

Spring of nineteen seventy-one: exactly fifty years ago. Don Cherry puts together a new organized spontaneity, organic in the sense of living, which he hippily renames Organic Music Society. Recorded in five different stages, between Stockholm and Copenhagen, this double LP is the sound testimony of cosmic wandering, which tinges with never-before-approached aural cacochromies, drawing relentlessly from harmonies and disharmonies of a world that existed only in dreams.

It begins in medias res with an endless funeral chant that gradually becomes a delirious catharsis and cosmogony. Thus purified, the ear approaches a dazzling journey, which from obsessive oppressiveness (Terry [Riley]'s Tune) spills into a tense air of celebration (Hope), in sublime frenzy (The Creator Has a Master Plan by Pharoah S.), to finally fade into a wakefulness (Sidhartha).

It is the organic way now undertaken by Cherry:

We can be in tune with time,

we can be enslaved to time

or we can be in total aspiration trying to catch time.

There must be a fourth way: to flow with time.

This is the organic way, the way of the organic society:

to flow with time.**

This and more, the Organic Music Society of Don Cherry:

A trembling inventing, from world to world, from sound to sound; an erratic freedom, yearning for dawns of many colors; a vibrant dissonance, abandoned to its kaleidoscopy; a banner emanated by the fingers and ingenuity of Moki, set as an allegory: a time that eats itself, merging with the eternal motion of the stars. Melodies and disparities with lost moorings, flowing with time. Disarming madness and childish whim. Enthusiastic peace: turning a piano into a drum, turning the West into the East, turning oneself into an opaline mirror, made and unmade in semi-sleep. Perspectives and visions of a new world: making one’s roots sprout. Tumid fragments of an ancient world: renewed by new rhythm.

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§ 3.

What is this new world if not a pilgrimage? Following the footprints and echoes, the smoothing of the shell and the eternal growing and dying, becoming decay and from decay a sprout. Following the vain eternal cycle, which from the eastern dawn already sets at your back. Thus, draw, wanderer, from a variegated well; pluck, while time lasts, a joyful and bitter cherry from the thick of a tribal rhythm; quench, at least for a moment, the thirst (of world and things made and unmade at dawn) before resuming the journey. You’ll just have to rub your eyes and look forward, for the dawn already unveils its eternal now.

The ripe fruits of this Weltanschauung will be given only later, with a bowl of rice and a visceral rhythm.

But it is now that the eyes open to the world, seeing what wasn’t there before.