The Summer House Sessions

Description

Having pioneered free jazz as a member of Ornette Coleman_s classic quartet, and with a high profile collaboration with John Coltrane under his belt, the globetrotting jazz trumpeter settled in Sweden with his partner Moki and her daughter Neneh. There, he assembled a group of Swedish musicians and led a series of weekly workshops at the ABF, or Workers_ Educational Association, from February to April of 1968, with lessons on extended forms of improvisation including breathing, drones, Turkish rhythms, overtones, silence, natural voices, and Indian scales. That summer, saxophonist and recording engineer G_ran Freese_who later recorded Don_s classic Organic Music Society and Eternal Now LPs_invited Don, members of his two working bands, and a Turkish drummer to his summer house in Kummeln_s, just outside of Stockholm, for a series of rehearsals and jam sessions that put the prior months_ workshops into practice. Long relegated to the status of a mysterious footnote in Don_s sessionography, tapes from this session, as well as one professionally mixed tape intended for release, were recently found in the vaults of the Swedish Jazz Archive, and the lost Summer House Sessions are finally available over fifty years after they were recorded.