Organic Music Societies

by Lawrence Kumpf (Editor), Naima Karlsson (Editor), Magnus Nygren (Editor)

Edited by Lawrence Kumpf with Naima Karlsson and Magnus Nygren. Introduction by Lawrence Kumpf and Magnus Nygren. Text by Keith Knox, Rita Knox, Bengt af Klintberg, Iris R. Orton, Åke Holmquist, Pandit Pran Nath, John Esam, Michael Lindfield, Sidsel Paaske, George Trolin, Alan Halkyard, Moki Cherry, Don Cherry, Ben Young, Christer Bothén, Ruba Katrib, and Fumi Okiji. Interviews by Keith Knox and Rita Knox with Don Cherry, Terry Riley, and Steve Roney.

Avant-garde jazz trumpeter Don Cherry and textile artist Moki Cherry (née Karlsson) met in Sweden in the late sixties. They began to live and perform together, dubbing their mix of communal art, social and environmentalist activism, children’s education, and pan-ethnic expression “Organic Music.” Organic Music Societies, Blank Forms’ sixth anthology, is a special issue released in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name devoted to the couple’s multimedia collaborations. The first English-language publication on either figure, the book highlights models for collectivism and pedagogy deployed in the Cherrys’ interpersonal and artistic work through the presentation of archival documents alongside newly translated and commissioned writings by musicians, scholars, and artists alike.

Beginning with an overview by Blank Forms Artistic Director Lawrence Kumpf and Don Cherry biographer Magnus Nygren, this volume further explores Don’s work of the period through a piece on his Relativity Suite by Ben Young and an essay on the diasporic quality of his music by Fumi Okiji. Ruba Katrib emphasizes the domestic element of Moki’s practice in a biographical survey accompanied by full-color reproductions of Moki’s vivid tapestries, paintings, and sculptures, which were used as performance environments by Don’s ensembles during the Sweden years and beyond. Two selections of Moki’s unpublished writings—consisting of autobiography, observations, illustrations, and diary entries, as well as poetry and aphorisms—are framed by tributes from her daughter Neneh Cherry and granddaughter Naima Karlsson. Swedish Cherry collaborator Christer Bothén contributes period travelogues from Morocco, Mali, and New York, providing insight into the cross-cultural communication that would soon come to be called “world music.”

The collection also features several previously unpublished interviews with Don, conducted by Christopher R. Brewster and Keith Knox. A regular visitor to the Cherry schoolhouse in rural Sweden, Knox documented the family’s magnetic milieu in his until-now unpublished Tågarp Publication. Reproduced here in its entirety, the journal includes an interview with Terry Riley, an essay on Pandit Pran Nath, and reports on counter-cultural education programs in Stockholm, including the Bombay Free School and the esoteric Forest University.

Taken together, the texts, artwork, and abundant photographs collected in Organic Music Societies shine a long overdue spotlight on Don and Moki’s prescient and collaborative experiments in the art of living.
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Distributed by Les presses du réel in French-speaking Europe, Antenne Books in the rest of Europe, and DAP in the rest of the world.

Contact Adrian Rew at adrian@blankforms.org with press inquires.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Jazz

496 pages, Paperback

Published June 1, 2021

Reviews

[Chris Reeves · Rating 5 out of 5]

Invaluable resource on the (until now) barely remarked upon communal art practices of Don and Moki Cherry of the 1970s. Seldom and never before seen photographs, diary entries, interviews, alongside texts written especially for this volume make this an indispensable (and inspirational) guidebook for anyone with an interest in jazz, performance and experience based art, communal living, domestic life as art, and the power of insisting on a better way of living in the world galvanized by the creative imagination. Cannot recommend this book enough.

[Alan (the Lone Librarian) Teder · Rating 5 out of 5]

Home as Stage, Stage as Home
Review of the Blank Forms Editions paperback (2021)

Music never stops. It is you who is stopping it. It is you that is ending. - Don Cherry as quoted in the liner notes for the album Eternal Rhythm

The stage is home and home is a stage. - Moki Cherry's motto during the Organic Music Societies era

American jazz trumpeter Don Cherry (1936-1995) had already earned his place in music history by being part of the seminal Ornette Coleman Quartet in the late 1950s / early 1960s, but his search afterwards led him much further afield and a case could be made that he was one of the major initiators of what is now variously labelled as the world music / world fusion genre. Cherry was already taking steps in that direction in the mid-1960s with his international quintet of Cherry/Barbieri/Berger/Romano/Stief where each member of the group spoke a different mother tongue without even much English in common. Don Cherry originally met Swedish designer/artist Moki Karlsson (1943 - 2009) in 1963 and they then joined their lives together in 1967.

Don Cherry's world fusion music is known through his dozen or so LPs (now CDs) from the 1970s-1980s time, but Moki Cherry's contribution to their mutual Organic Music Societies work was mostly only known through her album cover art, until this immense 496 page catalogue that documents through a generous selection of interviews, articles, autobiographies, diaries and photographs their international communal journey. This is highly recommended for modern jazz and world music fans.


Photograph of Moki Cherry's banner tapestry for performances of Don Cherry's "Relativity Suite", which also became the cover art for the original LP recording (seen on the right of the photo). Image sourced from the official Moki Cherry website at https://mokicherry.com/

Organic Music Societies was released in conjunction with its related exhibition at the Blank Forms gallery space in Brooklyn, NYC.

Other Reviews
Rediscovering Moki and Don Cherry's Utopian Visions at Frieze, April 14, 2021.
A Fresh Look at the 'Organic Music' of Moki and Don Cherry at the New York Times, April 28, 2021.

Trivia and Links
Blank Forms Editions is also releasing two previously unavailable Don Cherry recordings in conjunction with this book and exhibition. These are Organic Music Theatre: Festival de Jazz de Chateauvallon 1972 and The Summer House Sessions (1968), both are available as of June 18, 2021.

[Derek · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful, illuminating book. Tons of great pictures. Great interviews with Don. A lot of the book is dedicated to Moki Cherry's diaries of the time period covered. Just great all around.

[Benjamin Van Vliet · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book does many things very well but it has two flaws:

1. It’s very inconsistent and there’s a lot of repetition, with the main outlier being the almost unreadable academic wordsalad piece by Fumi Okiji, which feels out of place with the rest of the book and with Don Cherry’s own lack of pretentions;

2. It seems to only tell half of the story: a few years after the events of the book, Don and Moki separated, and there’s hints of bitterness in Moki’s 1990 diary entries and Neneh’s small chapter. I get that the family didn’t want to get into that part of the story too much, but right now it’s weird how it glorifies the beginning of the story in depth and ignores however it was that it ended.

[Jonathon Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

The visual presentation of Don Cherry's music has always intrigued me nearly as much as the music itself. In Organic Music Societies, Lawrence Kumpf compiles much of the art and stories around Cherry's music, mainly focusing on his time in Tågarp, Sweden. Kumpf devotes much of the book to Moki Cherry, Don's wife, who created much of the artwork, organized children's workshops, curated a communal performance space, and organized film screenings and art exhibitions. The book is visually stunning and highly recommended.

[Sean · Rating 5 out of 5]

We are so lucky that this anthology exists. Thank you to all involved!