Cooper-Moore

This page collects a few articles 50 Miles of Elbow Room has published on Cooper-Moore (born Gene Y. Ashton on August 31, 1946), a remarkable musician, improvisor, composer, instrument builder/designer, educator, activist, storyteller, & more. Last updated October 12, 2024.

Cooper-Moore & his ashimba, NYC, December 13, 2003. Photo by Clare O'Dea.

from the 2017 Vision Festival program:

"I believe it is my work to express in the Music the pain of loss and injustice, and to give expression to the victory of outlasting our losses and to our facing down adversity. And in the Music I feel it a duty to remember the struggle and the overcoming, and to express faith, forbearance, and hope in a better world."- Cooper-Moore

Cooper-Moore's life story, which can sometimes come across like a tall tale from the folk tradition that he often references, is uncommonly full of creativity and ingenuity. As a child growing up in segregated Virginia, the elders in his town recognized his facility with music and recruited him to be the pianist in their community, to perform at church events, plays, and other functions. This formative role, where music was both a service and a pleasure, helped to shape much of what was to come for him.

As a young man, he was exposed to jazz via records and magazines and was inspired to pursue that direction. A bit later he got to experience the music live and recalls “going to the mountaintop" when hearing John Coltrane and others who played music at the highest level. At around the same time, he also relished the excitement of going to nightclubs where people would carouse and carry on. His music embraces both of these worlds, simultaneously intellectual / spiritual and earthy, expressed with power, energy, beauty, humor, brave daring, and a big heart. 

Music and art have also been a means for personal reinvention: a new name, new instruments of his own design and creation, new experiences, new relationships. He has performed for all levels of society: from the usual concert venues and clubs to the "high art" world, dance, theater, schools, storefront churches, parks, subway stations...anywhere there is an opportunity to connect with people. In particular, he uses music and his instruments to teach life lessons to children in underserved areas throughout the United States and beyond.

As one who wants to contribute to a better world, he is unafraid to prompt and provoke, to add tension and fire. He is restlessly creative and seeks freshness, which he often finds in mentoring and collaborating with younger musicians. He emphasizes rigor and high standards, leading by example and approaching every performance as a chance for a mutual peak experience with his audience.

Cooper-Moore has said that he was inspired to be a musician in order to serve people and to "be one of the cats." That has been his path and our reward. It is wonderful that Arts for Art and the community honor him now, in recognition of his substantial past achievements, with gratitude for his crucial contributions, and in support of what is to come. -Adam Lore

from 50 Miles of Elbow Room issue #1:

A version of this piece was originally published in 50 Miles of Elbow Room issue #1 in 2000. The text, collected & arranged by Adam Lore, is drawn from electronic & in-person conversations that took place between October 1998 & March 1999. All photos by Clare O'Dea unless noted.

Cooper-Moore, then Gene Ashton, approx. 8 years old; photographer unknown

I was born into segregated Virginia to an intact African-American family in 1946, one year after the ending of WWII. My grandfather had built a house for my [parents] while my father was in the war. I was born in that house. We had a piano which had been owned by my grandmother next door. When she died, we inherited it. I can remember as a toddler being taken care of by my teenage sister, being held on her lap as she practiced. It seemed as though everyone could play "The Boogie Woogie" (on the black keys) or "Chop Sticks" or "Heart and Soul." I started studying when I was 8 years old with the woman who taught first grade at the local elementary school. I was a competent but not very good player. The older I became the more interest I developed in learning music and in learning how to play.

My 12th birthday was also the anniversary of my parents' marriage. They decided to have a party, a big one. Family and friends were invited. They came from everywhere. They camped out on the lawn, on the front and back porches, and at the houses of neighbors and friends. This was one of the most important occasions of my life. I was to be the DJ [and] choose the music to be played for the party, [which] lasted for three days and nights. Food, drink, music, and dance for three days straight. We had borrowed a huge stereo system from a cousin who had bought it when he had been in the Navy. Not just a stereo, but hi-fidelity stereo sound. This was a new thing. Before this I'd only heard recorded music on AM radio, small record players, and the old crank RCA Victrolas. This was really something, and 90% of the LPs were jazz. For those three days I slept in the chair next to the stereo. The music that made the most impression on me was Ahmad Jamal playing "Poinciana" and the flip side, But Not for Me." Then there was the Charlie Mingus band that completely blew me away. Something changed in me. I knew there was another world out there, and I wanted to be a part of it. Most of the recordings had been brought down by relatives from New York City. [That] became my dream place, the place where I was to go to hear the music, to be around the people that played it, and to be who they were.

My older sister married a man from Hartford, Connecticut, who played piano and was a lover of the music. He would at times send bundles in the mail containing old Down Beat and Metronome (now defunct) magazines. It is difficult to describe how important these bundles were. I was living in the rural south, [with] no place to buy recordings, no place to buy magazines, and libraries were off limits to us. Now I had stacks of old magazines with pictures of all the cats. I didn't have their recordings, but I was learning the history, [such as] who played with whom, when, [and] pictures of musicians playing their instruments.

In high school I was given a fake-book by the music teacher, Thomas Delaine. He was a real hipster, a trumpet player who had a goatee and wore a beret. I very much idolized him. He was the first live-in-the- flesh jazz player I had ever met. In the fakebook were standards and jazz tunes like "Round Midnight," "Oleo," Well You Needn't," and "Jordu." It took me years before I could make sense of these tunes. Later on I'd hear them on records but when I would go to play them I just couldn't make them work at all. Learning to play was hard. It was slow. I thought I'd never be able to play fast. It was a long time before I was able to hear what others were playing and was able to copy it. Playing other people's licks, phrases, and solos has not been a technique that has worked for me. I never heard about or was taught anything about the FEELING in the music until I got to college. Feeling, for me, now, is what it's all about.

From about 13 to 19 years old I went into an intensive listening period. Not just jazz but anything at all, especially if the music had a keyboard in it. Then in 1962 I heard Ornette Coleman with Don Cherry on This is Our Music. There was no going back after that. The revolution in the music hit. People were choosing sides, and I, too, chose.

