Codona 1,2,3 LPs - ECM Don Cherry/Collin Walcott/Nana Vasconcelos world jazz

	£		20
	$		27

These three classic free jazz / experimental ECM albums, on lovely vinyl, now quite hard to find. Used but in excellent condition - both sleeves and discs. Your records will be carefully cleaned and packaged in a rigid box, specifically designed to deliver your precious vinyl safely.

Tracklisting

Disc: 1
  1. Like That Of Sky
  2. Codona
  3. Colemanwonder
  4. Mumakata
  5. New Light
 
Disc: 2
  1. Que Faser
  2. Godumaduma
  3. Malinye
  4. Drip-Dry
  5. Walking on Eggs
  6. Again and Again, Again
 
Disc: 3
  1. Goshakabuchi
  2. Hey Da Ba Doom
  3. Travel By Night
  4. Lullaby
  5. Trayra Boia
  6. Clicky Clacky
  7. Inner Organs

Description and Review

Codona was the name of a project by three musicians rooted in jazz but with a boundless curiosity for other musical traditions: Collin Walcott (sitar and tabla), Don Cherry (trumpet), and Nana Vasconcelos (percussion). Together they recorded three albums for the ECM label: Codona (1978), Codona 2 (1980), and Codona 3 (1982). 

Walcott had training in Indian music, Vasconcelos hailed from Brazil with its melange of European and African diaspora traditions. Cherry was active in the counterculture and picked up a few things from various African musics. The Codona project was essentially a workshop where they could explore exotic timbres, make use of the interplay of sound and silence for dramatic effect, and combine East and West in a way that foresaw the explosion of World Music.

There is palpable sense of studio space: sometimes Walcott is front and centre, but Cherry and Vasconcelos sound like they are moving around or content to do their own thing in a corner somewhere. Across the three albums, Cherry and Walcott go beyond what they are usually known for: in addition to his famed trumpet, Cherry plays, doussn'gouni, various flutes, kazoo, organ and melodica, while Walcott, besides sitar and tabla, plays hammered dulcimer, sanza and timpani.

One of the unusual aspects of Codona's work within the ECM fold is that these three musicians exploited overdubbing to create thicker textures. "Que Faser" opens with tabla and sitar, which Walcott of course wasn't playing at the same time. On "Like That of Sky", the opener to the first album, growling vocals are multitracked to create a shamanistic ritual of unidentifiable provenance. In "Godumaduma", the second track of CODONA 2, Walcott performs alone, the music consisting of two string lines double-tracked.

While Codona went off exploring exotic traditions, they didn't entirely leave behind the jazz music they were based on. There are three Ornette Coleman tunes across the first two albums, which are recognizable but nonetheless utterly transformed by the new instrumentation. In "Clicky Clacky" on the third album, Don Cherry turned his hand to the hobo blues genre, writing a praise of railroad travel that sounds like some authentic folklore from the 1930s, but Walcott's sitar makes it a very curious blues indeed.

If Codona's versatility had to be represented by one track, it might be "Malinye" from CODONA 2. Cherry initially plays his horn while Walcott beats a timpani and Vasconcelos sings, the proceedings rooted in a folk music refrain. However, this track, 12 minutes long, eventually transforms into a free-jazz free-for-all with wordless shouting from the players and unstructured drumbeats, and then ends with minimalism of the Steve Reich sort.

... the first two albums especially are fine works that hold up well decades later, and even if one considers Codona a forebear of "World Music", they aren't the kind of unimaginative crossover gimmickry (merely Western pop with "ethnobeats" added on top) that one often associates with the genre.