Don Cherry Quartet
Village Vanguard
NY, NY
5 October 1987 (see notes below)
audience recording using unknown equipment > ? > Maxell UDXL II cassette (Dolby C), labeled "2nd gen ?" > flac (2021)

total time 83:50

Don Cherry - brass, vocals, piano, etc
Carlos Ward - alto sax
Cameron Brown - bass
Ed Blackwell - drums

1
2 Pettiford Bridge
3
4 Art Deco
----
5 Mothers of the Veil
6 Cherry welcomes audience to the Vanguard's 3rd set, which he says is being recorded
7 Happy House
8
9

notes:
Date cited on cassette source is "October 5, 1987" (Tuesday), although the NYT articles quoted below suggest that this show may have occured a month earlier. Cherry tells the audience that this show is being recorded but there is no available evidence that an official live recording of this show was ever released.
----------------------------
From the New York Times, September 3 (Friday), 1982

Don Cherry, a trumpeter, is leading a quartet with Carlos Ward on alto saxophone, Cameron Brown on bass and Ed Blackwell on drums tonight through Sunday at the Village Vanguard, 178 Seventh Avenue South, below 11th Street (255-4037). Sets begin at 10 and 11:30 P.M. and 1 A.M.; there is a $12 cover and a $6 minimum.

---------------------------------------------------
From the New York Times, September 4 (Saturday), 1982

DON CHERRY'S musical life has been rich in variety and adventure, often played out in exotic locales. He has learned from encounters with remarkable men, including Ornette Coleman, the Indian vocalist Pandit Pran Naph, the South African pianist Abdullah Ibrahim and the West African, Moroccan and American Indian musicians who taught him indigenous instruments and tribal lore. He has been a key member of several significant bands - the original Ornette Coleman Quartet, Old and New Dreams, the multicultural trio Codona. One thing Mr. Cherry hasn't got around to yet is leading a regular, working combo of his own.

The quartet Mr. Cherry is introducing this week at the Village Vanguard is already forging a distinctive group sound. Carlos Ward, who is playing alto saxophone and contributing a number of sturdily hypnotic compositions, thinks on his horn the way Mr. Cherry does. He breaks his songlike lines the way the voice breaks, with exclamations and asides, rather than depending on the fundamentally instrumental syntax of arpeggios and scalar figures. Ed Blackwell's drumming seems to sing, too, while keeping up an agile rhythmic commentary on the music's direction and pulse. Cameron Brown plays bass with confident authority, nailing down the robust ostinatos that anchor much of the group's music.

Vivid glimpses of some of the musicians who have crossed Mr. Cherry's path and shaped his personality slipped in and out of the music's mercurial flow on Tuesday. Soloing on Mr. Coleman's recent composition ''Mothers of the Veil,'' Mr. Cherry found himself detouring through Thelonious Monk's ''In Walked Bud,'' a theme Mr. Ward picked up and developed in the saxophone solo that followed. Mr. Cherry's ''Art Deco'' was an elegant 1930's soft-shoe routine, summoning the spirit of Jabbo Smith and Billie Holiday.

Mr. Cherry has integrated chantlike modal melodies, the tonal flexibility of Mr. Coleman's approach, the harmonic and rhythmic elaborations of be-bop, and an encyclopedic knowledge of non-Western music into a personal style of persuasive originality and depth. In the past, he has sometimes found it necessary to subordinate various facets of his musical personality to the preferences or limitations of the musical situation at hand. The new quartet responds to the full range of Mr. Cherry's sensibilities; if the trumpeter has been looking for a band worth developing on a continuing basis, he seems to have found it.