Don Cherry's New Researches featuring Naná Vasconcelos - Organic Music Theatre: Festival de Jazz de Chateauvallon (June 2021 Blank Forms Editions)

In the late 1960s, the American trumpet player and free jazz pioneer Don Cherry (1936–1995) and the Swedish visual artist and designer Moki Cherry (1943–2009) began a collaboration that imagined an alternative space for creative music, most succinctly expressed in Moki’s aphorism “the stage is home and home is a stage.” By 1972, they had given name to a concept that united Don’s music, Moki’s art, and their family life in rural Tagårp, Sweden into one holistic entity: Organic Music Theatre. Captured here is the historic first Organic Music Theatre performance from the 1972 Festival de jazz de Chateauvallon in the South of France, mastered from tapes recorded during its original live broadcast on public TV. A life-affirming, multicultural patchwork of borrowed tunes suffused with the hallowed aura of Don’s extensive global travels, the performance documents the moment he publicly jettisoned his identity as a jazz musician, and represents the start of his communal “mystical” period, later crystallized in recordings such as Organic Music Society, Relativity Suite, Brown Rice, and the soundtrack for Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain.

The musicians in Don Cherry’s New Researches, hailing from Brazil, Sweden, France, and the US, converged on Chateauvallon from all over Europe. The five-person band—Don and Moki Cherry, Christer Bothén, Gérard “Doudou” Gouirand, and Naná Vasconcelos— performed in an outdoor amphitheater and were joined onstage by a dozen adults and children, including Swedish friends who tagged along for the trip and Det Lilla Circus (The Little Circus), a Danish puppet troupe based in Christiania, Copenhagen. The platform was lined with Moki’s carpets and her handmade, brightly colored tapestries, depicting Indian scales and bearing the words Organic Music Theatre, dressed the stage. As the musicians played, members of Det Lilla, led by Annie Hedvard, danced, sang, and mounted an improvised puppet show on poles high up in the air.

The music in the Chateauvallon concert aspired to a universal language that would bring people together through song. In a fairly unprecedented move, Don abandoned his signature pocket trumpet for the piano and harmonium, thereby liberating his voice as an instrument for shamanic guidance. The show opens with him beckoning the audience to clap their hands and sing the Indian theta “Dha Dhin Na, Dha Tin Na,” and the set cycles through uplifting and sacred tunes of Malian, South African, Brazilian, and Native American provenance—including pieces that would later appear on Don’s albums Organic Music Society and Home Boy (Sister Out)—all punctuated by outbursts of possessed glossolalia from the puppeteers. “Relativity Suite, Part 1” notably spotlights Bothén on donso ngoni, a Malian hunter’s guitar, prior to Vasconcelos taking an extended solo on berimbau. A vortex of wah-like microtonal rattling, Vasconcelos’s masterful demonstration of this single-stringed Brazilian instrument is a harbinger of his work to come as a member, with Don, of the acclaimed group Codona.

The sounds of children playing on the ensemble’s achingly tender rendition of Jim Pepper’s oft-covered beacon of spiritual optimism, “Witchi Tai To,” lends the proceedings an especially intimate, domestic glow. Given the context of the star-studded international jazz festival, the concert’s laid back, communal vibe feels like an attempt by the Cherrys to show Don’s jazz audience that he was moving on. At the same time, however, Don was extending a warmhearted invitation for them to come along for the ride. With liner notes by Magnus Nygren. 

1. Intro: Dha Dhin Na, Dha Tin Na 05:04

2. Butterfly Friend 03:31

3. Elixir 01:35

4. Amazwe 03:44

5. Interlude with Puppets 03:13

6. Ganesh 05:24

7. Elixir Reprise / Witchi Tai To 06:19

8. Resa 05:24

9. Relativity Suite, Part 1 06:16

10. Berimbau Solo 06:45

11. Interlude / North Brazilian Ceremonial Hymn 09:02

12. Elixir Reprise / Ganesh 09:37

13. Ntsikana's Bell / Traditional Melody 04:27

Don Cherry (piano, harmonium, tanpura, vocals)

