When I first planned my overview of Don
Cherry's Swedish albums more than a year ago (which was then delayed for several reasons), I thought it needed some more depth than I
could possibly give it myself. I figured I needed an eyewitness report from
someone close to Cherry during his Swedish years, or better yet:
someone who actually played with him. I couldn't possibly
think of anyone better than drummer par excellence Bengt "Beche" Berger. He happily agreed to do it, and I sent him a set of questions. I thought it would be a simple little Q &
A – he indeed generously answered all my questions, but in the shape of what very well can be called an essay on his years with Don Cherry,
with many and valuable peeks into the creative process. (I only translated it.) A massive THANK YOU to Bengt Berger who graciously took the time to provide us with this!
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| Don Cherry iwith Bitter Funeral Beer Band in 1982 |
I had of course heard Ornette's
quartet already, but the first time I saw Don live was with Sonny
Rollins's quartet at the Stockholm Concert House in January 1964. A
house next door was on fire, so there was smoke in the hall and they
did a fantastic gig. I still listen to the tape I made of the radio
broadcast every now and then. [Jazz presenter] Olle Helander aired
just about every show at the Concert House. It was a fantastic
concert, Don didn't play a lot, mostly tossed in a phrase here and
there och joined in with the free handling of themes. Rollins played
continuously and was marvellous. Henry Grimes on bass and Billy
Higgins on drums. Listen to the show! Don later told me that after
the concert, Moki told him to come and look at her paintings in the
next room but there she turned out the light, and that's how they
met.
Next I heard Don's European quintet
with J.F. Jenny-Clarke, Aldo Romani, Gato Barbieri and Karl Berger at
the Golden Circle [a legendary jazz venue in Stockholm] a few years
later. Moki was up front in the audience. That too was fantastic but
for some reason, I only saw them one night. I wonder why – when
Charles Lloyd's first quartet with Keith [Jarrett], Jack [DeJohnette]
and Cecil McBee played at the Circle I saw them every night for two
weeks.
At Embassy at Sturegatan [in Stockholm]
I heard the trio with Johnny Dyani and Okay Temiz. When Don played a
little phrase on a wooden block and sang ”kukorokoko” and paused,
I responded from the audience. But it might have been after we met in
Uppsala, because Okay had his ordinary drum kit there and that was
before he got his giant darbuka drum kit.
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| Don and Beche in The Dome 1971 |
I had started playing with Arbete &
Fritid and we had one of our earliest gigs at Norrlands Nation in
Uppsala. We shared the bill with Don Cherry who was there with Bernt
Rosengren's quartet with Tommy Koverhult and Leif Wennerström. Tommy
Koverhult was in the back room before the gig and changed springs and
pads on his sax, and when Don heard I play the tabla he told me to
sit in with them. I was just back from India, but for some purist
reason, I never used them in Arbete & Fritid. And finding tablas
in Uppsala on such short notice was impossible, so I never sat in
with them that night. But both bands played some fine music that
night.
We often played in Stockholm around
that time, and it sometimes happened that you could hear Don play
along in the middle of a song. He sneaked up on stage behind us,
played along for a while and then disappeared. It happened several
times with Arbete & Fritid but also when I played with for
instance Handgjort, maybe at Gärdet.
But then came The Dome at the Museum of
Modern Art. The Cherry family lived in an old bunkhouse next to The
Dome, and they spent whole days in The Dome. Moki sewed and painted
and Don played with those who came there, and a lot of people did.
When I was there, he told me to bring the tablas so I did and we
played there every day after that. Moki played the tanpura and Don
sang, played the trumpet, flute, a little gamelan or whatever was at
hand. A grand piano and Okay's drums were there too, so we used these
a lot too.
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| Don and Beche in The Dome 1971 |
I can't remember exactly when they
bought the schoolhouse in Tågarp, but it must have been around the
time when they had just moved there that he asked me to come along.
