Tape, Trumpet, and Early Electronics
Ahead of its time, Appleton's electronics meet Cherry's trumpet and flute in a strange, sincere collision.
Human Music is a collaboration between Jon Appleton, a composer working with early electronic tools, and Don Cherry, the trumpeter and multi-instrumentalist who had spent the 1960s moving between free jazz and world music. The material was recorded across 1969 and 1970, and the sessions show two musicians working toward a shared set of sounds rather than a conventional jazz date. Cherry's trumpet and flute provide the human line, and Appleton's processing turns those timbres into something stranger and more elastic.
What you hear is less a jazz record with electronics added than a document of an experiment. Cherry's phrasing remains recognizably his, lyrical and spacious, but it is repeatedly bent, layered, and reshaped. Some passages feel loose and searching, others more focused. It is not an album to put on for easy swing. It rewards patience and a willingness to hear Cherry as a sound source as much as a soloist.
The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings wrote that the record was ahead of its time and inevitably neglected on first release, a fair summary of its position. It sits at the edge of Cherry's catalogue and of Appleton's, which makes it a good listen for committed fans of either but probably not the place to start with Cherry. Start with the more conventional sessions and come back to this when you want to hear where his ideas could go.