There was nowhere in town to buy the music. I would skip school [and] catch a Greyhound bus into Washington, DC. It was a 40-mile trip into the city. I'd go to the Howard Theatre for their noontime show. After the show I'd go and buy records. This was real exciting stuff. I was getting to hear the music, live. My ears were changing.

When I was 15 my mother died. I went to Hartford for a visit with my sister's family. Her husband became my teacher. He had hundreds of recordings: all that Monk had ever recorded, Bud Powell, Elmo Hope, Phineas Newborn, Jr., Art Tatum, Father Hines. But what was most important was being able to sit or stand near him while he played. And he would play a lot - I mean for hours and hours. And he wrote tunes. I had never met anyone who wrote their own music. I had made some small attempts but he had books of his own music. This was new and exciting. I wanted to do this.

When I was in 11th grade the guidance counselor asked if I would like to work after school. I went to work in the library in April 1963. Finally they allowed black people into libraries. I was probably the first black man in the public library. I ended up being there every day. I would read [and] go through all the books. They had a piano in the library and they got it tuned for me, so there was a place I could practice.

Then a friend of mine and I moved to an all-white school and integrated it. I got a call from this man who said, "I've heard about you from the librarians and I'd like to meet you." He came to the school in his Mercedes; [a] tall distinguished white guy, and took me to his house. He loved music. He wanted to be a concert pianist but he was a banker. He had a big Steinway piano. We sat there and we played Schubert duets, and it was love. He was very important. Every Saturday he'd pick me up and we'd listen to Metropolitan opera. Sometimes we'd go to the church and play pipe organ. Then he took me around the country visiting colleges and universities. He gave me support for m years straight and then intermittently for m more years if I had needs. I asked my friend why he did this, and he said, "Because I want you to be free," and I think that to some degree that happened.

In traditional European culture, artists are taken care of. Bach, Brahms, Schubert, Handel, Wagner—they were taken care of. [In present-day America] Jesse Helms won't let the National Endowment take care of them. America says, "No, we're not going to take care of you."

COLLEGE, CITY LIFE, & FIRST BANDS

I went to the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC and musically it was a mistake to have gone there. I switched my instrument from piano to flute. My teacher was an old racist white man who would shout, "Boy, you are a pie-ana player. You don't belong here." I knew after my first year at CU that some other place was for me.

But being in a city was what was important. After classes I was across town hanging out in bars with the musicians who didn't have a [gig] that night until the working cats came in and started playing. Then we hopped from club to club, seeing who was playing. This was during the time I first heard Coltrane and Sun Ra, during the time of ESP records. Those ESP recordings never lasted a day in the record bins. There it was. There was the music. We had all been following the growth of Trane, but here were musicians who were there already: Bill Dixon, Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor, Burton Greene, Albert Ayler, the whole crew. This was [when] I heard Trane live, [both] the quartet and the quintet. The quartet, live, played the most beautiful music I had heard. That band convinced me that Power Music was for me. A year later or so I heard the quintet. Such a difference: pushing, searching, unpredictable. [But] even though I had made the choice to follow the way of the free players, I was not yet playing that way. Miles Davis was a powerful influence in the mid-'60s and I was somewhat under his spell.

In 1967 I migrated to Boston to attend the Berklee School of Music. I was newly married. My wife was pregnant. I applied there thinking it would be a better environment than CU. The Berklee info said I'd be studying with the first flautist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Well, when I met my teacher it was not Mr. Kincaid of the BSO but Nick Cazzazi, who had played saxophone in the Stan Kenton band and doubled on flute. Nick was deaf in one ear and hard of hearing in the other. When we played duets, his mistakes were the reason for our having to stop. I got A's in all my subjects but flute. I flunked it [when] I refused to take the final in protest. I quit school after the first semester. I thought I'd been scammed, duped, cheated by the place. I learned nothing about music there, but I met some very interesting people at the school and in Boston.

I met a man by the name of Cleve Pozar. Cleve had been known on the NY scene as Robert Pozar. I knew of his LP on Savoy called Good Golly Miss Nancy, and thought it was very new, fresh, and hip. Michael Sol had done some electronic tape manipulations on it and I think Jimmy Garrison was on bass along with others. Cleve was the first person I ever saw record his own [album]. He did it solo, recording tracks on quarter inch and bouncing the tracks back and forth to other machines. Cleve was a percussionist but also used electronics. He was a builder of instruments and things. His philosophy was that with the tools and a good library he could do anything any other man could do. I keep that with me every day. Cleve was a total inspiration, truly gifted, the product of a self-reliant, rural upbringing.

Boston Globe, January 18, 1973

I joined an R&B band called The Sounds 4+4 and we worked seven nights a week. I WAS A MUSICIAN. The usual followed: drinking, late nights, reefer, speed, LSD. During this time I took David Ware into a studio and we did a duo, he on tenor and me on Wurlitzer electric piano. We just turned a tape on and recorded. That was the first time we were ever in the studio. The tape was used for an Opportunity Industrialization Centers orientation film (a job-training program). David and I had met at Berklee but we never played together while we were classmates, only after I had left.

Then I played flute in a band called the Afro Jazz Messengers, [which was] led by Jim Riley (who is now known as Jumma Santos). That band morphed into another one called The Rosewater Foundation. In that band I played the Hammond organ and wrote all but two of the tunes. Jumma played congas and the tunes were written around that sound. The band was trumpet, alto, organ, drums, and congas. After many rehearsals we finally got a gig. The afternoon of the first job Jumma came to us and said that he couldn't play it because he was going with Miles. We did it anyway. All went well. A couple months later he returned and I told him about David Ware and how I thought he would add a lot to the band.

In steps Ware. I was even happier than before, writing for three horns, all good players. The problem with my role in this band was being musical director of sorts and playing the organ. I'd only had it for two years, and it was new to me. I never soloed on the organ in this band. [There were] two keyboards up top and one that I had to play the bass lines on with my feet.

APOGEE, NYC, 501 CANAL

The Rosewater Foundation was over. I took off three months from doing any work other than composing. This was a time of deep reflection, introspection, and a bringing together of what I knew. I didn't drink or do any drugs during that time, I just wrote. Ware had moved back to Jersey, and I told him to come back to Boston to live with us and form our own band. We needed a drummer. [Ware] suggested Marc Edwards. Marc couldn't really play a drum set yet but he was a drummer. He'd done the marching thing in NYC and had a good sense of technique, was focused and a hard worker.

