After “Organic Music Societies”, Blank Forms’s recent exhibition (NY - April 8 to July 16, 2021), the American label has organized a two-night program at the Bourse de Commerce in celebration of the life, art, and collaborative spirit of free jazz legend Don Cherry (1936-1995) and visual artist-designer Moki Cherry (1943-2009). This performance series continues Blank Forms’s extensive programme dedicated to the duo’s extraordinary collaborations in the late 1960s and 1970s, joining the release of two albums—Don Cherry’s newly-unearthed The Summer House Sessions of 1968 and Don Cherry’s New Researches featuring Naná Vasconcelos’s Organic Music Theatre—Festival de jazz de Chateauvallon 1972—and the publication of Blank Forms 06: Organic Music Societies, the first-ever catalogue devoted to this dazzling period of artistic experimentation.
10 September 2021 : Organic Music Societies
Exotic Sin & Neneh Cherry + special guest
With a contorted, cosmic sound that fuses the free-form expressions of spiritual jazz with the compositional strategies of classic minimalism, Exotic Sin—Naima Karlsson and Kenichi Iwasa—revels in the exhilaration of sonic contrast. Karlsson and Iwasa initially collaborated in a tribute Karlsson’s forebears, Don and Moki Cherry, and formed Exotic Sin,—playing Don’s trumpet and jerry-rigged “zen saxophones” alongside their own synthesizers, celesta, bells, a Yamaha keyboard and a guitaret to make a sound their own. Their interdisciplinary roots and commitment to tonal and stylistic juxtapositions update the synergistic approach that defined Don and Moki’s art and life. In this performance, Neneh Cherry—mother to Karlsson, daughter of Don and Moki, and pioneering singer, trip-hop icon, and post-punk performer—will share the stage.
11 September 2021 : Organic Music Societies
NU music-4 + special guest
Performing under the moniker NU Music 4 for the first time, Mats Gustafsson and Goran Kajfeš join former Don Cherry collaborators Christer Bothén - key figure in the Scandinavian creative scene, traversing free jazz, folk, and experimental music- and Okay Temiz, legendary Turkish percussionist, as a new quartet. They will perform their own original suites and compositions alongside works by Cherry and others, all coalescing and dispersing as spontaneous and unbounded forms influenced by free jazz, radical rock, and traditional music from across North Africa, Turkey, Brazil, Scandinavia, and elsewhere. Completing the quartet are : Mats Gustafsson, Swedish saxophonist, flutist, and pioneering member of The Thing, Fire!, and the NU ensemble; and Goran Kajfeš, Croatian-Swedish trumpeter known for his Subtropic Arkestra, and his work in jazz groups.
Blank Forms
Set up in 2016 and based in New York, Blank Forms is a non-profit organisation devoted to emergent and under-represented artists in the fields of interdisciplinary and temporal practices, such as experimental music, performance, dance and sound art. Its objective is to set up new means to conserve, nourish and exhibit to a broad public the work of historic and emergent artists. Blank Forms offers artists curatorial support, residencies, commissions and publications to help them document, distribute and do.
