Old School Friday

Just like I asked you last week to go back and listen to Julius Hemphill's Dogon A.D. and The Hard Blues in order to understand my late-70s fascination with Abdullah Ibraham's Ishmael (you did go back and listen then, right?), this week I encourage you to first listen to Ishmael before listening to Don Cherry's Chenrezig.  In a perfect world, all these songs, plus the Art Ensemble of Chicago's Dreaming of the Masters and Odwalla, would all fit together into an ideal Old School Fridays mix tape.

Chenrezig is off Cherry's outstanding 1975 LP Brown Rice.  I had a really hard time picking out one single song off that album to post here, and will recommend that if you like this selection to go hear the entire recording.  It's amazing stuff, even these 40 years later.

For the record, unlike the earlier songs posted in this series and included in my imaginary mix tape, I didn't hear Brown Rice late at night on WBUR radio, but instead I had to go out and buy the album myself.  I first heard Cherry in the mid 70s when his odd little record, Mu First Part, somehow came into my possession.  It was a strange and hard-to-classify album, consisting solely of duets between Ed Blackwell on drums and Cherry on trumpet, flute and various other instruments. It didn't sound anything like the prog rock and jazz fusion popular at that time, but I liked it anyway. A few years later, I came across a used copy of Mu Second Part in a street vendor's stall on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, and I had to buy it (it was priced, after all, at only about $2).

It should be acknowledged at this point that Mu Second Part has two medleys each with sections titled Dollar Brand, Abdullah Ibraham's pre-Muslim name.  Cherry was apparently influenced by Ibraham just as I was, too.

At around that same time I was discovering the Mu recordings, Brown Rice got a major label release by Horizon Records and I bought the LP in an actual record store this time, and the sound, as you can hear, was light years beyond the improvised music of the two Mu records.  It was at that moment I became a Cherry fan for life.

Don Cherry passed away in 1995 at the age of 58 in Málaga, Spain.  He was survived by several children, including step-daughter Neneh Cherry, who was briefly in the post-punk band The Slits with Ari Up, and then later recorded under her own name.