We drove down there, Don, me and Gittan [Jönsson] that would become
my girlfriend a few years later. She did a very nice little painting
on a log of wood showing how we filled up gas late in the evening on
our way down. I think it's still there.
Always when in Tågarp, I stayed in a
little room in the attic, it was very cozy. An old schoolhouse is a
very harmonious building with its square classrooms at each end and
the teacher's residence in-between. They fired up a stove in each
schoolroom, one was Moki's atelier and the other was the music room
where we also ate and socialized.
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| Don, Eagle-Eye and the old schoolhouse in Tågarp |
Moki had painted the piano in beautiful
bright colours and next to it was [Don's son] ”Eagle-Eye's drum
kit”. When it was us only, we played piano and drums, lots of
Ornette themes that Don played over and over again while I played
along in full blast. It NEVER happened that he told me what to play.
I always played exactly what I wanted (and I've tried doing so ever
since). I could try to catch the melody and learn it, play along with
it, but I could also play against it and around it. At first he would
play the same thematic turnover forever, and then he played some kind
of rhythmic harmonic accompaniment based upon it. My understanding of
Ornette's harmolodics is that you construct a chord over an optional
number of notes of the melody, and how many notes you choose defines
how large the chord will be. You decide for yourself when you create
a new chord from a different chunk of the melody. The chords will be
different for each melodic section. Anyway, that's how I perceive it.
It would have been interesting hearing Ornette himself play over a
piano comp like that. Oh, by the way, sometimes Don could give me a
sign that he wanted me to play a fast comp on the cymbal, it added
brilliance. He gave a cymbal comp sign with his hand. But that was
the only instruction he ever gave me.
Or we could play tablas, wooden blocks
or some other smaller percussion instruments, and flutes, trumpet,
vocals or whatever. Then we were in some kind of Asian territory.
Tibetan music also figured. I showed him ragas, scales, and we made
up melodies/songs/ways of playing together. Later on they could show
up during concerts or at workshops. Don loved to learn and when I
gave him his first tabla lessons, I was taught a huge lesson myself.
I gave him the first lesson, and then we sat playing together but not
like doing the homework – we played music! We could play it over
and over again but not as an excercise in order to go on to something
new after that – this was the actual creating of music! I had never
understood that before, and only occasionally experienced it later.
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| Beche, Don, Eagle-Eye and Christer Bothén in 1974 |
My second great piece of learning was
the way we treated ”the reportoire” in concert. Case in point: We
had a gig at [jazz club] ArtDur, later Nefertiti, in Gothenburg.
Bernt Rosengren and I came down from Stockholm, Don from Tågarp,
while Christer Bothén already lived in Gothenburg. Don't think we
had ever played with that line-up before. We get there, unpack our
instruments and start rehearsing on stage. Don plays just like he
does when it's just me and him in Tågarp. He picks up a theme and
plays it round and round while the others try to learn the tune. All
of a sudden he changes to a different theme or a different
instrument. Perhaps he sits down at his harmonium. I switch to
mridangam, Christer to a donsu'nguni, Bernt maybe to a taragot, and
something new takes shape. So it changes; in the middle of a solo Don
might switch to a completely different song and you just have to
follow along. Either you know the theme, or you try to learn it while
playing. All of the time we're making music fully focused. After
having kept going for an hour or two, they let the audience in and we
keep going without a break or without starting over. After another
hour, we might stop or take a break only to start in a while again.
This method of not necessarily playing
a song from beginning to end but to change it altogether when you
feel like it is something I have tried to practice with all bands
I've played with, but with the difference I want everyone in the band
to have that same possibility. I think it probably worked best with
Berger Knutsson Spering, maybe three people are realistically the
best, but it of course depends on who you're playing with. In our
case we also allowed ourselves to pick up a song in any tempo or in
any style at all, but also refuse to change if someone didn't want
to. It can go far but it can also go to hell and that's of course
exciting.
* * *
The photos are taken by unknown
photographers and come from countryandeastern.se, all used by kind
permission of Bengt Berger.
