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Don Cherry/ Brown Rice
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| MUSTHEAR REVIEW: | |||||||||||||||
| "There is joy laced with confidence in this music, and sadness, or pathos, that is as much connected to the Blues as it is to the huge yearning of that sound in Eastern music...Throughout the record, one can hear the melding of Third World music and mysticism with Western instruments." --From Stanley Crouch's original liner notes to Brown Rice For Don Cherry, life and music were one and the same, and he consistently approached both with a daring sense of adventure. In his world-view, the art of living life and expressing life through music depended upon people "listening and traveling." A global explorer, Cherry learned to play and compose for wood flutes, tamboura, gamelan, and other non-Western instruments. Brown Rice is Cherry's mid-70s masterpiece, pulling from every corner of the planet (and beyond) to deliver a deeply spiritual groove that pulses with primal energy and folksy beauty. Combining elements of Middle-Eastern, African, and American music, Brown Rice brilliantly succeeds in covering the breadth of Cherry's musical interests while still remaining accessible, even danceable. As I scoured the Internet looking for my copy of Brown Rice, I was surprised to find the album's title track in the play-lists of many club and radio DJs who were mostly spinning rare groove and funk cuts. After my first listen, I realized that these DJs were hip to a musical secret worth sharing. The album's title track features Charlie Haden playing his upright bass through a wah-wah peddle to produce growling, guitar-like sounds that are incredibly funky and feel great with the volume turned way up. Add to the mix electric bongos (yes, they do exist), the soulful, spacey vocals of sister Verna Gillis, driving electric piano, and the ever swinging rhythms of drummer Billy Higgins, and you have a perfectly eclectic groove for Cherry to mess with. In a throaty whisper, Cherry rhymes out mostly unrecognizable lyrics which sound foreign and exotic, punctuated with the words "brown rice." While it may read strange, Cherry's original style of singing sounds startlingly funky and mysterious. Frank Lowe sets the track on fire with his impassioned tenor-sax screams and howls, putting a palatable dose of free-jazz into the funk. "Malkauns" opens with an extended, earthy bass solo by Haden, accompanied by Moki on the tamboura. Cherry's trumpet playing on the track has a distinct Miles Davis feel, strongly reminiscent of the master's acoustic cuts from the Bitches Brew era. "Chenrezig" points towards Cherry's later Codona recordings with multi-instrumentalist Colin Walcott. Fresh from world-music encounters at Woodstock's Creative Music Studio, Cherry beautifully blends African and Indian influences on "Chenrezig." His chant-like singing sounds like a spiritual or a call to prayer, giving the song a powerful message that transcends its unintelligible lyrics. The closing track, "Degi-Degi," ends things with a heavily African-flavored funk, as Cherry returns to his whisper-rhyme singing while the rest of the band swirls in a hypnotic, polyrhythmic groove. The music dances off the record with a magnificent sound recorded under the watchful ears of Philip Glass engineer Kurt Munkacsi and Carla Bley's trumpeter husband. An unsung classic from the unexpected year of 1975, the joy of hearing this record makes it well worth the search. --John Ballon (email)
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