Don Cherry

Genres:	Jazz • Music Videos & Concerts • Pop / Rock
Descriptive "tags":	jazz • free jazz • trumpet • avant-garde • fusion
Decades Active:	1960s • 1970s • 1980s • 1990s • 2000s

Biography

18 November 1936, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA, d. 19 October 1995, Alhaurín El Grande, Málaga, Spain. Cherry began playing trumpet while still attending high school in Los Angeles, where he was raised. He also played piano and some of his first public performances were on this instrument when he worked in R&B bands. An early musical associate was Billy Higgins and in the mid-50s the two men, by then playing bebop, joined Ornette Coleman and began to adapt their musical thought to the new concept of free jazz. Cherry and Higgins played on Coleman’s 1958 quintet album, Something Else!!!!, an album which represents an early and important flowering of the freedom principle. Coleman’s group became a quartet, the fourth member being Charlie Haden. The quartet’s success was recognized by an extended engagement at New York’s Five Spot Café, which began in November 1959 and continued into the following spring when Higgins was...

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