Don Cherry: Brown Rice [A&M]

Why you'll love it

A&M's reissue comes in a gatefold jacket and carries the album's later title, Don Cherry. The Penguin Guide to Jazz called it a lost classic of the era, and Pitchfork named it true world music.

This edition

• Gatefold jacket
• Pressed in the EU

About the album

Don Cherry made his name next to Ornette Coleman, blowing a pocket trumpet through the birth of free jazz, then kept walking right off the jazz map. By the mid-1970s he had absorbed music from India, Africa and the Arab world, and Brown Rice, cut at two New York studios, is the most focused version of where he'd got to.

The title track opens on a deep, slinky groove. "Malkauns" takes its name and mood from an Indian raga, "Chenrezig" is a long, meditative drift, and "Degi-Degi" closes with a hypnotic, chanting pulse. Cherry plays trumpet and sings, and the record moves from groove to drone without a seam. The first issue's artwork used tapestries sewn by his wife, the artist Moki Cherry, and the 1977 Horizon reissue retitled the album Don Cherry, the name this edition keeps.

AllMusic's Steve Huey called it the most accessible entry point into Cherry's borderless ideal, at once primitive and futuristic. It's a record called Brown Rice that tastes of everywhere at once, which is more than we can say for the brown rice in the staff fridge.

Also at Kops: more Don Cherry on vinyl · browse Modern Jazz

Tracklist

Listen

On A&M, a reissue of the 1975 album.