Poland

When I met Don Cherry in 1974 and he invited me to come and live with him in Tågarp in Sweden, he was about to go to a jazz conference in Poland with his family and he wanted me to join them.
To visit Poland was like time travel, going back 40 years to when I was ten years old. The countryside, which consisted of rolling hills very similar to the Danish landscape, was hardly touched by technology. The main road, two lanes with no painted lines and only a car or two passing every hour, was winding through small villages where women with kerchiefs chased the geese off the road. The grocery stores did not have an abundance of stuff, but what they had was old fashioned quality, like homemade.

At the jazz conference Don suggested to the other teachers that they all take time off to get together and rehearse a piece to perform at the end. That set Don in his element as composer, arranger and soloist; he knew how to unify and inspire and the show was a great success.

Because my participation had been decided at the last moment, I had only the three days visa that you could get when entering Poland. People seemed nervous about my situation, but there was no place to apply for an extension before the conference was over and we came to Warsaw.
When I presented the passport with the expired visa, the immigration officer was obviously perplexed; it had apparently never happened before that someone flouted the rules. Should he put me in jail or should he ignore the misstep? I was silently repeating the mantra of the powerful Guru Rimpoche for protection while he nervously leafed through the passport waiting for a solution to the problem. It worked! With sudden determination the officer stamped my passport and gave it back with a smile.
We went to celebrate at a restaurant and in our elation we didn’t notice the time pass until an hour had gone by and we still hadn’t been served. It could only be a case of racism, something we were unaccustomed to in Sweden and Denmark. In Sweden, driving once with Don, we were stopped and all Don had was an expired California driver’s license, but the cop was so thrilled by the meeting that Don could have shown him any old paper.