Don Cherry’s ‘Complete Communion’ Joins Blue Note’s Tone Poet Vinyl Series
The acclaimed cornetist’s 1966 debut album will be reissued in September.
Complete Communion is coming soon to a turntable near you. On Sept. 5, Don Cherry’s revelatory 1966 debut album will be reissued as part of Blue Note’s Tone Poet vinyl series. This edition of the LP was produced by Joe Harley, mastered by Kevin Gray from the original analog master tapes, pressed on 180g vinyl at RTI, and packaged in a deluxe gatefold tip-on jacket.
Cherry put himself on the map playing trumpet in the free jazz wrecking crew known as the Ornette Coleman Quartet. His appearances on classic Coleman albums like 1959’s The Shape of Jazz to Come and 1961’s Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation made him one of the most respected brass players in the world, a reputation he burnished by collaborating with fellow legends like John Coltrane and Sun Ra. With Complete Communion, he picked up a cornet and further cemented his legend.
On his solo debut, Cherry joined forces with tenor saxophonist Gato Barbieri, bassist Henry Grimes, and drummer Ed Blackwell to further deconstruct and reassemble the sound of his genre. “The first impression one gets in listening to Complete Communion is of ensemble precision achieved in an utterly unpedantic way,” Ekkehard Jost wrote in his book Free Jazz. “The transitions, for example, are relatively complicated: various musical figures are linked together; there are no schematic patterns; and yet the transitions are accomplished with astonishing ease, as though they were the most natural thing in the world.”
Each of the album’s two sides features a suite of songs assembled together into extended journeys of sound. The A side comprises the four-part “Complete Communion,” while the B closes out the album with another four-song procession known as “Elephantasy.” On these tracks, Cherry and his band bent jazz to their own ends, at angles only they could have imagined.
