Experiments in the art of living: Don and Moki Cherry’s Organic Music

In 2021, New York curatorial platform Blank Forms published Organic Music Societies – a book focused on the interdisciplinary work and lives of avant-garde jazz musician Don Cherry and textile artist Moki Cherry.

The publication, which was edited by Blank Forms founder Lawrence Kumpf and artist and musician Naima Karlsson – Don and Moki’s granddaughter – along with Don Cherry biographer Magnus Nygren, formed part of the platform’s larger project under the same name. Encompassing two records, an exhibition – curated by Karlsson and Kumpf – and a performance programme, the Organic Music Societies project delved into intersection of Don and Moki’s creative works and their collaborative experiments in the art of living.

It’s these pioneering communal artistic experiences and experiments of the couple that feed into this June’s Terraforma Festival. Where the Italian event’s post-Covid return last summer focused solely on the rave – as co-founder and artistic director Ruggero Pietromarchi puts it, “for once, we just danced. It was really about being all together again after two years of social distance” – Terraforma 2023 is centred on the community at its core along with an emphasis also on the non-club programme. As part of this, Karlsson and Kumpf will be giving a talk on their Organic Music Societies publication. This is set to take place in a domed structure inspired by the one at Sweden’s Moderna Museet where Don and Moki Cherry spent time both teaching and creating art in 1971 along with their children Eagle-Eye Cherry and Neneh Cherry – who is the mother of musicians Mabel and Tyson as well as Naima.

Ahead of Terraforma – and also the first solo exhibition of Moki Cherry’s work in London opening at the ICA later this month – we spoke with Pietromarchi, Karlsson and Kumpf about the enduring relevance of Don and Moki’s experiments in the art of living, the regenerative capacity of art and more.

Crack: How did you first meet and end up working together?

Naima Karlsson: Terraforma already had connections with Blank Forms, that was how we ended up meeting the other year – which was after we’d been doing the book project with Blank Forms. We started doing that with them quite a while ago, it became a longer and bigger book because of Covid. We started talking about doing some kind of archiving collaboration with [Blank Forms] in 2018. There’s lots and lots of material that I’ve gradually been working on, organising and cataloguing. When I met Lawrence, he was interested in helping in digitising some of it and then that was what ended up becoming the book project with them and it came out in 2021. Originally, it was supposed to be more like an exhibition and music project. And then because of Covid it became mostly focused on a book.

First of all, Lawrence approached us interested in doing a bigger exhibition in New York. And then the project took a different shape and became a book which is great, there wasn’t any proper published book about Don or Moki or the things they’ve done together. Then we did a concert in Paris. I think that that was the one that Ruggero was interested in, and we talked about doing something then.

Ruggero Pietromarchi: So, as a quick introduction, Terraforma is a three-day festival happening in this stunning venue just outside of Milan in Italy. It started in 2014 the idea was to terraform this space of Villa Arconati – which is a site from the 17th century that was abandoned for more than 20 years – and to start organising a music festival that could also have this potential of activating a regenerative process of the space.

For this upcoming edition I wanted to go back to the roots of the festival, of this communal experience. Through a friend of mine at the Bourse de Commerce I saw this interesting project about the Organic Music Society. So that’s how I got into this beautiful universe, which resonates a lot with me through Terraforma’s intention of regenerating a space through arts and culture and music. For me, it was essentially this kind of love story between these two souls, Don and Moki. They created this open space for music installations, performances, workshops, education, and a lot of other elements, which rang a lot of bells related to Terraforma for me.

In the beginning, we were thinking of an exhibition, but we didn’t feel it was the right way to address the Organic Music Society [at Terraforma]. In the end, we thought of this architecture; Don and Moki were invited by the Moderna Museet in Stockholm to bring their own experience of organic music to the museum within this architecture of a geodesic dome, where they essentially lived for a couple of months or so in 1971. The idea that we’re working on is to recreate this infrastructure, this geodesic dome within Terraforma for the three days and to make a space for what was missing last year with panels, workshops, installations and performances. We’re working closely with the Domus Academy based here in Milan to make it an open process in rethinking this dome. At the same time, we have this legendary figure Bengt Carling who’s the original architect that Naima put me in touch with, who built the original dome in the Moderna Museet. So we are creating this dome for the festival where Naima and Lawrence are going to introduce the Organic Music Societies through presenting the book.

Crack: Are there any parallels between the Organic Music Society and the community created through Terraforma?

RP: Well, there’s a lot of different touch points. Mainly, of course, this architecture of the dome and then there’s also a lot of music references, because there’s [Don Cherry’s] record that came out in 1972, Organic Music Society which is a masterpiece. And to me, that was also very interesting and important as a musician for Don Cherry coming from the New York free jazz scene, opening up to a number of sounds and musical experiences from all over the world. That’s what I’m also trying to do within the music programme. There’s a lot of music expression that, for me at least, resonates within the Organic Music Society. From people touching on the aesthetic of the family in a way, like the legend Dennis Bovell MBE who will play on the Sunday, and Naima will play as Exotic Sin with Kenichi Iwasa and her sister TYSON.

Also Beatrice Dillon, who for me is the perfect example of an artist who’s bringing this legacy in contemporary aesthetic. She’s going to perform together with this master of tabla percussions Kuljit Bhamra. That’s quite an important expression of how these two aesthetics coming from the past and from the contemporary can converge together.

Crack: Is there anything from Don and Moki’s work and their Organic Music Society that can be applied to imagining the capacity of art in our current society and how we live today?

Lawrence Kumpf: Naima and I started with the album Organic Music Society, which was really the inspiration of the project that we worked on together; and from that came this idea of making the “society” plural and making it expansive, imagining multiple societies. I think this is really Don and Moki’s approach to thinking about ‘world music’ and thinking about how one can connect with different cultures; and this would include the culture that birthed jazz–which is the culture that Don is coming from–and viewing it on the level with these different musical folk traditions. I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense, but in the sense of non-commercial music, these deep culturally specific practices that as a musician he can dive into and really learn and spend time with. And then move to another space, another way of educating oneself, and bringing all of this together in a way that I think is really respectful of these differences. I think that’s a really instructive way to think of bringing divergent cultures together in a way that is perhaps meaningful in this current political moment.