Teaching Jazz, Teaching Justice, and the Blackness of Don Cherry’s Global Communion

Abstract

This essay proposes trumpeter/multi-instrumentalist Don Cherry as a pedagogical coordinate for approaching globally expansive jazz studies and social justice perspectives. Central are Cherry's philosophies on universality—at once musical, spiritual, and ethical—and the ways jazz functions as "glue" within his broad musical/geographic scope. While explicitly cosmopolitan, jazz here is anchored in its particular lineages of Black radical aesthetics (the blues, the necessity for improvisation and syncretism, etc.) and as such offers nuanced frames around Black universalities; those prefiguring and emerging through the capaciousness of jazz's wide trajectories yet firmly situated in race, history, power, and that seemingly impossible ideal of a more loving, equitable, compassionate world. The totality of Cherry's breadth—musical and otherwise—both troubles the "universalism" of inherited philosophical (Western) consensus and provides compelling directions for how practitioners and educators alike can think and support a growing jazz globality that still centers ethical imperatives of the music's histories and embedded potentials.