Organic Music Societies

Welcome to a new post of the newsletter The Don Cherry Book Project. This post feature a link to a very precious work I did back in 2020/2021 together with Lawrence Kumpf: the introductory essay in the book Organic Music Societies which Brooklyn based Blank Forms published in 2021.

The book was the first in-depth study of Don and Moki Cherry’s collaboration within Organic Music Theatre in the 1970s. Drawing on a mix of archival material, including interviews, diary entries, Moki’s artworks, photographs, essays (both new and old), and newly written essays by the likes of Naima Karlsson, Neneh Cherry, Christer Bothén, Ben Young, Ruba Katrib and Fumi Ojiki, the book explores Don and Mokis collaboration in an unprecedentedly way in close to 500 pages.

We titled the introductory essay The Revolution is inside. It is based on a quote by Don Cherry where he was talking, in part, about the revolutionary times of the 1960s. Certainly, he supported the struggle against injustice and racism. But for him, the social revolution was never the most important one. Instead, it was the revolution taking place within each individual that was most important. According to him, the hardest journey was the journey inside, that was the most dangerous one.

The start of the essay:

"Organic Music Theatre was a collaborative intermedia initiative of the American musician Don Cherry and the Swedish artist Moki Cherry. Their idealistic vision came together in the early 1970s against a backdrop of intense division and conflict in the United States. Though Don had distanced himself from most overt political actions, believing music itself should not be political, his collaborative work with Moki cannot be separated from the larger social context in which it was made. “These days politics just slaps you in the face. As a Negro raised in a mixed neighborhood, white people put me down, and black people put the white people down. I soon discovered hate–and I soon learned that we have to fight hate.” Appalled by the US bombing of Cambodia as well as the state of race relations in America, the couple left the country in the spring of 1970 and by the fall had settled in the Swedish countryside. Committed to leading a healthy and spiritually rich life structured by the teaching and practice of the arts, they made Sweden their base until 1977 and lived there occasionally after that, until they separated in the mid-1980s."

The rest of the essay you find at Blank Forms. Read it here:

The Revolution is Inside – by Lawrence Kumpf and Magnus Nygren.