This double CD, featuring new liner notes by journalist John Masouri, includes Orient, a record Cherry made with two different trios in the early 1970s. That alone would make for a glorious release. The real highlight, however, is Mu, the album Cherry recorded with Ed Blackwell in 1969. The obvious point of comparison is Interstellar Space, recorded by Coltrane and Rashied Ali two years earlier, although not released until 1974. Mu shares that album’s free jazz spirit, Cherry and Blackwell drawing on their shared background with Ornette Coleman. But Cherry had already embarked on his globetrotting quest to absorb as much music as humanly possible, and, when he plays piano, there are also nods to South Africa’s Abdullah Ibrahim/Dollar Brand; elsewhere he plays a bamboo flute picked up in Morocco. The track titles – ‘Sun Of The East’, ‘The Mysticism Of My Sound’, ‘Bamboo Night’ – reinforce his planetary perspective. Jazz remained his filter, but Cherry was working towards a music he called ‘primal’ or ‘organic’ or simply ‘human’. Transformative and even transcendent, this is world music before the term existed, and its spirit continues to blaze almost half a century on.