Apogee's Purpose, probably written by David S. Ware, courtesy of Chris Amberger, with additional thanks to Ben Young

I went to Webster's Dictionary to find a name for the new band. I got no further than the A's: Apogee. We practiced, rehearsed, practiced, rehearsed, obsessed about our place in the history of the music, practiced, rehearsed, obsessed. We created our own concerts. Anywhere that would have us we played. No one wrote for this band. We just started playing and stopped when we stopped. We never talked about what we were playing. Apogee was like a marriage. I have never had relation-ships with other musicians like [I had] with David and Marc. I loved these people. What we did was very powerful for us. Maybe others didn't understand it, but for the trio it filled a great need and a bridge to another place. Later we added a bass player, Chris Amberger, who gave the name "tremble time" to the hyperness in our music.

[In early 1973] the quartet was asked by Sonny Rollins to open up for him at the Village Vanguard. The night at the Vanguard was a highly charged one. The club was filled. We knew that most of those in the audience had not come to hear us but many had and some others would be receptive [because] we had the endorsement of the Master. We mounted the stage as if it were a spacecraft and blasted off. Musicians in Sonny's band and other musician friends of ours were sitting in seats on the side in back of the stage. I could see them laughing and rocking back and forth. "Yeah," I thought, "They're digging it." I don't know how long we had been playing, but the stage lights began flashing on and off. Max (the owner of the Vanguard) was having a fit and wanted us off. He didn't like the kind of music we played and made a point of not hiring musicians who played it. We played until the music stopped. Then something amazing happened. Sonny's band got on stage and they were so filled with the energy that Sonny could barely control them. They wanted to go, go, go. Poor Max.

Village Voice ad for Apogee concerts at Studio Rivbea, NYC, 1973; courtesy the research of Rick Lopez

Not long after that we all moved to NYC. I found a building on Canal Street. 501 Canal had five floors and the rent was $550 a month. The first floor became the rehearsal/performance space. David Ware and Alan Braufman lived together on the second floor. My family took the third. Chris Amberger took the fourth. The fifth was condemned but was used by my wife as a pottery studio, for storage, and for musicians who needed a place to stay. There was music all the time, people practicing, rehearsals, performances, jam sessions, recordings, at all times of the day. Very memorable was waking up every morning to Trane being played on the stereo upstairs or Ware or Braufman practicing down-stairs. I often thought, "This must be Heaven." Here we were, fulfill-ing the dream. Finally we had arrived, an instant community. My vision was to use the place to break onto the scene by creating our own scene. Looking back on it all, I see that for me it was a strategy based on insecurity. None of it went the way that I thought it would. People went their own ways.

flier for a 1973 concert at 501 Canal, courtesy of Chris Amberger, with additional thanks to Ben Young

mention of concerts at 501 Canal in Down Beat, 1974

Apogee started in 1970 and ended when we recorded Birth of a Being in 1977. I raised the money to make the recording, $1,500 or so. David Ware took it to Hat Hut and sold it for $500 under his name, not the name of the band. The explanation was that the owner of the company wanted it that way. This, of course, upset me [because] to me Apogee was a collective.

BACK TO VIRGINIA + INSTRUMENT BUILDING

In early 1975 I caused a fire at 501 Canal, and this made me realize that I had to change my habits. So I went back to Virginia, where my father was, took my family there and raised them.

How do you think your time in a rural area impacted upon you?

That's very important. It's something I think about all the time. When I was in Virginia, I was starved for input, so my imagination was running wild all the time. I was starved for artists; I was starved for art. Of course, you have trees and country, and all that stuff is good but that was never my need because I always had that. I grew up with that. But after I experienced New York City and Boston, my need was the experience of people. Every day in New York I meet somebody interesting. The country was a good place to develop the creation of the instruments, but in the development of the playing of the instruments it was good to be here because I got the input [from others]. The country deprived me, and because I was deprived I had to search for ways for filling me up.

Do you think growing up in the relative solitude of the country made you focus on activities that involve some kind of search? In your email you mentioned that you enjoyed astronomy and short-wave radio when you were younger.

Now it's the Web. I mean, how can we be bored, ever, with this device? I love libraries, and now I have the biggest library that's ever been in existence. I'm overwhelmed. There's so much to learn! There's so much to learn about music, instead of being stuck in the '40s, or the '50s, or the '60s, or yesterday. Why go and be stuck in that? People invest themselves in this music and they're trying to hold on, but that's not what it's about. It's about throwing off, casting off, getting lighter. It's all weight and baggage. It's a Zen thing. Throw it off!

People invest in lots of things: "I've invested in this diet!" "I've invested in this exercise regimen!" "I've invested in this kind of music!" "I've invested in you!" "I've invested in this band! It can't change!" They're all invested and try to hold on, when the thing is you've got to let go. "You're my son, my baby!" (laughs) Let go, mama!

How did you develop your instruments during this period?

I saw what I could build. I saw that I could continue to design different instruments, [and] come up with different ideas. I really had to stop and confine and limit myself because it takes much longer to learn how to play these things than it does to develop them. The first instrument I built was an ashimba, which is an 11-tone xylophone. The next instrument that I made was the only instrument I ever designed; it's called a twanger. The third instrument I made was a diddley-bow. When I first made that it was six feet long, and I had a brake cable from my VW bus as the wire. Since then I've turned it to a bass string and a pickup. Next I made a kind of zither, but it never went too far. The next instrument was the horizontal-hoe-handle harp (yes, it really is partially made from the handle of a hoe — ed). The next instrument was called a TeZe (pronounced "tayzay") which I've only performed [in public] once, when Joseph Jarman hired me to play it. It's a tension zither and it was named by one of my sons. It's a box, four strings across, it's electric, and you play it with sticks. Not hitting it like a hammer dulcimer, but always touching and fretting with different kinds of stick angles. It's a beautiful instrument, but complicated.

