MUSIC ARCHIVES

Illicit Cherry For Sale on the Dark Side of the Web, We’re Not Telling Where

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The pope’s car, Britney Spears’s home pregnancy test, a grilled cheese sandwich bearing the image of the Virgin Mary, stolen credit cards, guns, teenage girls—you can find anything you want on the Internet, if you follow enough links. I even buy soap, toothpaste, and cat food online, now that stores always seem to be out of my preferred brands (hey, since when did we become the former Soviet Union?). Music too. Disappointed that the live Wayne Shorter due from Verve in June includes nothing from last year’s tour with Herbie Hancock, Dave Holland, and Brian Blade? Looking for Coltrane and Archie Shepp together in Chicago in 1966? It’s all for sale on the dark side of the Web. My latest find is an unreleased Don Cherry studio session from 1964 with Pharoah Sanders, Joe Scianni, David Izenson, and J.C. Moses—three tunes and one alternate take, presumably recorded for Savoy, only 20 minutes long and in sub-fidelity, but well worth it for Cherry’s fractured trumpet rhymes, the rhythm section’s bounce, the early glimpse of Sanders (then still a muscular hard bopper), and the sensation of eavesdropping on free jazz at a critical point in its evolution. I’d like to see the crooks selling this and other unauthorized material punished to the full extent of the law—now that I have mine.

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