Bristow, Gabriel; (2024) Information About The World: Don Cherry's Transnational Music. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

My thesis explores the transnational music of Don Cherry (1936-1995), an itinerant multi-instrumentalist best known as a jazz trumpeter. Charting Cherry’s trajectory across the long Black Arts era (1958-1974), I argue that his aesthetics were a musical correlate to Aimé Césaire’s call for a ‘humanism made to the measure of the world’. By analysing his playing, concepts, musical materials, methods, and collaborations, I trace the connections between his contributions to the beginnings of free jazz and his experiments in world music avant la lettre. This entails a reassessment of each of these terms: ‘free jazz’ was more worldly than its recurrent association with black nationalism would suggest, and the commercial ‘world music’ of the 1980s has a distinct pre-history containing echoes of a vernacular cosmopolitanism worth salvaging. I begin by discussing Cherry’s trumpeting, arguing that his open approach to the instrument broke with its traditional connotations of virility and virtuosity and foreshadowed his openness to diverse musical idioms. I go on to parse Cherry’s relationship to Africa, suggesting that his various engagements with the continent point beyond pan-Africanism to a non-racial, non-nativist African music interwoven with the world. Turning to his collaborations with Turkish musicians, I argue that his improvised collaging of Turkish melodies and rhythms formed a counterpoint to histories of musical Orientalism. Finally, detailing the many duets Cherry performed, I highlight the central role these antiphonal dialogues played in the development of his transnational music. Throughout the thesis, I reflect on Amiri Baraka’s comment that music was the form through which Cherry gave us ‘information about the world’, showing how the trumpeter’s oeuvre provides us with vital traces of information about the shape of the twentieth century, and utopian messages about the world as it might be.

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