Full Communion is coming quickly to a turntable close to you. On Sept. 5, Don Cherry’s revelatory 1966 debut album will likely be reissued as a part of Blue Observe’s Tone Poet vinyl sequence. This version of the LP was produced by Joe Harley, mastered by Kevin Grey from the unique analog grasp tapes, pressed on 180g vinyl at RTI, and packaged in a deluxe gatefold tip-on jacket.
Cherry put himself on the map taking part in trumpet within the free jazz wrecking crew referred to as the Ornette Coleman Quartet. His appearances on basic Coleman albums like 1959’s The Form of Jazz to Come and 1961’s Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation made him one of the revered brass gamers on this planet, a status he burnished by collaborating with fellow legends like John Coltrane and Solar Ra. With Full Communion, he picked up a cornet and additional cemented his legend.
On his solo debut, Cherry joined forces with tenor saxophonist Gato Barbieri, bassist Henry Grimes, and drummer Ed Blackwell to additional deconstruct and reassemble the sound of his style. “The first impression one gets in listening to Complete Communion is of ensemble precision achieved in an utterly unpedantic way,” Ekkehard Jost wrote in his guide Free Jazz. “The transitions, for example, are relatively complicated: various musical figures are linked together; there are no schematic patterns; and yet the transitions are accomplished with astonishing ease, as though they were the most natural thing in the world.”
Every of the album’s two sides encompasses a suite of songs assembled collectively into prolonged journeys of sound. The A aspect contains the four-part “Complete Communion,” whereas the B closes out the album with one other four-song procession referred to as “Elephantasy.” On these tracks, Cherry and his band bent jazz to their very own ends, at angles solely they may have imagined.
Order Don Cherry’s Full Communion on vinyl now.
