Anniversary of Chateauvallon

Exactly 54 years ago today – on 27 August 1972 – The Don Cherry New Researches performed at the jazz festival in Chateauvallon, France. The concert was filmed by French television and is something of a highlight from Cherry’s most hippie-influenced period.

“Back then, everything was supposed to just flow naturally. It was sort of understood,” said saxophonist Gérard “DouDou” Gouirand about the preparations for the concert, in an interview I conducted several years ago. He recalls that it was all very special. “Trippy” and “utter chaos” with people dancing and children running onto the stage, just like at the Woodstock Festival, he thought. What’s more, they were camping just behind the stage. In photos, you can see the minibus parked there, Moki Cherry’s fabric tapestries stretched between wooden poles, and blankets laid out on the ground. There were no traditional rehearsals before the concert; the music was playing constantly, and people were constantly on the move. At the same time, the music was absolutely fantastic.

The New York-based record label Blank Forms released the music in 2021 as the double album Organic Music Theatre: Festival de jazz de Chateauvallon 1972. I wrote the liner notes (with linguistic assistance from Andrew Lampert). A truly enjoyable project, from a very exciting period in Don Cherry’s musical life.

Below is an extract from the liner notes.

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"It is not my music," Don Cherry remarked of the interwoven melodies and musical motifs in his graceful performances and composition. The songs and sounds he absorbed during time spent in Oklahoma, California, New York, Turkey, India, Mali, Sweden, and elsewhere belonged to everyone: he just borrowed them. No matter what instrument Cherry played or the cultural origins of his inspiration, he possessed a signature touch that made all his music feel as though it could only have come from him. In concert, after an hour of multidirectional free-blowing, he would often want to conclude with something cheerful, eloquent, and possibly even familiar to the audience, something they could relate to in an elemental way. "I want to leave people with a song," he once told Norwegian bass player Arild Andersen. "Viva la simplicity."

Seldom was this longing for simplicity so clearly conveyed as at the 1972 Festival de jazz de Chateauvallon in the South of France. The Don Cherry New Researches ensemble were a featured act alongside international stars including Charles Mingus, Art Blakey, Weather Report, Jean-Luc Ponty, Michel Portal, and the Cohelmec Ensemble. Cherry's appearance on the final day actually turned out to be the first substantial performance of the Organic Music Theatre, a burgeoning project developed with Moki Cherry, his wife, over the previous few months at their home in Tågarp, a rural area in the south of Sweden. Their charmingly and perhaps bewilderingly laid back presentation was broadcast live on RTF, the French public television channel, and, as a contemporaneous review In Rock et Folk magazine suggested, millions of people might have tuned in. The music heard here is taken from video documentation held in the archive of the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel. The black-and-white images captured along with this prismatic audio attest to the show's hazy, spacy fusion of music, theater, and life.

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