Donald Eugene Cherry was born November 18, 1936, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. His father, who was African-American, played trumpet and owned the Cherry Blossom Club, which hosted Charlie Christian and Fletcher Henderson; his mother, who had Choctaw ancestry, and his grandmother both played piano. The family moved to Watts, Los Angeles, in 1940, where his father tended bar at the Plantation Club on Central Avenue, a hub of the city's jazz scene. Cherry attended Fremont High School but was transferred to a reform school after skipping classes to play in a rival school's swing band; there he met drummer Billy Higgins, who would become a lifelong collaborator. By the early 1950s he was working the Los Angeles scene, informally mentored in jam sessions by trumpeter Clifford Brown, touring with saxophonist James Clay, and serving as pianist in trumpeter Art Farmer's group. Beginning in late 1958 he joined a quintet led by alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman that also featured pianist Walter Norris, documented on Something Else!!!! (Contemporary, 1958) and Tomorrow Is the Question! (1959).

Cherry became a permanent fixture of Coleman's quartet once it dropped the piano, playing what would become his signature instrument, the pocket trumpet, alongside bassist Charlie Haden and Higgins on The Shape of Jazz to Come (Atlantic, recorded May 22, 1959) and Change of the Century (Atlantic, 1959-60), then with bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Ed Blackwell on This Is Our Music (1960). In December 1960 he took part in Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation, Coleman's double-quartet recording pairing Cherry, Haden, Higgins, and Coleman with a second quartet of Eric Dolphy, Freddie Hubbard, Scott LaFaro, and Blackwell, an album whose title gave the movement its name. The following year Cherry stepped outside the Coleman axis to record Evidence (New Jazz, recorded November 1, 1961) with soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy, Higgins, and bassist Carl Brown, an all-Thelonious Monk and Ellington/Strayhorn repertoire session that showed Cherry could work as fluently inside Monk's tunes as inside Coleman's.

Through the first half of the 1960s Cherry moved fluidly among the emerging New York avant-garde. He co-led The Avant-Garde with John Coltrane (recorded 1960, released on Atlantic in 1966), toured and recorded with Sonny Rollins on Our Man in Jazz (RCA Victor, 1962), and co-founded the New York Contemporary Five with saxophonists Archie Shepp and John Tchicai, a group that recorded for the Fontana and Sonet labels during a 1963 European tour. He also worked and recorded with Albert Ayler, including the session that became Ghosts (Debut, 1964). As he later recalled, the scene that took shape around these musicians in New York in the early 1960s pulled in a new generation of players; drummer Rashied Ali, newly arrived from Philadelphia, backed Cherry, Ayler, Shepp, and saxophonist Pharoah Sanders as he established himself in that circle before his own association with Coltrane began in 1965.

Cherry made his recorded debut as a leader with Complete Communion (Blue Note, recorded December 24, 1965, released May 1966), a quartet date built as two continuous, multi-part suites, with tenor saxophonist Gato Barbieri (whom Cherry had discovered while living in Rome), bassist Henry Grimes, and Blackwell on drums. He expanded the group to a septet for Symphony for Improvisers (Blue Note, recorded September 19, 1966, released August 1967), adding vibraphonist Karl Berger, bassist Jean-Francois Jenny-Clark, and tenor saxophonist Sanders to the same continuous-suite format. Where Is Brooklyn? (Blue Note, recorded November 11, 1966, released 1969) returned to a quartet with Sanders, Grimes, and Blackwell and was his last album for the label.