Naná Vasconcelos (berimbau, percussion)

Christer Bothén (donso ngoni, piano, light percussion)

Doudou Gouirand (soprano saxophone, alto saxophone, light percussion)

Moki Cherry (tanpura, vocals)

Annie Hedvard and Det Lilla Cirkus (puppet theater)

Moki Cherry (scenography)

Friends from Tågarp: Marianne Rydvall (additional and unintentional vocals), Craig, and other unknown characters

INA documentation: Marie Jaros INA coordination: Christiane Lemire

INA digitization in high resolution, sound restoration, and mastering of the original tapes: Ian Debeerst

Additional audio restoration and mixing by Robbie Lee

Mastering for vinyl by Kassian Troyer at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin

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Don Cherry - The Summer House Sessions (June 2021 Blank Forms Editions)

In 1968, Don Cherry had already established himself as one of the leading voices of the avant-garde. Having pioneered free jazz as a member of Ornette Coleman’s classic quartet, and with a high profile collaboration with John Coltrane under his belt, the globetrotting jazz trumpeter settled in Sweden with his partner Moki and her daughter Neneh. There, he assembled a group of Swedish musicians and led a series of weekly workshops at the ABF, or Workers’ Educational Association, from February to April of 1968, with lessons on extended forms of improvisation including breathing, drones, Turkish rhythms, overtones, silence, natural voices, and Indian scales.

That summer, saxophonist and recording engineer Göran Freese—who later recorded Don’s classic Organic Music Society and Eternal Now LPs—invited Don, members of his two working bands, and a Turkish drummer to his summer house in Kummelnäs, just outside of Stockholm, for a series of rehearsals and jam sessions that put the prior months’ workshops into practice. Long relegated to the status of a mysterious footnote in Don’s sessionography, tapes from this session, as well as one professionally mixed tape intended for release, were recently found in the vaults of the Swedish Jazz Archive, and the lost Summer House Sessions are finally available over fifty years after they were recorded.

On July 20, the musicians gathered at Freese’s summer house included Bernt Rosengren (tenor saxophone, flutes, clarinet), Tommy Koverhult (tenor saxophone, flutes), Leif Wennerström (drums), and Torbjörn Hultcrantz (bass) from Don’s Swedish group; Jacques Thollot (drums) and Kent Carter (bass) from his newly formed international band New York Total Music Company; Bülent Ateş (hand drum, drums), who was visiting from Turkey; and Don (pocket trumpet, flutes, percussion) himself. Lacking a common language, the players used music as their common means of communication. In this way, these frenetic and freewheeling sessions anticipate Don’s turn to more explicitly pan-ethnic expression, preceding his epochal Eternal Rhythm dates by four months. 

The octet, comprising musicians from America, France, Sweden, and Turkey, was a perfect vehicle for Don’s budding pursuit of “collage music,” a concept inspired in part by the shortwave radio on which Don listened to sounds from around the world. Using the collage metaphor, Don eliminated solos and the introduction of tunes, transforming a wealth of melodies, sounds, and rhythms into poetic suites of different moods and changing forms. The Summer House Sessions ensemble joyously layers manifold cultural idioms, traversing the airy peaks and serene valleys of Cherry’s earthly vision.

In the Swedish Jazz Archive quite a few other recordings from the same day were to be found. Some of the highlights are heard as bonus material on the CD edition of this album. The octet is augmented by producer and saxophone player Gunnar Lindqvist, who led the Swedish free jazz orchestra G.L. Unit on the album Orangutang, and drummer Sune Spångberg, who recorded with Albert Ayler in 1962. The bonus CD also includes a track without Cherry featuring Jacques Thollot joined by five Swedes including Lindqvist, Tommy Koverhult, Sune Spångberg, and others.

With liner notes by Magnus Nygren and album art featuring a cover painting by Moki Cherry: Untitled, ca. 1967–68.