I have a slap pipe, which is a traditional kind of instrument. It's a seven-foot long pipe with a mic inside the bottom of it, and you play it through a big amp system. You play it at a big dance space whereby you go around and search the feedback overtones in the different spaces because speakers radiate overtones in different places. You play the instrument by moving the pipe into different spots. You have to pretty much do a dance. That's a wonderful instrument. Then the banjo. I've only made two banjos. Those are the instruments that I've really developed. The diddley-bow I didn't really develop until I [returned] here, 14 years ago.

Developed in terms of making it or playing it?

Playing everything. I would sit and practice the Bach cello suites every day. Because people would say, "Is that a real instrument?" [So] I would play the Bach cello suites and they'd leave me alone. I can play that, and play anything any bass player can play, with one string.

Cooper-Moore, East Harlem, NYC, 1999. Photo by Clare O'Dea.

I hear that you used to play in a country band?

On Sunday afternoons I played keyboard with a hillbilly band. After church we would play up in West Virginia in the back of a roadhouse for illegal gambling. The mayor would be there; the chief of police would be there! We played all the country tunes. The band was one white guy who played organ and sang, and the rest of the band was black. The first time we walked into this gambling place we were all wear-ing double-breasted black suits. We looked good. They looked at us and said, "What is this???" But then we started playing their music and their jaws just dropped. We knew the music.

After that band I played in a Dixieland swing band. I was very unhappy in both of these bands. It's not what I wanted to do. I was much more [dissatisfied] in the swing band because of the rigidity of it. We rehearsed five days a week for three months just to learn the licks off the old records.

Well, you said you never liked doing that.

What is the purpose of that? That's like Wynton [Marsalis] and them doing what they're doing, [saying] "This is Duke Ellington's music." That's not Duke Ellington's music. Duke Ellington's band and him playing was Duke Ellington's music. You're playing his compositions, but you're not playing his music. You can't ever play his music. You can't play Charlie Parker's music. You can't play Monk. Monk played Monk! That's corrupting the whole process of creative improvisation. You do this music to become a person that is defined by your sound and what you play. You hear David Ware, one sound, "It's David!" One sound, "It's Trane, I know it's Trane!" Two notes [and] I know it's Dizzy, sometimes one. You know these people from their sound. Immediately you know it's them. I have particular chords I play, I know people know it's me. Who are these guys? I don't know who any of them are! It's kind of corrupting. It's perverted.

This drummer [in the swing band], he played all of Gene Krupa's licks. He acted like Gene Krupa, shook his head like Gene Krupa. The clarinet player, he only played Benny Goodman. The guitar player played lick-for-lick Charlie Christian. They said, "We want you to play like Teddy Wilson." I said, "I can't play like Teddy Wilson! He had a hand span like that! (indicates a gigantic hand) I'd have to play with two fingers!" [They'd say] "Well, we want you to play that way because that's what's on the record." Perverted!

It was work to support my family. If I had to, I would. I worked seven nights a week and played weddings on the weekends.

Can you talk a little bit about your work with the Head Start program and how you got involved with it?

The work with Head Start was a whole other world and way of being. This was a time when most of my creative energies were not focused on composition or performance, from about 1981 to 1985. I'm considered a specialist in early childhood. I was trained to use music to teach curriculum to three, four, and five-year-olds. I spent four years developing curriculum. National Head Start was the funder of the Wolftrap Foundation, who toured me all over the country to train teachers to do what I do. I did it all up and down the East Coast and am published in it. I really liked being in classrooms with [children who are] that age, [who are in] the developmental period. I learned a whole lot about what little people can absorb and learn.

In April of 1981, I did a six-week tour of Europe with David S. Ware. The band consisted of Ware on tenor and soprano saxes, Beaver Harris on drums, Brian Smith on bass, and myself on piano. The experience was so awful that when I returned home I called a friend who helped me push my piano out of the living room, through the kitchen, off of the back porch into the yard where I then took a sledgehammer and demolished the thing. I then burned the wood, took the sledge and demolished the cast iron harp and put the pieces and the ashes in barrels to be carted away by the garbage men.

I did not play piano for two years after that. My energies were instead focused on using music to teach the things little people needed to learn about reading, math, life, and getting along. This is work that I am very proud of. It is work that is used today, along with the work of the other gifted artist who worked on the project, in classrooms all over the country. It was working in this program that I began to understand the value of art as a tool.

In Order to Survive: William Parker, Cooper-Moore, Susie Ibarra, Rob Brown, NYC, 1996. Photo by Clare O'Dea.

BACK TO NYC, NEW SOUNDS + FUTURE PLANS

I came back to New York in February 1985 because my family had busted up. I lived at a dance studio near City Hall, where we would do concerts at night. I played for ballet classes there for my rent. I played the ashimba, horizontal-hoe-handle harp, and diddley-bow on the streets and in the subways to survive. I also played at dance classes, modern and ballet, in dance schools all over the city.

My activities in theater and performance were a result of being involved in the dance world. These were the people who accepted what I was doing and could do using my instruments. You see, as hip and avant-garde and free and whatever, few of the players in what I call my musical community were able to expand beyond what is traditional instrumentation. Charles Gayle needed a bass player once to do a gig at the Knitting Factory and asked me if I knew of anyone who could do it. I said, "Yeah, me on diddley-bow." He couldn't conceive of it. David S. Ware stated the same kind of thing. [My] long-time friend Jumma Santos said to me, "Why are you messin' with those toys?" These are the "hip" people. So my answer has been to go where I've been welcomed, [which is] the dance/ theater world. [In the jazz world] William Parker and Dr. Bill Cole have been the exceptions.

William Parker is totally beyond so many people, period. Him not being seen being as the leader [of this music] makes me very angry. William is like Duke Ellington to us; he's like Mingus. Even beyond that because neither Mingus nor Duke had the compassion that he has. Not to say that they didn't have compassion, but neither of those people showed it other than in a showbiz kind of way. William's very direct [and] he gives us total freedom.

Have you ever considered putting out your own record?

I'm considering it now. I will this year. I'm waiting to get my commission for the last show I wrote and with that money I will pay people decently. First I'll record it. I have no agenda. I'm not trying to be a star. I think that's corrupting. I don't see it as being good for musicians when people who create music know that it's an investment. It's an investment that musicians are giving up. Musicians should be investing in themselves. The record I did with David Ware sells for $100 a disc now. That was an investment for Hat Hut, who paid $500 for it! So my thinking about people who own record companies is that I'm being ripped off because they know that in Jo, 15, 20 years, they've got a lot of money. Anything that William does now, or David does now, sells big time in the future.

