Volume Three of this series (the earliest recorded from this engagement, the third released) is yet another documentation of the extraordinary musical vision Don Cherry was creating in the mid 60s, a vision that would fully flower in works like "Eternal Rhythm" and "Relativity Suite". Here, in a quintet featuring Gato Barbieri and Karl Berger, he explores the suite format, stringing together melodies of his own with those from seemingly disparate composers including Albert Ayler, Dollar Brand (later Abdullah Ibrahim) and Antonio Carlos Jobim.
The sheer vibrancy of Cherry's approach goes a long way toward making these pieces a success. His clarity of tone and sparkling attack is a wonderful foil for the youthful Barbieri who, at this stage, is just coming into the period of his trademark, guttural roars. Throw in the incredibly inventive vibraphone of Karl Berger and you have three ingredients of a particularly heady stew, all of them imbued with a rich lyrical sensibility, integrated into an ensemble that had fully taken to Ornette Coleman's notion of everyone soloing all the time, with no "leader". While they're more than tight enough to negotiate both the heads and the segues necessary to reach them, the five musicians retain an ample raggedness and sense of freedom that the listener never comes close to any feeling of slickness. Bassist Stief (a substitute for Cameron Brown due to a Danish law requiring at least one native to be present in any band!) and drummer Aldo Romano are well up to the task, moving things along briskly and soulfully.
"Complete Communion" bounces and glides from one theme to another, generally staying in a boppish mode, musicians sliding in and out of solos. It's quite rambunctiously joyous; one almost gets the image of any four members tossing the fifth up in the air off a blanket. "Remembrance", using Ray Brown's "Two Bass Hit" as a focal theme, is only slightly more languid, an elastic flow between drawn out passages of touching melancholy and sprightlier interludes. Throughout, Cherry is in peak form, his darting, angular lines combining great depth with a childlike sense of play. The set is a marvelous kaleidoscope, a document bristling with all the inventiveness of free jazz from that fertile period and a healthy openness to music from outside its normal purview. Great stuff, among Cherry's best.
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