Don Cherry: Complete Communion (Blue Note Tone Poet Series) 1LP

Blue Note, 1966

Blue Note founders Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff had open ears and open minds, as they proved time and time again through the early part of the 1960s as they documented some of the most adventurous players of the modern jazz scene including Andrew Hill, Eric Dolphy, and Tony Williams. But it wasn’t until they brought Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry to the label in 1965 that they fully embraced the avant-garde. Coleman and Cherry had made history together years prior as the frontline of Coleman’s revolutionary quartet that turned the jazz world on its ear in 1959 when it arrived at the Five Spot Café in NYC. Though Cherry co-led the album The Avant-Garde with John Coltrane for Atlantic Records in 1961, his career as a bandleader began with his bold Blue Note debut Complete Communion recorded in December 1965 (Coleman had documented his new trio live at the Golden Circle in Stockholm for his own Blue Note debut just weeks before). On two extended side-long suites—“Complete Communion” and “Elephantasy”—Cherry expounds upon his expansive musical vision with a quartet of intrepid companions: tenor saxophonist Leandro “Gato” Barbeiri, bassist Henry Grimes, and drummer Edward Blackwell.