Introduction
Ava Cherry, (born 1953) is an American model and disco/soul/rock singer. In the years 1974-1978, she was a backing singer for British singer David Bowie, along with Robin Clark and Luther Vandross.
She is also often called Black Barbarella.
Early life
Ava Cherry was born in 1953 in the Woodlawn neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois. Her father was a trumpeter player and worked for the post office. Her mother worked for Playboy magazine in the administration department.
Career
Ava Cherry started her career as a model in the early 1970s. Once she was invited to a party at the Playboy mansion and was introduced to Hugh Hefner, who asked her to pose for his magazine. She agreed and modeled for Playboy briefly. She was a Playboy bunny in 1971.
In 1972, Cherry was living in New York and working at a nightclub called Genesis. At the time, British rock star David Bowie was touring America and set to perform at Radio City Music Hall in New York. While in New York, Bowie was introduced to Cherry by her manager at Genesis. Bowie asked her, "Listen, I've got this tour I'm going to do in Japan. Would you be interested in going?", to which she said, "Yeah, I am." And thus began their professional and personal collaboration. Also at the party that night were many acclaimed musicians such as Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight, and Stevie Wonder.
Cherry toured with Bowie in Europe and Japan and relocated to London, where she lived in an apartment on Oakley Street. The two began dating and Cherry began performing backing vocals for him. From 1974 to 1978, she, and Robin Clark and Luther Vandross, were his backing singers for most of his tours and studio recordings.
Dating Bowie also brought Cherry in his inner circle of people and she got to hang out with his many of his famous friends including John Lennon, Andy Warhol, Mick Jagger, and his wife Bianca Jagger. Cherry also got a mention in a Mick Jagger's biography Mick: The Wild Life and Mad Genius of Jagger by Christopher Andersen.
On Bowie's suggestion, Cherry formed a soul vocal trio Ava Cherry & The Astronettes, with her friend Jason Guess and Geoffrey McCormack (a close friend of Bowie). The trio was accompanied by Aynsley Dunbar (drums), Herbie Flowers(bass), Mike Garson (keyboards), Mark Pritchard (guitar), Luis Ramirez, and Bowie himself of the saxophone. The group recorded, in particular, new songs written and arranged by Bowie, constituting a kind of testbed for their future album Young Americans. Due to the management complications, the album wasn't released for two decades until 1995, when it was issued in May as People From Bad Homes (reissued in 2009 as The Astronettes Sessions). The album contains 12 tracks, including "Seven Days" (composed by Annette Peacock), "Spirit in the Night" (composed by Bruce Springsteen), "Highway Blues" (composed by Roy Harper), and "How Could I Be Such a Fool?" (composed by Frank Zappa).
When Bowie and Cherry were seeing each other, Bowie was listening to a lot of American music — like Aretha Franklin and Marvin Gaye and growing more interested in the sound of soul music. Cherry brought him to watch a performance by Carlos Alomar at the Apollo theater in New York. That's when they began to form the band that would play on Young Americans(1975). Alomar worked with Bowie until the early 2000s and played on more Bowie albums than any other musician other than pianist Mike Garson.
Cherry and Bowie broke up shortly after the release of the album Young Americans in March 1975. Though, they remained friends for years and continued to work together.
After her breakup with Bowie, Cherry returned home to Chicago where a friend introduced her to Curtis Mayfield, who owned Curtom/RSO Records. In 1980, with Custom/RSO records, she released her first solo work Ripe!!! — a disco and soul album, without any hard rock songs she had written. The album failed to impress the listeners and Cherry returned to work with Bowie in London. In 1982, she released Streetcar Named Desire, a 10-track funk/soul album with Capitol Records, which also failed to make a mark. Her third album from 1987, Picture Me, also with Capitol records, received little success. A common belief is that her good albums failed because the record label packaged Cherry as a disco artist while the disco was on a decline.
In the following years, she worked as a backing singer for Luther Vandross with Lisa Fischer and Kevin Owens.
Towards the end of 2019, Cherry signed with Mymy Madyy Pepper Gomez's Chicago/Miami-based record label Wake Up! Music and released on January 3, 2020, her first single, "Let's Dance," a remake of the David Bowie classic. In March 2020, she released her second single "Testify Love".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzPKvfOFWEc
Cherry is slated to release a full album with Wake Up! Music in 2021.
Media
In 1985, Cherry was featured in David Winters' Girls of Rock & Roll, along with Celena Allen, Kimberly McArthur, Cheryl Rixon, and many others. She performed the song "Love To Be Touched".
In 2013, Cherry was seen in a documentary dedicated to backing vocalists — Twenty Feet from Stardom. It was written and directed by Morgan Neville and features, besides Cherry, Lou Adler, Patti Austin, Merry Clayton, Sheryl Crow, Charlotte Crossley, Darlene Love, and many others.
Also in 2013, she was featured in Francis Whately's David Bowie: Five Years — a documentary covering five of the most important years of David Bowie's career. The documentary also featured Bowie's keyboardist Rick Wakeman, Bowie's guitarist Mick Ronson, culture critic Nelson George, social critic Camille Paglia, and Bowie's ex-wife Angie Bowie among others.
In 2017, she was seen in the sequel documentary David Bowie: The Last Five Years, also by Francis Whately, which featured Bowie's guitarist Earl Slick, guitarist Gail Ann Dorsey, Bowie's guitarist Gerry Leonard, and Bowie's guitarist David Tornamong others.
Cherry also appeared as "Ava" in a 1996 short film titled The Beatnicks, alongside Andrea Marcovicci, Patrick Bauchau, and Robert Kotecki.