For several decades, jazzmen have sustained an increasingly intense flirtation, first with Africa, then with the inscrutable East. Paradoxically, however, just when they thought they’d got there, someone changed the ‘rules’ and, in fact, they weren’t there at all. The nearer they got, the more elusive became their quarry and, contrarily, the further away from it they finished.
The end product, in both cases, is often neither one thing nor the other, creating an obvious difficulty in appraisal.
Here, the music pulsates with undeniable feeling and sincerity, but something important is lacking. Cherry himself is an impressively equipped musician, richly emotional, but little of his own work here possesses the wiry tension of his solos with Ornette Coleman or George Russell.
It is as though he needs some external discipline to control and direct his playing, for little in this rambling, noisy excursion has any of the vibrant shape which sets aside the epochal ‘Free Jazz’, in which Cherry was also involved, but which has yet to be matched, let alone surpassed. Nor is there much of the primitive elegance of his ‘Symphony For Improvisers’. And the strong display of Third World timbres and rhythms fails to compensate.
Similar sentiments apply to the otherwise admirable Berger and Mangelsdorff.
There are, to be sure, moments of riveting melodic or rhythmic grandeur here. But they are too often swamped in shapeless gouts of sound just as they seem to be taking me somewhere I want to go. Too often they recall the clamour of a traffic jam in Karachi, rather than something on a higher plane.
My usual reaction to dislike of music I prize is sorrow rather than anger, so I suppose I should feel sorry for me for disliking this. Somehow, I can’t.
The record’s main surprise is that side one’s microgrooves, playing the LP par of 17¾ minutes, fill only half the available space, amply demonstrating that modern technology is well up to engineering the 30-minute LP side. In this case, I’m glad they haven’t bothered.
Discography
Part One; Baby’s Breath; Sonny Sharrock; Turkish Prayer; Crystal Clear (exposition); Endless Beginnings; Baby’s Breath (17¾ min) – Part Two: Autumn Melody; Lanoo; Crystal Clear (development); Screaming J; Always Beginnings (23½ min)
Cherry (cnt/gender & saron/flt/bells/vcl): Albert Mangelsdorff. Eje Thelin (tbn); Bernt Rosengren (ten/clt/flt/oboe); Sonny Sharrock (gtr); Karl Berger (vib/pno/gender); Joachim Kuhn (pno/prepared pno): Arild Andersen (bs); Jacques Thollot (dm/saron/ gong/bells/vcl). Berlin 11.12/11/68.
(BASF MPS 21-20680-7 £2.26)
