Don Cherry Music, Wisdom, Love

Reaching a near-mythical status amongst fans of free jazz’s most worldly intrepid explorer, these seldom heard Paris soundtrack sessions known as Music, Wisdom, Love have evaded collectors’ grasps and confused historians for exactly 50 years. Instigated in Paris in 1967 and filmed during Don’s downtime on a visit to the Chat qui Pêche nightclub in March 1967 (where he played with Karl Berger, Henri Texier and Jacques Thollot), the bulk of this cinematic portrait was filmed on the streets of Paris under the direction of creative all-rounders Jean-Noël Delamarre and Nathalie Perrey, who, as their careers bloomed, would become pivotal figures in underground French cinema – straddling La Nouvelle Vague, adult entertainment and cinema fantastique in what can only be described as speedball cinema. As the supportive creative family that primarily played home to French vampire/horrortica director Jean Rollin, both Nathalie and Jean-Noël, his brother Jean-Philippe Delamarre and a small team of other fans of oblique media would be responsible for a vibrant micro-culture that awkwardly flourished on the outskirts on the Parisian new wave – combining comic book culture, Lettrism, sexual liberation, psychedelic rock, graphic design and (with this record as prime example) free jazz and avant-garde music. What previously might have been regarded as an unlikely coupling, with the benefit of half a century of archival hindsight, this release documents the essential cosmic collision of two fantastic planets.