Screenshot from “Don Cherry Swedish TV Documentary 1978”
The Don Cherry documentary created by Swedish television in 1978 is a wonderful exposition of the jazz musician and his approach to life. The soft spoken man was best known for being a trumpeter with some of the great jazzers of the 1950s-70s, but the film shows there was more to Cherry than his rapid fire trumpet. His whole approach to music and to life was both beautiful and radical.
Just viewing bits and pieces of the doc, you quickly pick up that Cherry was more than just a horn player, or a piano player, or a flutist, or a bird caller. The guy’s approach to life was music. Anything and everything he came across was music. Life was a song and Cherry sang it out loud.
I especially enjoyed how he viewed competition in music.
“I don’t believe in competition in music. I don’t think of music as better or worse. It’s just different… and that brings a lot of ego and keeps musicians from coming together, because everyone wants to feel like they’re doing something different. Everyone wants to be an innovator. And all the innovators I’ve ever known—Coltrane, Ornette, Eric Dolphy—they all were playing their music and trying to develop in music. It wasn’t to try to be an innovator. They were innovators but they weren’t intentionally trying to be innovators.”
Wonderful. The doc also features some killer shots of NYC in the 1970s… worth a shot.