John Coltrane and Don Cherry
The Avant-Garde

I'll be brief.

New York. Summer of nineteen sixty.

The hallmark is negation (and dizziness): disharmonies, melodic asymmetries, nocturnal arrhythmias & fragments of sharp, splintered phrases with a flair for noise.

There is this Ornette Coleman, a daring madman with a whiff of heresy with his plastic saxophone, who, at the end of the Fifties, weaves a new way of making music.

It will be called, evasively, Frìgezz.

Now, Don Cherry, Ed Blackwell, and Charlie Haden, members of the prophet and Texan heresiarch's quartet, are recording these five shattered and frenetic pieces in two sessions. Alongside them, none other than John William Coltrane, fresh from Giant Steps. Here, Trane and company have fun sweating it out, chewing over pieces of New Thing with rare depth.

Trane's recognizable voice is already there, with its strength and clarity. Trembling and tremendous, accompanied and seduced by the flashes of Don Cherry stirring the murky depths of sound, describing —almost materializing— the scent, the lights, the night, and everything else of the Big Apple.

Splattering here and there, with a diamond-like and light manner.