1. Summer House Sessions Side A 23:37

2. Summer House Sessions Side B 23:13

3. Untitled Summer House Session 1 09:36

4. Untitled Summer House Session 2 17:18

5. Untitled Summer House Session 3 08:55

6. Untitled Summer House Session 4 05:45

Recorded July 20, 1968 at Kummelnäs, Sweden by Göran Freese

Audio restoration by Robbie Lee

Mastering for vinyl by Kassian Troyer at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin

Cover painting by Moki Cherry: Untitled, ca. 1967-68

Design by Alec Mapes-Frances

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Chora(s)san Time-Court Mirage - Blues Alif Lam Mim (2021 Blank Forms Editions)

Having already unearthed three collections of archival '70s recordings by Catherine Christer Hennix, Blank Forms continues our annual illumination of the visionary Swedish composer’s music by turning to more recent work with this first-time vinyl edition of Hennix’s “Blues Alif Lam Mim in the Mode of Rag Infinity/Rag Cosmosis,” a 2014 piece first released as a CD in 2016.

The double album captures the April 22, 2014 premiere of Hennix's composition by the Chora(s)san Time-Court Mirage, her expanded just intonation ensemble, featuring a brass section of Amir ElSaffar, Paul Schwingenschlögl, Hilary Jeffery, Elena Kakaliagou, and Robin Hayward; live electronics by Stefan Tiedje and Marcus Pal; and voice by Amirtha Kidambi, Imam Ahmet Muhsin Tüzer, and Hennix herself. Intended to reveal the blues’ origins in the eastern musical traditions of raga and makam, “Blues Alif Lam Mim in the Mode of Rag Infinity/Rag Cosmosis” has its roots in Hennix’s 2013 realization of an “Illuminatory Sound Environment,” a concept developed in 1978 by anti-artist Henry Flynt on the basis of Hennix’s own “The Electric Harpsichord.”

As Hennix explains in Other Matters, Blank Forms’ 2019 collection of her writings:

“Rag Infinity/Rag Cosmosis presents fragments of 'raga-like’ frequency constellations following distinct cycles and permuting their order, creating a simultaneity of ‘multi-universes.’ When two such ‘universes’ come in proximity of each other and begin unfolding simultaneously along distinct cycles, there is a kaleidoscopic exfoliation of frequencies as one universe is becoming two, but not separated—the effect of cosmosis is entrained, binding two or more frequency universes into proximity where their modal properties interact and blend, creating in the process entirely new microtonal constellations in an omnidirectional simultaneous cosmic order with phenomenologically ‘transfinite’ Poincaré cycles (cyclic returns to initial conditions).”

As with Hennix’s best work, the organic unfolding of this quivering drone belies a precision that opens onto the infinitesimal. Upon its mesmerizing ebb and flow, the vocalists incant a devotional poem written in Arabic by Hennix and featuring quotations from the Quran in praise of Allah. Also reproduced on the album’s gatefold jacket, Hennix’s reduction of the sacred text to its most elegant formulation invites the contemplator to bring their inner knowledge to the composition for use as a prompt for meditation. Yet the piece offers depth to even the most secular listener willing to immerse themselves in music brimming with such serene intensity.

Catherine Christer Hennix (b. 1948) started her creative life playing drums with her older brother Peter, growing up in Sweden where she heard jazz luminaries, such as John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Dexter Gordon, Archie Shepp, and Cecil Taylor perform from 1960 to 1967. Directly after high school, Hennix went to work at Stockholm’s pioneering Elektronmusikstudion (EMS), where she developed early tape music, incorporating computer generated speech done at the Royal Technological University (KTH), where she was an undergraduate student. After traveling to New York In 1968, she met artists Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles who invited her to stay at the Something Else Press Town House where she had the opportunity to meet, among others, composers John Cage, James Tenney, and Phil Corner. During the following years she developed fruitful collaborative relationships with many composers in the burgeoning American avant-garde, including, most significantly, Henry Flynt and La Monte Young.

