Don Cherry needs to be seen as well as heard, his cool, smooth deportment (the opposite of Miles Davis's concentrated intensity), his facial expressions, his charm.
Things took off for him when he teamed up with the legendary Ornette Coleman - replaced by John Coltrane for the legendary
Avant-Garde recording: heroic times when all these people improvised their way to a new Art form - free jazz.
Though at first Cherry was averse to fusion, he ended up inventing a fusion genre of his own, integrating African, Arabic and Asian elements, thereby placing himself at the origin of multi-culturalism in the arts.
He also co-authored a piece with the then avant-garde classical composer Krzysztof Penderecki,
Actions for Free Jazz Orchestra - one of the most pointed instance of interpenetration of Jazz and the classical in the XXth century.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...A1DM9CO5YR0PDP
