Don Cherry Orient / Blue Lake CD

2003 remastered reissue combines two classic jazz albums, originally issued on the Paris based BYG label. Seven tracks. Charly.

Personnel includes: Don Cherry (trumpet); Mocqui Cherry (tamboura); Johnny Dyani (bass); Han Bennik, Okay Temiz (drums).
Recorded live in Carpentras, France, August 11, 1971 and Paris, France, April 22, 1971.
Personnel: Don Cherry (trumpet); Don Cherry & Ed Blackwell (vocals, flute, pocket trumpet, piano); Moki Cherry, Mocqui Cherry (tamboura); Johnny Dyani (bass guitar); Han Bennink (accordion, drums, percussion); Okay Temiz (drums).
Liner Note Author: Edwin Pouncey.
Recording information: Carpentras, France (04/22/1971-08/11/1971); Paris, France (04/22/1971-08/11/1971).
Photographer: Peter Symes.
The Charly label has brought together two double live albums Don Cherry recorded in France in the early 1970s. While these albums have been available separately on import, this release marks their first appearance in one package. Cherry was deeply devoted to exploring world music during this period, while still playing by the free jazz rulebook (or anti-rule book, as it were) he helped write with Ornette Coleman in the '60s. Both ORIENT and BLUE LAKE bear traces of the indigenous music of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, synthesizing these sounds with deconstructive jazz principles that challenge and mesmerize at once.
Charly, in their seemingly infinite taste and wisdom, have finally set some of Don Cherry's most legendary music to the straight and narrow. There have been bootleg recordings, and at least one official issue of both the Orient and Blue Lake albums to date. Sound quality varies, and presentation does too. This double-CD includes both double live albums Cherry cut for the Actuel label in France in 1971, using two different trios, bringing the two dates, recorded only 11 days apart, together as whole. It also sets the record of who played on what straight. It is a stunning, deeply moving picture of a musician feeling the payoff in his principle and discipline. Coming off the two now legendary MU duet recordings with Ed Blackwell, Cherry was restlessly, and seemingly relentlessly, working to expand his musical palette to include as many of the planet's traditions as he could. The first of these trios features Cherry on his pocket trumpet, flutes, piano, and vocals -- doing everything from simple droning hums to Tuvan polyphonic singing -- Han Bennink on various percussion, drums, and accordion, and Mocqui Cherry (Don's wife) on tamboura. This band makes up two very long selections "Orient" and "Si Ta Ra Ma." The effects these two expansive tracks have is not only mesmerizing, it's astonishing. The other five cuts that make up the last two on Disc One, and all of Disc Two, feature the great South African bassist Johnny Dyani and the Turkish drummer Okay Temiz. While more in line with the free jazz element of Cherry's musical universe, these two offer a breakdown of forms and paint a new landscape on which improvisational dialogue can be built. Check especially the gorgeous implementation of lyricism in "Dollar's and Okay's Tunes," referring not only to the drummer, but to pianist Abdullah Ibrahim (then known as "Dollar Brand"). The gorgeous, complex, melodic universes create immediate and mysterious harmonic architectures that offer rhythm as an aspect of shift, change, and mode -- listen for the Andalusian folk songs in "Eagle Eye," with Cherry moaning and singing with his lyrical line on the piano, as Temiz double times and then refracts it back to Dyani who lays a groove down so Cherry can bring the audience into play in song. This is the way to get these two records on CD, and not get ripped off in the process. ~ Thom Jurek
Orient captures the nomadic Don Cherry in two live sets in the early '70s with two different trios. As distinguished from his early jazz career with Ornette Coleman and his later flirtations with pop forms, Cherry's work from about 1967-1