Since the turn of the year my listening activities- aside from the half hour commute to work- have centred around the very wonderful Admirable Restraint radio shows up at archive.org. There's a whole world of music going on here that has apparently passed me by completely, and I suspect I'm going to be spending a lot of time and money investigating it further over the coming months. Always nice to have a plan. When you start discovering subcultures within subcultures you can find yourself in some dizzying places, and they are the kind of places that suit me just fine.
I've also heard Don Cherry's 'Eternal Rhythm' a handful of times too, a scratchy old vinyl rip lifted from the dark side- Don Cherry has always been just a name to me, a name on a list or hidden away in a review: I had no idea he had made music quite like this. Admittedly, my relationship with jazz has always been a secretive, sordid thing- brief passionate half hours in the photocopying room and then we don't talk to each other for months. All sorts of wonderful thing have drifted beneath my radar I'm sure.
This starts like a sunrise- flutes, bells, all the sounds of waking. A crash and then in come the percussion, the piano, and all the while the flute bold and liquid. Cherry the multi-instrumentalist then- he seems to be playing everything he can get his hands on here, and with a graceful calm abandon that will bring light to any room you play this music in. Yeah, it's that kind of record- it invites bad poetry. This is such happy, invigorating, creative, joyous music, ful of themes that dance round your head and an inexpressible sense of well-being that you really have to savour- you find it so rarely.
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