Don Cherry Interviewed by Art Taylor

Notes and Tones​, pp. 176-178. Kongsberg, Norway, June 26, 1971.

«Education should open you up.»

I was raised on music. My mother played the piano, and my grandmother played the piano for
silent movies. My father had a club in Tulsa, then he was a bartender at the Plantation Club in
Watts, Los Angeles, where I was raised. We were Oakies who had moved to California. We
always had a piano in the house. I took a few piano lessons, then I started playing the
boogie-woogie and got off lessons. In 1950 my mother bought me a trumpet. My father was
always down on me ​about playing music. He connected playing music, especially jazz, with
taking drugs. He knew how drugs can control your life.

I also became interested in music because a lot of my relatives were members of the Baptist
Church, and I would often go to the church and listen to the choirs. I saw how the spirit would
enter the room, and everyone would become very happy. To me that's what music has always
been about=stimulating that sense within us which only music can stimulate.

Someone in our neighborhood had all the records of Charlie Parker, Monk, Fats Navarro, Leo
Parker, Lady Day and Bud Powell. We couldn't buy the records, but we could listen to them and
borrow them. When I say we, I mean myself and an alto player named George Newman. We
would listen and learn the tunes. The first be-bop tune I learned was Bird's «Perhaps». Then I
learned a lot of Bird tunes like «Klactoveedestene». On reaching the level of
«Klactoveedestene», I tried to reach the level of «Donna Lee» and «Confirmation». These songs
open up a young musician by showing him how the notes can become sound. The sound of
be-bop was fascinating, and you wanted to reach that sound. You have to know these melodies to
see how they move, how the notes are moving within the chord structure. You learn about a
bridge, and you learn to remember that the bridge comes again, because there were always some
musicians who couldn't conceive that form.

I was always interested in form. George Newman and I started ​playing in the high-school band,
which was taught by Mr. Samuel Brown. Frank Morgan, Art Farmer and a lot of other musicians
studied with him. We were playing some of Diz​z​y Gillespie's big band things like «Things to
Come» and «Manteca».

I went through that until I quit school. I quit because education always seems to vacuum ​you, to
close you up and to indoctrinate ​you. Education should open you up, draw things out of you so
that you realize they're in you. The grade school and junior-high school I went to were
interracial. I could never play first trumpet even though I think I had the ability, because there
would always be someone white playing first trumpet. The teacher was in that groove, thinking
that way. That's why I tried to play other instruments, so I could have the melody part. I would
play baritone horn, which was good, because I learned other voices. I really liked phrasing
melodies. I could read, count and play something the same way twice, but when I heard how
Bird, Bud ​and even Lady Day could play the same thing differently each ​time, I realized how
important phrasing was. First it was form, then phrasing and then sound, always sound.

How would you classify your music?

Jazz started as Dixieland, then it went to swing, to be-bop, then to what they call avant-garde or
whatever. Some people say it's development, but I believe that it's the quality of Dixieland and
swing which is really important and must be preserved. It is this quality of purity, pitch and
sound which must be retained, this quality of improvisation. Even in the West they used to
improvise when they played the classics. Today there's so much pressure to become professional
and commercial that you try to get a thing going which everybody recognizes as being
specifically yours. That's what stops high-quality improvisation. People who live in nature and
with nature in Africa, China, or in the woods give their music a quality which is both earthy and
godly, and that's what I think should be preserved: this quality of earthiness.

What do you think of the word jazz?

If we're going to speak about words, we could talk about a word like ​aum. ​Because you don't say
the word ​aum, y​ ou sing it. ​And you have to sing it where you use the a as ah, which is the throat.
Then you're singing. sustaining the tone ah. Then you go to the u, and then you reach the and
you've liberated the body. That's a word. In the Bible they speak of the Word. First there was the
Word. And then they speak of the word that was lost.

But do you consider yourself a jazz player?

I consider myself a jazz player because I have been around some musicians who I felt had been
sent here as messengers. They were called jazz musicians and they have showed me the way.

But what about the word?

You're speaking like Webster's or the Oxford dictionary or like something commercial. What do
you call those people who feel they have control and who put that word on the music? There can
be so many different qualities in our music: it can be intellectual music, it can be spiritual music,
or music just for joy. or celestial music. John Coltrane was one person who attained this celestial
quality. When he came on the scene, he realized that he had to carry the message, and he carried
it very well. His thinking was spiritual, but instead of speaking of it, he would play and you
could feel it. You could also feel it in the way he lived and carried himself as a human being.
Albert Ayler, too. That was a very special period in jazz. I thank God for having been able to live
during the time and period of their presence.
 ​ ​ould still like you to classify the music.
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But that's canning it if you put a label on it like jazz. Maybe we could say that jazz is a truth we
realize because we are living it. That brings me to the point of when I met Ornette Coleman.
Here was a person who not only taught himself to master an instrument but who also realized we
had a system of music that contradicts the Western system while still having the intelligence of
the Western system. I'm speaking of the way Ornette writes his music. He has a fantastic system.
It's not bar lines, it's more or less where each note creates a melody of a wholeness. It's basically
the same system as be-bop.

W​hat is your reason for living in Europe?

We live on Planet Earth, and I'm at a period in my life where I have to come close to Mother
Earth and live in the rotation of the seasons. I had lived in cities most of my life, and I reached a
point where I had a polluted brain, a polluted soul. The only cure for me was nature. I settled in a
forest, on the carth, without boundaries. It's like you asking me about this word jazz; I feel the
same way about boundaries. Like there are all kinds of different people and languages. But
there's one universal language: the language of music. When people believe in boundaries, they
become part of them. When did they first start having passports? That's the only way I can
categorize music. I have read different ​books on jazz. I have never been to New Orleans, but I
know a drummer called Edward Blackwell who's from New Orleans.

When I came to Europe, especially France, I heard a lot of records I had never heard before:
Bubba Miley, old Duke Ellington, Freddie Webster and a lot of Louis Armstrong. I've been
raised in the environment of Jimmy Lunceford. Jimmy Witherspoon was a good friend of the
family. A few musicians my father knew had different records of Pres [Lester Young] and
Django [Reinhardt]. Django was incredible, and he was in Europe. All of us should write a book
to record these things. ​I have been very close to and studied with Dollar Brand. To me he is a
very important person, as are his music and melodies. I have been where people have taught
them to other people and could sing these melodies. It feels so close to when I was going to the
Baptist church or hearing someone playing the piano. Also studying music from India, which has
been beautiful for my concentration. If we're categorizing jazz, we can speak of different systems
of music. Like the music of China, of the Orient, from Bali, or the music from north India, South
India, the music from the Congo, the music from the Dagoons. Each one has such spiritual
quality to it. ​Playing music for money is one thing, but playing music to reflect God is a whole
reality that​ ​holds the truth​. That's it. I don't want to talk too much.