Many musicians are hungry and feel they have to put out CDs. It's ego, it's self-fulfillment: "If I don't do that, I'm not anybody," or, "If I don't have a CD, I haven't arrived." People put out records because they want to push them-selves; they want to get more gigs. I don't have that agenda, so in a way it makes me free because I don't have to create anything that I don't want to create. I don't have to impress anybody in a certain way because I want them to sign me or hire me. I don't call people looking for work. Yesterday the Knitting Factory called me and they said, "Will you ever consider working here?" To put a band together to take into a club is going to cost me money. They're not going to pay me enough to cover my expenses, so why do I want to do it? I have a family. I can't take money out of my wife's pocket, out of the checking account, in order to pay another musician's rent. It doesn't make any sense. Why would I go downtown and be with them, when I can be with these people (my family)? (laughs)

I live in these other worlds. I don't feel desperate that I have to be a piano player or play those instruments in that world in order to make it. I've made it in my opinion. I do a lot of stuff and I enjoy it. I do pretty much what I want to do and I'm happier than I've ever been. Look at my family: these are the people I want to spend most of my time with. We have fun together. Many people are driven because of the lack of what I have. They don't have love in their life, so they go look for it somewhere else: "I'll be a star! They'll love me then!"

I'm not trying to create myself to be a star, so I can sell [records]. My agenda is to make a living, [and to] be one of the cats. That was my desire since I was 12. I feel I'm one of the cats now. I'm 52, I'm getting older, I've survived a lot of stuff. I'm relatively healthy, so I expect to be around at least another 10 or 15 years. My focus now is in the writing, and I'd like to be producing even more as a composer.

The next vocal thing that I will do is a song cycle, then after that will be an opera, where I'm not confined at all. The song cycle has been ongoing. It includes words of lyricists other than myself, such as Fred L. Price who has taken the place of Dr. Betty Shabazz over at Medgar Evers. [I've also composed music for the poems of] turn of the century African-American poets Paul Lawrence Dunbar and W.E.B. DuBois. I've just finished 10 choral works for a 200-voice choir in New Jersey for Arthur T. Wilson. I did the music for A Still Life, a play by Emily Mann, at Rutgers University.

Feathers at the Flame, which you experienced at The Kitchen, is one of many versions of that show. I became involved with it performing the music of Tiye Giraud, who at that time was its composer. Laurie Carlos who wrote the book mentioned that she had a libretto called Pagan Violins. I wanted to do it and finally convinced her last year [to let] me. We begin workshopping it in March 2000.

I've recently been asked to do the music for a Rita Dove play, which will be produced by the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis in April 2000. This is the big time in theater and I hope it comes off. I believe you to be one of the only people to have experienced both of my worlds. I've kept them pretty much separate, but now see opportunities for more integration.

The last couple times I've seen you play you've used some unconventional sound sources. With In Order to Survive you played the balloon, and last night with the Organic Trio you made noise with scotch tape. Do you have any interest in or feelings about musique concrete or found sound?

It's all found sound. Finding the parts, discovering them, piecing them together, going away, meditating on them, coming back, doing it again, go on and on. There's no end to it.

I don't look to the past. I don't listen to be-bop. I don't listen to recordings I did with anybody, unless it just came out and I want to see if it works. I've got shopping bags full of tapes. I don't want to listen to that. It's old.

1960s avant-garde jazz stuff: BORING! It's old. It's done. People need to move on, but they can't because they're invested in it. If you practice for years to play something, you can't just play something else. Want me to beat up on the piano? I can do that [I can attest to the absolute truth of this statement —ed.], but it's old. My interest is in new kinds of performances, lots of time stuff, space stuff, where I am on the floor. It's discovering.

The energy way of playing, that is the way. Fire and energy is the way, but it has to be with something different. My interest is in song and the voice; I think that is where the music has been neglected.

I don't want to lose sight of my folk roots and the music I was inspired by. And the music of my imagination, the music of the slave brass bands, who I've only seen pictures of. We're not talking about marching bands; we're talking about bands that used to keep brass instruments in the shed out back. On Sundays they'd go back there and they'd play their music on these horns. That's important music and it's lost. I only have in my imagination how free that was. Because it was free. Just like blues singers down in the Delta—sometimes they'd sing a 3-bar measure, a 5-beat phrase, stop in the middle, grunt a little bit—That's where I want it to go.

I don't find what I do as being exotic, and the lifestyle is difficult. At a basic level it comes down to a way for coping with living. Most of the artists/performers with whom I work suffer from some kind of insanity that they have been able to use and make work for them. Probably it was the same in the past. The difference now is communication. The crazies are more in touch with one another. We don't always feel so alone.

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Liner notes to C-M 7" box set:

Below are the notes to the Cooper-Moore s/t 5x7" box released by 50 Miles of Elbow Room in 2004 & subsequently reissued on CD as The Cedar Box Recordings by AUM Fidelity & 50 Miles. Box design by Fitz Gitler, C-M photos by Clare O'Dea, text by Adam Lore.

Cooper-Moore was born Gene Y. Ashton on August 31, 1946 in a small racially segregated town in the Piedmont area of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. At an early age, indications of his aptitude for music attracted notice in the community and he was recruited to learn the piano. When he was twelve years old he heard records by artists such as Charles Mingus and Ahmad Jamal and was inspired to become a jazz musician. Although he has become most recognized in the jazz world as a pianist, for the last thirty years he has also developed a unique vocabulary on instruments of his own design, construction, and occasionally invention. He has been a regular at venues from the church to the stages of concert halls and theatre productions to the classroom and out to the parks and streets of New York City.

This experience has helped to foster a particular concern with community, and the music heard here is often socially minded, informed by his past life in Virginia and his present surroundings in East Harlem. Two pieces were recorded on the Robert Moses-designed footbridge which leads to Ward’s Island, located a few blocks from Cooper-Moore’s apartment. Another session took place while perched on the island’s garbage heap. Various selections heard here were played for fishermen, the birds outside his window, and friends gone by. Among other things, Cooper-Moore is concerned with tapping into the latent potential of people and objects, as well as creating unique sounds that have the potential to both affect change and entertain. We sat down at his apartment to talk things over on October 23, 2003 and February 16, 2004.

