Don Cherry

Featuring: Bitter Funeral Beer Band

2019 small repress. First of all, Bengt Berger -- a pioneer of the Swedish underground of the '70s and historical member of bands such as Archimedes Badkar and Arbete Och Fritid -- is a versatile drummer-percussionist and well-educated ethnomusicologist with several research sojourns in India and Ghana. Deeply influenced by Hindustani, Carnatic, and West Africa music, he founded the Bitter Funeral Beer Band in 1980, an ensemble of 12 elements, basing his ideas on the traditional funeral music of the people of LoBirifor, in the northern region of Ghana. The sound material reinterprets the spirit of the funeral ritual, when the dance and its songs become a moment of catharsis, releasing a sense of joy in the trance for the liberation from pain. The marriage between this Afro-polyrhythmic roots, with the spiritual jazz of the eternal Don Cherry, and the Ondian sarod of K. Sridhar, it is in the direction to a pan-internationalism of profound spirituality, which blends different geographical traditions in a single contemplative gaze. It is the convergence towards a music without boundaries, where every instrumental voice shines and is well fermented and integrated.