By the late 1960s Cherry was working increasingly outside conventional jazz instrumentation and increasingly in Europe. Eternal Rhythm (MPS, 1969) documented a large ensemble organized for the November 1968 Berlin Jazz Festival that incorporated Indonesian gamelan instruments borrowed from the Indonesian embassy in Bonn, with Cherry himself playing cornet, gamelan, several flutes, bells, and voice. That same period produced "Mu" First Part and "Mu" Second Part (BYG Actuel, recorded August 22, 1969, in Paris), a stripped-down duo session with Blackwell. Cherry settled in Tagarp, in southern Sweden, with his wife, textile designer and visual artist Moki Cherry, converting an old schoolhouse into a home and performance space where the two developed "Organic Music Society," a communal, workshop-based practice blending jazz with folk and devotional musics from around the world; the album of the same name (Caprice, released October 1973) combined a 1972 studio session with documentary field recordings. He also led the separate, full-length Relativity Suite (JCOA, recorded February 14, 1973, at Blue Rock Studio in New York) with the Jazz Composer's Orchestra, produced trumpet and voice for Allen Ginsberg's Songs of Innocence and Experience (MGM, 1970), recorded Actions (Philips, 1971) with classical composer Krzysztof Penderecki, and appeared on Carla Bley's Escalator Over the Hill (JCOA, 1971).

Cherry spent the rest of his career deepening this world-jazz fusion while periodically returning to his Coleman-era circle. Brown Rice (recorded 1975, released in Italy on EMI in 1975 and in the US on A&M/Horizon in 1977) reunited him with Haden and Higgins alongside saxophonist Frank Lowe, fusing Indian, African, and Arabic modes with electrified, Miles Davis-indebted jazz-rock. From 1978 to 1982 he was a third of Codona, a trio with multi-instrumentalist Collin Walcott and percussionist Nana Vasconcelos that made three self-titled albums for ECM; he was also a founding member of Old and New Dreams, a quartet of Coleman alumni with saxophonist Dewey Redman, Haden, and Blackwell, whose Old and New Dreams (Black Saint, recorded October 1976), a second self-titled album (ECM, recorded August 1979), Playing (ECM, live recording, June 1980), and A Tribute to Blackwell (Black Saint, live recording from the November 1987 Ed Blackwell Festival benefit in Atlanta, held after Blackwell's kidney illness) spanned more than a decade. He also recorded the duo albums Music/Sangam (Europa, recorded June 1978) with Indian tabla master Ustad Latif Ahmed Khan and El Corazon (ECM, 1982) with Blackwell, and later Home Boy (Sister Out) (Barclay, 1985), a reggae- and funk-inflected Paris session; Art Deco (A&M, recorded August 1988 at Van Gelder Studio) reunited the Shape of Jazz to Come rhythm section of Haden and Higgins with saxophonist James Clay; and Multikulti (A&M, recorded 1988-90, released September 1990) and Dona Nostra (ECM, recorded March 1993 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo, with Swedish saxophonist Lennart Aberg, pianist Bobo Stenson, and Turkish percussionist Okay Temiz, released March 1994) closed out his recording career. He was stepfather to singer Neneh Cherry and father to musicians David Ornette Cherry, Eagle-Eye Cherry, and Jan and Christian "Ricky" Cherry. Don Cherry passed away on October 19, 1995, in Malaga, Spain, of liver cancer, at age 58; he was inducted into the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame in 2011.

Cherry is best known for two connected things: co-inventing, alongside John Coltrane's bandmates and Ornette Coleman, the harmonically open, pulse-driven language of free jazz in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and then spending the following three decades pulling jazz outward into what would later be called world music or world-fusion, years before "world music" was a marketing category. His playing, most often on a compact pocket trumpet rather than a standard-length horn, favored a vocal, keening tone and short, darting phrases over Coleman's harmolodic freedom from fixed chord changes; critics and historians treat his work in the Coleman quartet, alongside Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins, as equal in historical weight to Coleman's own contribution. From the mid-1960s on, first through his Blue Note leader dates with Gato Barbieri and Pharoah Sanders and then, after his move to Sweden, through the Organic Music Society and groups like Codona, he built a genuinely cross-cultural practice, incorporating Indonesian gamelan, Indian raga and tabla, West African stringed instruments like the doussn'gouni, and Turkish and North African modes directly into jazz performance rather than merely quoting them. That combination, restless improviser and border-crossing bandleader, made him a direct influence on later generations of jazz musicians pursuing non-Western material, and AllMusic's Chris Kelsey has called him "one of the most influential jazz musicians of the late 20th century."