Who was it that came to ask you to learn to play music?

The preacher, the head of the Sunday school, who was a woman, and the first grade teacher, who taught piano, showed up on a Saturday. I was eight years old. Scared the hell out of me. (laughs) Can you imagine? The woman who terrorized all of us in first grade? She was our first teacher, which meant there were 45 kids in the class, so she had to terrorize us to keep control. And then the preacher? The head of the Sunday school, I really loved her, but the preacher, I had no relationship with him. Why is he here? Other than, you know, they always wanted to baptize you.

I was eight when I started playing lessons [in] October 1954, and then [on] Easter of ’55 I was playing in the church. Right away they started teaching me how to play the music that I was going to have to play for the Easter program. I played in the Sunday school and in the church from that time on, for like nine or ten years, until I left. ... People would always call you to play for church programs. Whatever the denomination was – Methodist, Baptist, it didn’t matter – you’d play.

So what was your sense of going around to all these different kinds of places? You’re getting called on to do these things, so what was your impression of this? Was it just something fun to do?

Well, usually they’d take up collection and you might make four or five dollars, you know, or not. It wasn’t as much fun as duty, but one that you accepted. I never felt it was a hassle to dress up and go to church in the evening, [on a] school night, [and] play for the old ladies in the choir or something.

I really don’t know why they kind of chose me. It’s strange because people who knew me then, every now and then you hear from somebody or talk to them on the phone, [and] they still ask, “You still play your music?” They don’t say, “Do you still play music?” They ask, “Do you still play your music?” They all ask me that, “Are you still with your music?” I haven’t quite grasped their meaning. I have never asked that of anybody. I’ll say, “Do you play music?” They say, “Do you still have your music?” or “Are you still with your music?” (laughs) So they associated me with a relationship with music, not just something I do. That’s how I think I’m seeing how they saw [it], but that’s not how I felt. It’s what I did, [but] only one of the things I did.

Growing up in a community, what I learned is that you don’t have to like everybody. You’re not going to like everybody, but the binding force of cooperation, in that it helps everybody survive, is very powerful. You have to get along with your neighbors because, you know, when I grew up, your neighbors helped you and you helped them. When your neighbor was building a porch, you helped your neighbor. If you were digging the ditch to put in your water pipe, your neighbors helped you. In the neighborhood where I lived, neighbors helped [each other] build their houses. So even though you might not hang out with them, you talk to them and you socialize with them. But you may not like them. When I come to New York, I only hang out with people that I like, so you can lose that sense of what’s necessary in order to have community. You don’t have to like everybody that you’re communing with, but you by necessity get along with them. That’s what I learned in the country: by necessity you get along with people in order to have community, because community helps ensure your survival.

It’s the same thing in bands. I don’t like everything that [other] musicians might play all the time, but my liking or not liking it, it may be all subjective. Maybe if I don’t like it I have to open up my ears a little better to hear what these people contribute and maybe they’ll help me. Usually it does. That’s another thing about living in a community – you have to tolerate things that you may not want to tolerate.

Does it tie in to the notion that a lot of the music that you recorded here for this project and out in and around the park on Ward’s Island was somewhat related to the castoffs in society and the things that society perhaps doesn’t value?

Well, my instruments are made out of stuff, first off. I mean, the ashimba bars, somebody threw them away. They were on the corner for the trash to pick up. I just put those bars on the body I made from other scrap wood and it became the instrument. Almost all my first instruments were made from junk, made from what I found in dumpsters or on the side of the road ... or some broken furniture or something.

Ward’s Island is now the home of a sewage treatment plant. The homeless live there, [there’s] the jail for the criminally insane. And when I walked over [there] back in the summer, here in the middle of the island there was a landfill. ... Where traditionally they were taking garbage to Staten Island, now they found a place in the middle of the city, on Ward’s Island, where the park was dumping all of its waste. We’re not talking about leaves and grass and cuttings. We’re talking about stuff that was infected with chemicals or their garbage. So the ashimba piece was performed on a garbage heap and the ambience of it is that of the place where the waste was.

Cooper-Moore & his ashimba in front of the footbridge to Ward's Island, NYC, December 13, 2003. Photo by Clare O'Dea.

Emancipation

Ashimba is [a contraction of] “Ashton marimba.” When I built it, living on Canal Street, there was an artist living across the street named Lonnie Yongue, he named it. After I made it I took it to him to play for him. This was an instrument I was calling a xylophone. He says, “No, call it an ashimba.” I felt very uncomfortable about it because I’d never named anything, [but] then I said I’m going to start using the term and then other people started using the term, ashimba.

When you played the ashimba for the sunset, where was that?

After part of the West Side Highway had collapsed, before they tore it down ... it was being used as a recreation site from all the way downtown up to 42^nd Street. That’s how I learned to play the ashimba. I built that in May ’74 [and played there] through the fall. I would take it over to the river, climb up the steps to the West Side Highway, and there would be people skating or running or just sitting looking across to Jersey. Every day at sunset, if there was a sun, I would play. I did that for months and months. I would play a tune for the sun to go down and I would keep playing it until it was totally gone. And then it became a daily routine where people would come and I would play and they would all sit and we’d all watch the sun go down and I would play for the sun. That went on for months.

This ashimba piece in this recording has a segment in it which I call “Emancipation.” I was actually trying not to play it, because I always play it. ... I’ve been playing this piece since around October of ’74, a very simple version. ... The image is of an old black man in the south in slavery days. He’s been told that he’s no longer a slave ... because Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation which freed him. He’s in the field, it’s getting darker and darker, and he’s in the field cutting or picking or something, and he decides that he’s gonna escape. The whole idea is of him having these thoughts and at the end he’s going over the hill. He’s escaping, going over the hill as a free person.

