Don Cherry, Naná Vasconcelos, Collin Walcott

The Codona Trilogy brings together the three albums recorded for ECM by Codona, the trio of Collin Walcott, Don Cherry and Naná Vasconcelos. Between 1978 and 1982 they made an improvised music that drew on India, Brazil, Africa and the jazz of Ornette Coleman at once, years before “world music” became a shop-rack heading. The name joins the first two letters of each player's first name.

Walcott called the group together in 1978. He played sitar, tabla, hammered dulcimer, sanza and timpani; Cherry brought his trumpet with flutes, the doussn'gouni, organ and melodica; Vasconcelos played berimbau, cuíca, talking drum and percussion. All three sang. Every session took place at Tonstudio Bauer in Ludwigsburg with engineer Martin Wieland and producer Manfred Eicher: Codona in September 1978, Codona 2 in May 1980 and Codona 3 in September 1982.

The first album opens with Like That of Sky, eleven minutes in which a gong, sitar drones and tabla support Cherry's trumpet and the voices. Its Colemanwonder runs Coleman's Race Face and Sortie into Stevie Wonder's Sir Duke, a nod to Cherry's years with Coleman. Codona 2 includes Coleman's Drip-Dry and Cherry's Malinye, where melodica and timpani meet whispered and wailing voices over a sanza. Codona 3 starts from Goshakabuchi, a traditional Japanese piece arranged by Walcott for trumpet and hammered dulcimer, and also holds Trayra Boia, a wash of spoken words by Vasconcelos and Denise Milan.

The 3-CD set came with a booklet and liner notes by Steve Lake. In Jazzwise Ken Hunt wrote that “its astonishing openness conjures torrents and tumbles and millraces of visual images”, and praised the humour that runs through it. Ray Comiskey in The Irish Times (2009) found the later albums uneven, but judged the three records “unique in their marriage of jazz and ethnic music from all over the world”. Walcott's death in 1984 meant there would be no fourth album.

This is the 3-CD box in ECM's Old & New Masters series, which gathers earlier albums of an artist or group in one set with new notes and photographs. It is catalogued ECM 2033-35 and was released on 14 November 2008 by ECM Records.