Cherry grew up in Oklahoma City and came of age in Los Angeles, where he fell in with Ornette Coleman in the late 1950s. That partnership produced some of the most genuinely startling records in jazz history — The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959) and Free Jazz (1960) among them — but Cherry was never just Coleman's sideman. He had his own sound from the start: a small, slightly brassy pocket trumpet tone that could sound playful and searching at the same time, never quite landing where you expected it to.

After the Coleman years, Cherry did something most musicians from his generation didn't do — he left. Not out of frustration, but out of curiosity. He spent years moving through Europe, Africa, and Asia, studying music traditions that had nothing to do with jazz in any conventional sense. He picked up the doussn'gouni, the flute, the piano. He raised kids in a Swedish commune. By the time he resurfaced on records through the late 1960s and into the 1970s, he was playing something that didn't have a clean name yet. World music is the lazy shorthand people use now, but that phrase flattens how organic the whole thing actually sounded coming from him.

Eternal Rhythm (1969) is a good place to hear what that exploratory period produced — a long, sprawling session recorded in Germany with an ensemble that included musicians from multiple continents. It can feel loose if you're expecting structure, but sit with it and the internal logic starts to come through. Cherry wasn't jamming randomly; he was building a vocabulary in real time. Relativity Suite (1973) takes a similar approach and holds together even better, with Charlie Haden anchoring the low end and giving the whole thing some weight.

His later work is where opinions split. Codona (1979) — the trio he formed with percussionist Nana Vasconcelos and multi-instrumentalist Collin Walcott — pushed even further into folk and world music territory. Some listeners find it deeply satisfying. Others find it too diffuse. Both reactions are reasonable. Cherry was never chasing commercial appeal, but he also wasn't being willfully obscure — he genuinely believed all this music was connected, and when he played it, you got the sense he'd earned that belief through actual experience rather than just declared it.

What you remember about Cherry is the tone and the attitude. His trumpet playing always sounded like someone asking a question rather than making a statement. He could play inside the changes when he wanted to — his bebop grounding was real — but he was almost always more interested in the space between the notes than in demonstrating facility. He made four or five records that absolutely hold up. He made others that are more document than destination. The best way in is Complete Communion (1966), which finds him leading a small group with Gato Barbieri and hits a balance between freedom and focus that he rarely topped.