Technique and Style
Cherry's trumpet influences included Miles Davis, Fats Navarro, Clifford Brown, and Harry Edison. Journalist Howard Mandel suggests Henry "Red" Allen as a precedent (given Allen's "blustery rather than Armstrong-brazen brass sound, jauntily unpredictable melodic streams, squeezed-off and/or half-valve effects and repertoire including novelty vocals") while Ekkehard Jost cites Wild Bill Davison.
Some critics have noted shortcomings in Cherry's technique. Ron Wynn writes that " technique isn't always the most efficient; frequently, his rapid-fired solos contain numerous missed or muffed notes. But he's a master at exploring the trumpet and cornet's expressive, voice-like properties; he bends notes and adds slurs and smears, and his twisting solos are tightly constructed and executed regardless of their flaws." Jost notes the tendency for writers to focus on Cherry's "technical insecurity," but asserts that "the problem lies elsewhere. Perfect technical control in extremely fast tempos was more or less risk-free as long as the improviser had to deal with standard changes that were familiar to him from years of working with them.… In the music of the Ornette Coleman Quartet – a 'new-found-land' where the laws and habits of functional harmony do not apply – there is no use for patterns that had been worked out on that basis."
Miles Davis was initially dismissive of Cherry's playing, claiming that "anyone can tell that guy's not a trumpet player – it's just notes that come out, and every note he plays he looks serious about, and people will go for that, especially white people.". According to Cherry, however, when Davis attended an Ornette Coleman performance at The Five Spot, he was impressed with Cherry's playing and sat in with the group using Cherry's pocket trumpet. Later, in a 1964 Down Beat blindfold test, Davis indicated that he admired Cherry's playing.
Read more about this topic: Don Cherry (musician)
Famous quotes containing the words technique and/or style:
“The more technique you have, the less you have to worry about it. The more technique there is, the less there is.”
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