DON CHERRY

photo © Nina Contini Melis

Spring of 1966 at the old Cafe Montmartre in Copenhagen with Don's Paris-based quintet: Gato Barbieri on tenor, Karl Berger on vibes (mostly) and piano, Aldo Romano on drums and myself. Jean-Francois Jenny-Clark, the regular bassist, was doing his final examination concert at the Paris Conservatory and Don invited me down from Stockholm for this gig. The group had been together for a couple of years and had an amazing repertoire spanning the modern history of our music: Bird tunes, John Lewis tunes, Miles tunes, Trane tunes, Jobim bossa-novas, standards, Ornette tunes, Albert Ayler tunes, Don's originals, plus incredible little motifs and transitional fragments and phrases which would pop up between tunes. At the moment when Coltrane was playing one tune per set, Don went in the opposite direction. He wove together 10 or 12 tunes in an hour-long set and the music had a wonderful buoyancy and stop-or-go-on-a-dime pacing. Obviously, not everyone soloed on every tune: sometimes a theme would be truncated, sometimes reprised, and there was an unerring sense of order and connectedness to the way each set evolved: the way the keys and the melodies followed one another so naturally. And Don was the spontaneous organizer and orchestrator of these grand medleys, and the band was so tight that it followed him seamlessly, quick as lightning. Of course, I didn't know all the material and often felt like I was the last ice-skater on the end of the "crack-the-whip" line. Sometimes, I flew off and had a hell of a time catching up again!
Don modeled how music and all of life could be magic: open and flowing and spontaneous with an intense sense of presence, awareness and freedom, and an inner simplicity that zips straight to your heart.



DON PULLEN

photo © Nina Contini Melis


Don said, "Music is the healing force," and he taught me that. I miss Don.
It was a magical day for me in the summer of 1979 when he called and told me that he thought I'd be a good bridge between the more "straight-ahead" musical leanings of George Adams and Dannie Richmond and his own more "avant-garde" tendencies in a new quartet due to go on tour that fall. I remember exactly where I was and I remember thinking, "this could change my life." It certainly did! The George Adams/DonPullen Quartet lasted almost ten years and, in the first couple, was incapable of playing a first set shorter than two hours. Used to drive Max at the Village Vanguard crazy. He'd flash the lights, signaling that the set should be over, to no avail. It was intense, athletic music: exhilarating and energizing.
I was also blessed to play one of Don's last gigs with him, a trio date at Blues Alley in Washington, DC with Tommie Campbell. The fire and intensity was still there, burning deep inside the music.
Don was unique as a pianist and composer. He was a "one-or-two-note" guy; you could tell it was him immediately, by his sound and touch. His Suite (Sweet) Malcolm (Part I -- Memories and Gunshots) from his first solo piano recording for Sackville is an unsung masterpiece. And Don spanned the music, covered it all like no one else: from as abstract, pantonal (atonal?), as "out" as you can be, to swinging as hard as you can swing, as far back into the church and into Africa as you can go.


GEORGE ADAMS

  photo @ Jan Vernieuwe

Mr. Intensity. Mr. Smoothie (one of his tunes). My neighbor in "Dumbo," the loft area under the Manhattan Bridge in Brooklyn. Ten years plus on the road together. Incredible sound and energy. Beautiful tunes. He and Don Pullen were perfect foils for each other, the flint and the tinder, the tinder and the flint. And George would exhort Dannie and me to pour gasoline on the fire.


DANNIE RICHMOND

photo © Nina Contini Melis

My "graduate school" of the rhythm section, and jazz in general. There could have been no better professor in advanced rhythm studies. Dannie was an architect of music. He shaped it, molded it; built it up and broke it down. The first run-through of a tune bore little resemblance to how it sounded three months later, after Dannie had grown and developed it on the bandstand. And getting to play the Mingus repertoire with Dannie's quintet, especially the long suites, allowed me to experience all the richness of Mingus's genius, coming through his life-long partner, the man Mingus himself said knew his music better than he did!
And since Dannie and I were the "sidemen" in George and Don's band, we were kind of thrown together, even though Dannie had been with them so long and even though he certainly should have been the band's third "co-leader." We didn't know each other before the fall of '79, but we were immediately close and he quickly brought me into his own band. There was no more funny, supportive, loyal friend, no better "road-buddy" than "DR," "the doctor." I think there were some years when we spent more time with each other than we did with our families!
I have tapes of a night in Stockholm. The quintet had just finished 5 or 6 one-nighters in Finland, with a worse set of "rock-'n-roll" drums, a more out-of-tune and broken-down spinet piano, and a worse and/or more nonexistent sound system (is that possible?) each night. We hit Stockholm, Club Fashing, with a beautiful set of Gretsch drums, a Bosendorfer grand piano and a good sound system. Dannie played with such ferocity, exorcising the frustration of the previous week, that I swear the bandstand levitated! There was no more exciting experience in music than playing next to Dannie Richmond!

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