Donald Eugene Cherry (November 18, 1936 – October 19, 1995) was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, and multi-instrumentalist. Beginning in the late 1950s, he had a long tenure performing in the bands of saxophonist Ornette Coleman, including on the pioneering free jazz albums The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959) and Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation (1961). Cherry also collaborated separately with musicians including John Coltrane, Charlie Haden, Sun Ra, Ed Blackwell, the New York Contemporary Five, and Albert Ayler.
Cherry released his debut album as bandleader, Complete Communion, in 1966. In the 1970s, he became a pioneer in world fusion, with his work drawing on African, Middle Eastern, and Hindustani music, as heard on the 1975 release Brown Rice. He was a member of the ECM group Codona, along with percussionist Naná Vasconcelos and sitar and tabla player Collin Walcott. Chris Kelsey of AllMusic called Cherry "one of the most influential jazz musicians of the late 20th century."
Cherry was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, to a mother of Choctaw descent and an African-American father. His mother and grandmother played piano and his father played trumpet. His father owned Oklahoma City's Cherry Blossom Club, which hosted performances by jazz musicians Charlie Christian and Fletcher Henderson. In 1940, Cherry moved with his family to the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, where his father tended bar at the Plantation Club on Central Avenue, at the time the center of a vibrant jazz scene. Cherry recalled skipping school at Fremont High School in order to play with the swing band at Jefferson High School. This resulted in his transfer to Jacob Riis High School, a reform school, where he met drummer Billy Higgins.
By the early 1950s Cherry was playing with jazz musicians in Los Angeles, sometimes acting as pianist in Art Farmer's group. While trumpeter Clifford Brown was in Los Angeles with Max Roach, Cherry attended a jam session with Brown and Larance Marable at Eric Dolphy's house, and Brown informally mentored Cherry. He also toured with saxophonist James Clay.
Cherry became well known in 1958 when he performed and recorded with Ornette Coleman, first in a quintet with pianist Paul Bley and later in the quartet which recorded for Atlantic Records. During this period, "his lines ... gathered much of their freedom of motion from the free harmonic structures." Cherry co-led The Avant-Garde session which saw John Coltrane replacing Coleman in the quartet, recorded and toured with Sonny Rollins, was a member of the New York Contemporary Five with Archie Shepp and John Tchicai, and recorded and toured with both Albert Ayler and George Russell. His first recording as a leader was Complete Communion for Blue Note Records in 1965. The band included Coleman's drummer Ed Blackwell as well as saxophonist Gato Barbieri, whom he had met while touring Europe with Ayler, and bassist Henry Grimes.
After leaving Coleman's quartet, Cherry often played in small groups and duets, many with ex-Coleman drummer Ed Blackwell, during a long sojourn in Scandinavia and other locations. He traveled through Europe, India, Morocco, South Africa, and elsewhere to explore and play with a variety of musicians. In the late 1960s he settled in Tågarp, Sweden with his wife, Swedish designer and textile artist Moki Cherry. In 1968, Don Cherry taught music classes with guest lecturers, performance collaborators, and workshop leaders from around the world at Arbetarnas bildningsförbund (ABF) House, a Swedish labor movement-run education center. For ten years, Don and Moki Cherry lived and worked collaboratively in an abandoned schoolhouse in Tågarp, holding classes and performances, hosting guests and collaborators, and exploring their concept of Organic Music Society.
In 1969, Cherry played trumpet and other instruments for poet Allen Ginsberg's 1970 LP Songs of Innocence and Experience, a musical adaptation of William Blake's poetry collection of the same name. He appeared on Coleman's 1971 LP Science Fiction, and from 1976 to 1987 reunited with Blackwell and fellow Coleman alumni Dewey Redman and Charlie Haden as Old and New Dreams. Old and New Dreams recorded four albums (two for ECM and two for Black Saint) where Cherry's "subtlety of rhythmic expansion and contraction" was noted.
In the 1970s, Cherry ventured into the developing genre of world fusion music. Cherry incorporated influences of Middle Eastern, African, and Indian music into his playing. He studied Indian music with Vasant Rai in the early seventies. From 1978 to 1982, he recorded three albums for ECM with "world jazz" group Codona, consisting of Cherry, percussionist Naná Vasconcelos and sitar and tabla player Collin Walcott.
Cherry also collaborated with classical composer Krzysztof Penderecki on the 1971 album Actions. In 1973, he co-composed the score for Alejandro Jodorowsky's film The Holy Mountain, together with Jodorowsky and Ronald Frangipane.
At the end of the 1970s, the trio Organic Music Theater (with Gian Piero Pramaggiore and Naná Vasconcelos) had an intense live activity in Italy and France.
In 1982, Cherry released the duet album El Corazon with Ed Blackwell. He also released two albums as a bandleader in the 1980s: Home Boy (Sister Out) in 1985 and Art Deco in 1988. He recorded again with the original Ornette Coleman Quartet on the first disc of Coleman's 1987 album In All Languages.
Other playing opportunities in his career came with Carla Bley's 1971 opera Escalator over the Hill and as a sideman on recordings by Lou Reed, Ian Dury, Rip Rig + Panic, and Sun Ra. Cherry played with Ian Dury and the Blockheads on their 1980 tour, including the final gig on Christmas Eve, which was broadcast live by the BBC, from the Dominion Theatre in London, on The Old Grey Whistle Test. He also toured UK and Europe with the band in 1981.
In 1992, Don Cherry was invited by renowned Indian violinist L. Shankar to perform in Mumbai, India. This interaction was captured in a documentary film titled "Rhythms of the World: Bombay and all the Jazz". In 1994, Cherry appeared on the Red Hot Organization's compilation Stolen Moments: Red Hot + Cool, on a track titled "Apprehension", alongside the Watts Prophets. This album, meant to raise awareness of the HIV/AIDS epidemic among African-Americans, was named "Album of the Year" by Time.
Cherry died of liver cancer in Málaga, Spain, on October 19, 1995, at the age of 58.
Cherry was inducted into the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame in 2011.
Cherry was married to Monika Karlsson (Moki Cherry), a Swedish painter and textile artist, who also occasionally played tanpura with him. His stepdaughter Neneh Cherry, his step-granddaughters Mabel and Tyson, and his sons David Ornette Cherry, Christian Cherry, and Eagle-Eye Cherry, are also musicians. David Ornette Cherry died from an asthma attack at the age of 64 on November 20, 2022.
Don Cherry practiced Vajrayana Buddhism.
Cherry learned to play various brass instruments in high school. Throughout his career, he played an F. Besson (Paris) MEHA pocket cornet (though he identified this as a pocket trumpet), trumpet, cornet, flugelhorn, and bugle.