Don Cherry's life and music: popular modernism and consciousness-raising
Lead Research Organisation:
University College London
Department Name: Sch of European Languages, Culture & Soc
Abstract
Don Cherry (1936-1995) was a multi-instrumentalist best known as a jazz trumpeter. Despite the singularity of his musical career, from the birth of free jazz to his ventures into "world music" avant la lettre, surprisingly little - scholarly or otherwise - has been written about him. For this PhD I plan to undertake a rigorous study of Cherry's popular modernist approach to music as consciousness-raising via his recorded work and largely untold biography.
The concept of "consciousness-raising" as political practice has seen a recent revival both in cultural studies - notably in the work of Mark Fisher et al. - as well as in contemporary social movements (from #MeToo to Black Lives Matter and beyond). This concept will allow us to explore the alternative sociality embodied by Cherry's music, which will in turn extend recent work on the social aesthetics of improvisation (Georgina Born et al.).
Central to Cherry's music was his complex engagement with modernism. In The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy highlighted the integral role that black diasporic culture has had in shaping modernism. The role jazz has played in this is the subject of extensive debate. Cherry's music is best understood as an intervention in what Werner Sollors dubbed "populist modernism" - a seemingly paradoxical pairing in so far as modernism's experimentalism is usually understood as inimical to popular culture. As James Smethurst argues, African-American avant-gardes attempted to overcome this paradox in two distinct ways: either engaging with mass culture or reimagining folk cultures. A study of Cherry's approach - which falls largely within the latter endeavour - would deepen existing understandings of attempts to reconcile popular politics with modernist aesthetics. The way in which he played with this apparent contradiction- taking it on a world tour - is unique.
Cherry's approach took him away from marketable forms of modernism and into the street. Footage from 1976 shows him walking through Harlem with a West-African doussn'gouni. Rather than selling albums with political lyrics, he foregrounded a live, democratic form of music, troubling the performer-spectator divide, and even running free jazz workshops for children.
Yet what makes this live, democratic, consciousness-raising approach to music uniquely interesting is the way it intersected with Cherry's high modernism. Cherry is best known for having broken through as a sideman in Ornette Coleman's first experiments in free jazz. Despite going on to explore "folk traditions" from around the world, Cherry never repudiated the formal, modernist experimentations that he began with Coleman. Rather he attempted to democratise and re-route this experimental modernism by drawing it through popular musical traditions. Such an approach is significant in so far as it suggests that Cherry's spontaneous happenings were not simply about "rediscovering" African culture, but rather about forming new popular cultures by routing black experiences of modernity through a transnational approach to "folk traditions" (an aesthetic shaped in significant ways by Cherry's itinerant lifestyle, split between the Swedish countryside, New York, and frequent travels). In a speculative re-imagining of post-1968 history - in which such "folk" experimentations were not recuperated by commercial labels and packaged into the neat category of "World Music" - this popular, transnational modernism could have been the (anti-)sound(track) of global revolution. As such, this research will seek to trace Cherry's music through the "structures of feeling" (Raymond Williams) that run through it, from hippy mysticism to residual Third Worldism to nascent ecological sensibilities.
The concept of "consciousness-raising" as political practice has seen a recent revival both in cultural studies - notably in the work of Mark Fisher et al. - as well as in contemporary social movements (from #MeToo to Black Lives Matter and beyond). This concept will allow us to explore the alternative sociality embodied by Cherry's music, which will in turn extend recent work on the social aesthetics of improvisation (Georgina Born et al.).
Central to Cherry's music was his complex engagement with modernism. In The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy highlighted the integral role that black diasporic culture has had in shaping modernism. The role jazz has played in this is the subject of extensive debate. Cherry's music is best understood as an intervention in what Werner Sollors dubbed "populist modernism" - a seemingly paradoxical pairing in so far as modernism's experimentalism is usually understood as inimical to popular culture. As James Smethurst argues, African-American avant-gardes attempted to overcome this paradox in two distinct ways: either engaging with mass culture or reimagining folk cultures. A study of Cherry's approach - which falls largely within the latter endeavour - would deepen existing understandings of attempts to reconcile popular politics with modernist aesthetics. The way in which he played with this apparent contradiction- taking it on a world tour - is unique.
Cherry's approach took him away from marketable forms of modernism and into the street. Footage from 1976 shows him walking through Harlem with a West-African doussn'gouni. Rather than selling albums with political lyrics, he foregrounded a live, democratic form of music, troubling the performer-spectator divide, and even running free jazz workshops for children.
Yet what makes this live, democratic, consciousness-raising approach to music uniquely interesting is the way it intersected with Cherry's high modernism. Cherry is best known for having broken through as a sideman in Ornette Coleman's first experiments in free jazz. Despite going on to explore "folk traditions" from around the world, Cherry never repudiated the formal, modernist experimentations that he began with Coleman. Rather he attempted to democratise and re-route this experimental modernism by drawing it through popular musical traditions. Such an approach is significant in so far as it suggests that Cherry's spontaneous happenings were not simply about "rediscovering" African culture, but rather about forming new popular cultures by routing black experiences of modernity through a transnational approach to "folk traditions" (an aesthetic shaped in significant ways by Cherry's itinerant lifestyle, split between the Swedish countryside, New York, and frequent travels). In a speculative re-imagining of post-1968 history - in which such "folk" experimentations were not recuperated by commercial labels and packaged into the neat category of "World Music" - this popular, transnational modernism could have been the (anti-)sound(track) of global revolution. As such, this research will seek to trace Cherry's music through the "structures of feeling" (Raymond Williams) that run through it, from hippy mysticism to residual Third Worldism to nascent ecological sensibilities.
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