Wewantsounds issues the first official release of a legendary 1977 performance, capturing Don Cherry, Collin Walcott and Leon Thomas in the only documented meeting of the three. Recorded live on March 5th, 1977, at Pease Auditorium in Ypsilanti, Michigan, the set has circulated for decades among a small number of Cherry fans. The full concert now arrives, licensed by the Don Cherry Estate and producer James Quinlan, with Moki Cherry artwork and new liner notes by Jason Weiss.

Cherry's influence has grown steadily over the years, as new generations of listeners continue to uncover the breadth of his global musical vision. Sunrise catches him in a particularly fertile late-1970s stretch, the years when the American trumpeter folded Eastern spiritual concepts and African traditions into the philosophy he called Organic Music. The timing matters: the concert took place barely a month after Cherry took part in the recording of Collin Walcott's ECM album Grazing Dreams. He moves through the evening the way he moved through the world - trumpet, then the doussn'gouni, the hunter's harp of Mali, then bamboo flutes, percussion, voice. Walcott's sitar and tabla run underneath, and Leon Thomas enters with his unmistakable yodel. For part of the night the rest of Oregon steps in - Ralph Towner, Paul McCandless, Glen Moore - and the music thickens without hardening. It circles rather than builds. The line runs straight from here to Codona, and Sunrise stands as its clearest forerunner: three musicians already dissolving borders in real time, before anyone had a name for what they were doing. The new remastering is close and unguarded, the sound of a room in 1977 rather than a document about it. The release also works as a homage to Don and Moki Cherry's creative partnership, the front cover reproducing Moki's 1975 Mandala tapestry.