Terry Riley, Don Cherry & Karl Berger Live In Köln 1975

The concert staged by Terry Riley, Don Cherry and Karl Berger in Cologne, Germany on February 23 1975 serves as a landmark of minimalist jazz. Keyboardist and composer Terry Riley was the driving force behind the set. He was born in a small town located in the High Sierra mountain range of northern California, studying composition at San Francisco State University and the University of California, Berkeley, were he began experimenting with tape recorders, and befriended avant-garde composer, La Monte Young, whom he briefly joined in the experimental Fluxus group. Moving to Paris in the early 1960s, he continued his tape experiments, using a pair of machines to form a “time lag accumulator” that perpetually recycled what was played. He moved to New York in 1965 to collaborate with Young and began playing all-night solo concerts, making a record with John Cale that would surface as The Church of Anthrax. Then, after a lengthy period of study in New Delhi, he returned to California to continue his varied musical experiments. Trumpeter Don Cherry was born in Oklahoma and raised in Watts in Los Angeles, where he was mentored by Clifford Brown.
After a chance meeting in the late 1950s, he began playing with free-jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman, leading to subsequent work with experimental jazz giants such as John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins and Albert Ayler, among many others. Heidelberg-born pianist, vibraphonist and composer Karl Berger learned to play jazz from visiting American performers such as trumpeter Don Ellis and saxophonist Leo Wright. He began playing in Don Cherry’s band in the mid-1960s, which led to his first solo recordings; in 1972, he co-founded the Creative Music Studio in Woodstock, New York, with Coleman. The Live in Köln album is comprised of just three mega-length songs, with Riley in the driver’s seat, Berger as a steady accompaniment and Cherry passing through in fleeting melodic moments; final track “Köln Improvisations” references the Indian musical and spiritual forms that were so appealing to each musician; opening track “Descending Moonshine Dervishes” bridges the psychedelic and minimalist realms and “Sunrise Of The Planetary Dream Collective” is based on throbbing, repetitive keyboard and vibraphone patterns.