After recently having seen 79-year jazz legend Ornette Coleman in a triumphant concert at the Austrian Saalfelden jazz festival I was reminded of another concert I had attended here in Regensburg in 1995.
Don Cherry was Ornette Coleman's main accomplice, when he introduced his revolutionary free jazz in 1959/60. So Ursula and I were thrilled to hear that he was giving a concert here in town. The concert was well attended, and the audience was excited, when the band started off before Don Cherry entered the stage. But when he did appear it was quite a shock!
This man was visibly an old man and obviously quite ill. He needed help from his musicians to step up the stage and he wobbled around disorientated while they were still playing. He searched and found his trumpet and laboriously tried to fit on the mouthpiece. He let it fall, then fell on his knees to find it, until a fellow musician picked it up for him.
This went on for the rest of concert. Although he was magnificent as soon as he started playing his trumpet (and occasionally the piano), Ursula and I felt very uncomfortable, since we had the impression we were watching a dying man. In the middle of the concert there was a short break, so we left and went home, it was just too painful to watch.
A few weeks later we heard the news that Don Cherry had died on tour in Spain due to liver failure caused by hepatitis. He was 58 years old.
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