
Recommended by
Codona 3
It’s unfair that critics charged the short-lived supergroup trio of British sitarist Sir Collin Walcott, American pocket trumpeter Don Cherry, and Brazilian percussionist Naná Vasconcelos as being responsible for the rise of the bland “world music” genre in the early 1980s. Omnivorous in their musical appetites, CoDoNa (for each player’s first two letters) imagined a Pangaea where Indian, Moroccan, African, Brazilian, Scandinavian, and American jazz could all cohabitate, where the well-known folkloric sounds of each place might become fresh and new again. How else to hear the sitar plucked as a lead melodic instrument, to have the ever-curious Cherry put his lips to any horn, reed, or shell and find a joyous sound within it, to hear Naná’s ever-present berimbau land on any foreign musical terrain and instantly sound native?