Now, [on] this particular recording, [the tune] is not very clear because I wasn’t sure I was going to play it. I was really trying to stay away from it. I was playing some other things, but “Emancipation” comes in. It’s like it said, “No, you’re not going to present the ashimba, because I am the ashimba!” You know what I’m saying? “I am it. Everything that you’ve played on this instrument has come from this tune. Everything comes from this tune.” If I play the instrument, that tune gets played. Now, if some people say, “That’s boring. You just play the same old tune,” well, it’s not for me to say whether I’m going to play it or not. The instrument says, “You’re gonna play me first!” (laughs) That’s the truth! “When you were hungry on the street, I fed you. When you were depressed and no one wanted to have anything to do with you, you played ‘Emancipation’ and I played and the music happened and you weren’t depressed anymore.” And that’s the truth. ... Whether people have heard it or not or don’t want to hear it again – tough. It’s real, you know what I’m saying? You could work for years and years trying to create a tune, but for me, just creating that tune for that instrument, that’s the piece, just like an artwork.

Whenever I play the music, the image is always a servant. With the harp, it was Egypt. I was behind the veil, behind the curtain. I was playing the music for royal[ty]. The ashimba too – I was like the chief’s musician. It was always like that. Maybe it goes back to being a kid and them coming to ask me to play, having in my mind that service. Like you were saying, did I have fun, was it fun? Well, it was my duty. It’s the joy you get out of performing your duty. Do you know that sense? Not necessarily fun and great, but you’ve done your job and you’re respected. People bow to you, bow their head, they give a nod to you. The old people, you know? We’re talking about old people in their eighties and nineties, when they go “Yeah boy!” (laughs) You know? You play, “Yeah, young man! Yes! Yes! Hallelujah! Yes!” That’s heavy. That’s heavy. It’s not like playing some funk and some people dancing. These are old people who, something that you’ve done, something is struck [that’s] been around for a while, you know what I mean? If you hit on something that’s been around because it’s moved these old people, that’s deep too, when it comes to knowing, presenting, informing you of who you are, and I think that’s what we’re talking about here – becoming who you are.

Sweet Hour of Prayer

You said that the piece that you chose for the mouthbow, “Sweet Hour of Prayer,” is also about informing people about who you are.

Yes. It’s a piece in a church where I grew up in, a Baptist church, everyone would stand up and sing this song, and it’s when the church became a unity, a whole, a one. You could see many people cry. I didn’t ask but I knew it was because they were going back. Pretty much we were remembering all those people who had been there who weren’t there. And then you realize, that went back a long time – a lot of people had been in this space and sung that song. This was the time when the church became [one]. And it’s also time that the preacher would ask you to bring up some money. (laughs) You know? You were vulnerable. He understood. You sing this song and you’re vulnerable and you might dig a little deeper in your pockets. (laughs)

But “Sweet Hour of Prayer,” and in the kind of timbre that I played it...sometimes you can go into these churches and you think people aren’t singing in tune or [they are] off-key and it’s not really that. You can’t think that way. Sometimes people in church, because these are not songs that are pretty much sung out of church [or] what you hear on the radio, they’re singing it the way they heard it. So here’s the oral tradition in the very pure form, because it’s how my Aunt So-and-so sang it.

Crow Shit on the Window

You’ve mentioned that you envision the banjo for when you’re older.

Yeah. I used to think the harp was that, but the banjo is more expressive. The banjo has fewer limits expression-wise because of the three strings and because there’s no frets. The harp, you can play the harmonies and you play the notes that are there. You really can’t vary the tone of it as much. ... The banjo sings and I can be very subtle with it. And I envision myself because of the image of the old black man with the banjo, you know? (laughs)

“Crow Shit on the Window” is inspired by the crows who chase away the hawk that comes around your neighborhood?

Every morning the hawk perches in the dead trees on 104th Street. This is what I see every morning before I go to bed. It looks like a red-tail hawk. It perches up on the tree for about fifteen, twenty minutes, then the crows come, five or six of ’em come around. They just badger the hawk until the hawk leaves.

So were you watching that as you were playing, or...

No, but I was thinking about it. I was thinking about it because the red-tail hawk and the crow are my favorite birds, both of them. ... [“Crow Shit...”] is played through effects but under the effects it’s pretty much a traditional banjo.

You had told me that there’s someone you want to dedicate the banjo piece to, who you knew when you were growing up in Virginia.

Curtis Ewing. Curtis was older than I and he lived about five or six houses down from me. His father was a principal of a local elementary school who had come to town with his wife, and my grandfather had given them a place to live while they were becoming established. Curtis was the only real musician that I knew. I only know that now. At that time, he just did what he did. Curtis played a guitar, he played mandolin, he played fiddle, and I believe he played accordion. I’m not sure, but I think he had a banjo. I dedicate it to him because he was the first person I really saw play those string instruments. You understand, we were in a part of the country where a lot of what we might call the country folk style was shared by black and white people – the same. The picking style, even the singing style, it wasn’t bluesy like [in the] Delta, it was a folk blues. Curtis did that – he did it well. ... I would go there or sit on the step out on the porch and Curtis would play. And I always remember how good his pitch was, because I had heard other people try to play guitar and those things, but they sounded like they were always out of tune. But Curtis, he sounded like he was off the radio.

Where Do Old Friends Go?

The harp [song] is “Where Do Old Friends Go?” and that’s what you hear me playing over and over, where do old friends go? That’s deep because I’ve had a lot of old friends, I don’t know where they are. When you’re young you think they’re going to be the ones, but I’ve gone through layers, different groups of friends, and they’re gone. In your mind you hold on to them, but they’re somewhere else.

The harp is a very beautiful instrument. The harp is how I’ve met many, many people. It’s the one that I can relate to anyone. When I play percussion I can relate to certain people. I can play flute, I relate to certain people. The harp, almost everybody gets drawn in, seduced by it. It can be almost like mystical and spiritual, or it can be like a salsa, or it can be like a blues, it can even be almost like jazz swing, bebop, kind of hinting at that. I like the harp. I always thought I was gonna build another one because I’d like a harp that was more responsive. But at the same time, I know we all have that thought that it’s greener on the other side of the mountain. But this one has really gotten me through a lot. I built this one in 1975, so it’s going on thirty years now. The ashimba and the twanger I built in ’74.

