Don Cherry & the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra – Isla/Psychedelic Weapons
Today marks one year since the death of Charlie Haden, the extaordinary bassist and composer. Haden’s music is rarely far from my turntables, but that has been especially the case since I learned of the vinyl issue of the soundtrack to Jodowrosky’s The Holy Mountain, one of my favorite films of all-time and a soundtrack that was long rumored to have been lost, until it turned up in digital form a few years ago on a box set of the director’s work. Finders Keepers have recently reissued music from all of Jodo’s films, but this soundtrack, reproduced on two pieces of vinyl with packaging worthy of the original film, is the one I was most interested in. When I first saw the film during college, a period of time where I was DEEP into avant-garde jazz, I don’t think I recognized that Don Cherry & the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra were responsible for most of the music. It wasn’t until I tracked down Don Cherry’s Relativity Suite, and then re-saw the movie a few years ago that I realized how the two were linked. Unfortunately, the soundtrack doesn’t have any extended solos from Haden, and in fact it’s difficult accurately place his bass in many of the songs, but it’s clear when you listen to “Isla” that that is Haden, with his distinctive tender sound. Though I understand and appreciate the hard right turn the music makes from “Isla” to “Psychedelic Weapons” I almost wish there was more of what appears to be a longer take for the first song, because it’s just as it starts to settle into something truly beautiful that it switches (it almost sounds as if someone stopped a reel-to-reel playing “Isla,” or, to post-hip-hop ears, it almost sounds like a sloppy cross fade of a DJ) into the rocking “Weapons,” but this is a minor complaint. There is so much beauty in these two discs, music that many of us thought would never see the light of day, but we have it now and it gives us more to treasure from Haden, Cherry and all of the other master musicians associated with the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra at that time.