Bitter Funeral Beer Band - Live in Frankfurt 82 (Country and Eastern, 2007)

Don Cherry is one of my all-time faves, and I've posted a few of his things on here before. The thing is, apart from a few moments, I don't hear him too much. This is definitely the sort of thing that he would be involved with, but this is not so much a vehicle for his playing, but an example of the type of thing he wanted to surround himself with. I always felt that, setting aside his eccentricities, especially later in his career, Cherry was the anti-jazzbo trumpeter. While people say his technique was wanting here and there (I'm not proficient on the instrument, so I'm not sure I can verify this), his imagination, his way of making phrases and tones fit in with what the group was doing, was unquestioned. I think for Cherry, instead of learning the idiom perfectly (as Miles did, before he started his own stylistic expansion), he wanted to blend what he could do with things that he enjoyed, almost from the outset.

Cherry's "world" recordings, basically easily dated as 70s mixtures with rhythms and wind instruments immediately recognized vaguely as music from outside the Western tradition, have a life of their own, and still are exciting listens today. However, this one is peculiar because he is a side man, and from what I can tell, his pairing here is with European fellow travelers, equally interested in looking outside their national border. The result is not dissimilar to the type of sputtering post rock rhythms you might here from this or that collective in the 90s, with a touch of 70s and jazz material, of course (this in from the 80s, but you get the point).

Anyway, there are much better reviews of this, but hopefully you can get out of it what I do, a fledgling attempt, one I rarely hear anywhere until much later (again, some of the directions rock based acts would go to when reaching for jazz, resulting in a few strains of post-rock), and the enthusiasm. Beautiful record.