Young introduced Hennix to Hindustani raga master Pandit Pran Nath and she would later study intensively under him as his first European disciple. While Hennix continued to make music performing alongside Arthur Russell, Marc Johnson, Henry Flynt, and Arthur Rhames, she also served as a professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at SUNY New Paltz and as a visiting Professor of Logic (at Marvin Minsky’s invitation) at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In recent years Hennix has led the just-intonation ensemble the Chora(s)san Time-Court Mirage, which has featured musicians Amelia Cuni, Amirtha Kidambi, Chiyoku Szlavnics, Hilary Jeffrey, Amir El-Saffar, Benjamin Duboc and Rozemarie Heggen. She currently resides in Istanbul, Turkey pursuing studies in classical Arabic and Turkish makam. 

1. Blues Alif Lam Mim in the Mode of Rag Infinity/Rag Cosmosis 01:19:39

Voice - Catherine Christer Hennix, Amirtha Kidambi, Ahmet Muhsin Tüzer

Brass - Amir ElSaffar, Paul Schwingenschlögl, Hilary Jeffery, Elena Kakaliagou, Robin Hayward

Computer/live electronics - Stefan Tiedje, Marcus Pal

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Graham Lambkin - Solos (2021 Blank Forms Editions)

The years between Graham Lambkin’s tenure with the legendary Shadow Ring and his more recent improvisational duos mark a distinct period of creative production within the artist’s insular career. Living with his family in Poughkeepsie, NY, from 2001 through 2011 Lambkin recorded and self-released four solo albums that valorized mundane domestic situations while reveling in the liminal spaces between the acts of listening, recording, and producing. Created through an ingenious economy of means, these solo records are as beguilingly seductive as they are uncanny. Perpetually laughing in his own duplicitous face, Lambkin breathed new life into musique concrète and sound poetry, giving outmoded forms a contemporary consciousness while setting the gold standard for a continuously unfolding canon of 21st century tape music.

Poem (For Voice & Tape), Salmon Run, Softly Softly Copy Copy, and Amateur Doubles are now remastered and finally back in print, with Salmon Run and Softly Softly Copy Copy available on vinyl for the first time. This deluxe boxed set of Graham Lambkin’s first four solo records includes an expansive 42-page book featuring unseen photos and reproductions of artworks as well as essays and anecdotal recollections providing fresh insight and divulging hermetic secrets by Ed Atkins, Mark Harwood, Matt Krefting, Lawrence Kumpf, Samara Lubelski, and Adrian Rew.

Graham Lambkin (b. 1973, Dover, England) is a multidisciplinary artist who first came to prominence in the early ‘90s through the formation of his experimental music group The Shadow Ring. As a sound organizer rather than music maker, Lambkin looks at an everyday object and sees an ocean of possibility, continually transforming quotidian atmospheres and the mundane into expressive sound art using tape manipulation techniques, chance operations, and the thick ambience of domestic field recordings. His Kye imprint, founded in 2001, was an instrumental platform for the dissemination of and dialogue between work by an intergenerational cast of artists using sound, including Henning Christiansen, Anton Heyboer, Moniek Darge, and Gabi Losoncy. He began showing his visual art in 2014 with Came To Call Mine, an exhibition curated by Lawrence Kumpf and Justin Luke at Audio Visual Arts in conjunction with the publication of Lambkin’s children’s book (for adults) of the same name, and has since exhibited his work at 356 Mission, Künstlerhaus, PiK, and Blank Forms.

1. Poem (For Voice & Tape) Pt I 20:08

2. Poem (For Voice & Tape) Pt II 19:52

3. Intro 04:25

4. Glinkamix 03:50

5. The Brendan Drill 03:19

6. Jungle Blending 06:06

7. Jumpskins 02:25

8. Baby & Fox 03:30

9. The Currency Of Dreams 09:03

10. Cementspawn 04:27

11. Divers 03:06

12. The Bridge To Aria / Salmon Run 07:12

13. Softly Softly 20:40

14. Copy Copy 20:40

15. Amateur Doubles (Besombes/Rizet - Pôle) 19:58

16. Amateur Doubles (Philippe Grancher - 3000 Miles Away) 18:22

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