For a tall man, David Ornette Cherry is hard to locate. Now he's blowing two little wooden flutes at once, now he's stroking big chords on a piano, now he's plucking trance throbs on a gourd guitar, now he's sitting at a little table pretending to demand "the check for the water" if he doesn't see commitment.
We see a bit of the chameleon griot here -- DOC uses a magician's misdirection, simultaneously wanting us to remember and forget the legacies of his father (world-music progenitor Don Cherry) and avant inventor Ornette Coleman (Don's quartetmate and the source of DOC's middle name). Our bandleader is here, he's there, don't pin him down.
DOC gives us plenty of other colorful places to look. Skinny, Panama-hatted Gemi Taylor, for instance, has a '70s look and a chinky James Brown guitar sound to match. From the islands way down under, Nadene Pita in her flowered dress brings a clear, heart-tugging voice and what she rightly calls her own sound on viola -- grainy, dusky and desert-dry. On saxes and flute, Randall Willis blows with real soul. Bassist Ollie Elder Jr. pops the funk in sync with the truly essential anchors of this stormy crew, drummer Don Littleton and percussionist John L. Price. When Nichell Monroe comes on to sing at the end, by the way . . . the flow, the feel, the range, woo-ee.
David Ornette Cherry's concept that each musician would weave his or her life story into the performance works better in some cases than in others. The music feels loose and joyful, with many unisons and organic stop/starts à la Ornette plus quotations from Coleman's "Lonely Woman" and "Una Muy Bonita." Any number of selections -- a riverside picnic ballad, a jazzfunk workout, an eerie sax-melodica dance paired with talking drum, a gnawa-style drone -- could have continued much longer if not for constraints of time and format, and that would have been even more fun. Still, lure after lure to attract the ear.
Let's see this band stretch out real soon.
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Watch this performance here (set starts 18 minutes in). Donate to the World Stage here.
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Read Greg Burk's 2006 L.A. Weekly interview with David Ornette Cherry here.