That's Right

The twanger is the only instrument that I ever drew and designed before I made it. It has two banjo strings and it isn’t fretted. It has a high bridge up near where the pegs are that I play with my left hand, and I just squeeze the strings down between two bridges. That changes the tension on the string, changes the pitch. It’s a whole different way of playing in that you make this jump in your mind that your hand is now your vocal cord. The squeezing and releasing of your hand is the vocal cord. So in my mind, that’s where I go. I release my vocal cord in my throat and put it into my hand. I can not do it and just play the instrument, but it doesn’t work like when I transfer my vocal cord mindset to my hand, because it’s a vocal instrument.

Is that vocal aspect of it something you get that’s unique to the twanger? Because you have other fretless instruments, such as the diddley-bo and the banjo.

Yes, it’s totally different. It’s a whole jump. It’s the most difficult of all the instruments, and when it’s through the right amplification system, it’s the most fun. It’s really more fun than the diddley-bo, which is a lot of fun when you play through big stacked amps. With the twanger it’s a lot more fun. It has a range of about four octaves, which is pretty much a stretch for an instrument, depending on how I’m setting up the tension on the strings. I’m playing it pretty much using the same kind of plucking that I do with the banjo, [with] the thumb and the first finger. It’s a very African approach – just two fingers. I don’t frail it. I don’t beat it. I just [go] back and forth with the thumb and the pointer.

With this particular tune, the variance in timbre is because I’ve wrapped little pieces of foil around the strings ... It’s really tight around the strings ... gripping it. It confuses the string. The string doesn’t know where the notes are. Really filtering out, creating different kinds of overtones. It’s the same kind of thing that you would do with a synth – change the timbre of the strings. ... You can do all kinds of things with electronics, but physically it’s more difficult. The demonstration here is that you don’t need the electronics.

A Sunday Tale

That’s just the way it happened. I couldn’t make it up.

Fifes & Flutes

When you talk about me playing the bamboo or silver or any kind of flute, for me it is the most expressive instrument because it is using the breath. Dynamically and soulfully it’s the most expressive.

The first flutes [I made] were made out of lawn chair aluminum tubing. The next flutes I made were out of clay, ceramic. I always had great difficulty making flutes out of bamboo, so after clay I made flutes out of plastic pipe. Only during the last four and five years have I really made bamboos. Part of it is finding the right bamboo. The flutes I used to make, I would just use bamboo from garden suppliers or a hardware store, and that had a tendency to crack. And then I used to think that I could drill bamboo, [but] you can’t drill bamboo. You have to burn all the holes, and that’s a skill too, to burn the holes and the placing of the holes.

Now, the pieces, one was recorded in the house, in the living room, and the other was recorded on the footbridge going across to Ward’s Island. They feel different because of the ambience, and I think the points I’m making as a player are somewhat different. One I’m playing for people who are around me, playing for them. That’s out [on the footbridge]. The other over here [in the living room] was played actually at nighttime in a quiet way, even though it may not sound like it...not trying to produce a lot of energy. Though it may sound up, it was really played very softly. The one on the bridge was played as hard as I can play, with the reverberation coming, with the winds, with maybe some boats and airplanes and stuff. Men had been on the other end of the island fishing. They live in the neighborhood here, Puerto Rican, so I played the fife for them. ... The diddley-bo was [also] done there.

A Lament for Trees

The diddley-bo [more commonly spelled diddley-bow, this is Cooper-Moore’s preferred spelling for the instrument] came to me...when Jimmy Hopps [a drummer who has recorded with Marion Brown, Stanley Cowell, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Pharoah Sanders, and others] lived with us on Canal Street. [501 Canal was home to many musicians such as Tom Bruno, David S. Ware, and others who both lived and performed there] He talked about, as a drummer, wanting to play bass with sticks [and] about having seen people play a one-stringed instrument with sticks in Brazil. So when I left New York and went back to Virginia in ’75, I had a VW bus, and when it broke down I pulled out the brake cable. It was like ten feet long and I put it on a two-by-four, an eight foot two-by-four. That was my first diddley-bo. I put a pick-up under it and it worked. I plugged it up. I said, “This is interesting.”

So I built one with a bass string, and when I built the one-string upright D bass, after I plugged it in, part of me – the front, conscious world – had doubts that it could ever be anything. But then the inner, imaginative world kept saying, “This is a great thing.” And it took me so long to make it work. I just had this faith that’s in me that said, “Keep playing. It’s gonna work.” It just didn’t work. I just couldn’t make it work right. I could play some dinky stuff. It wasn’t until I came to New York ten years later that it opened up ... because I finally put a mark where the notes were. I was trying to play it by feel, thinking of it like a flute or the mouthbow [or] the ashimba. The diddley-bo is different. I had to be a little more precise. If I was going to play tunes and basslines and things, I had to know where the notes were. It wasn’t like an upright bass where you can know where things are by hand positions. I couldn’t figure that out because I was playing with sticks. So finally when I marked where all the notes were, up to three octaves or so, in ’85, it worked. It started opening up. I could play anything that I could read. I used vibes and marimba books. I would use those exercises because it was about the sticking. ... There were different ways of sticking and picking up the melody that you’re playing.

So I learned that and then in about ’86 or ’87 I came over here and I started working on the Bach solo cello suites [and] it just all opened up. I could play anything after I played that. I knew I could play anything. People would say, “Is that a real instrument?” and I would pull out the music and I would play the Bach cello suite.

“A Lament for Trees,” is there anything you’d like to say about that piece?

William Parker always talked about [how] “green things are your best friend,” and trees definitely are. No trees, we’re in trouble. So it’s a lament because we’re chopping them. ... This country was full of trees. It’s like being in Venice last month ... I didn’t see any trees! How do people live with no trees? Well, try midtown [Manhattan]. ... It’s a sadness that we have that we are not gaining in trees – we’re losing trees. But now it’s turned into “A Lament for the World” because the world is kind of screwed up. It’s a political statement.

How often do politics work into what you do musically?

More, I think, because fewer people do it. I think the people I admired, like Mingus or Duke Ellington or the people who were very instrumental in what people called the free jazz movement, they’re all very political people. The tunes stated it. I mean, Archie Shepp was very political. John Coltrane was political in how he labeled his songs, [such as “Alabama.”] Charlie Parker and those guys, Dizzy [Gillespie], they were political by creating music that was obscure and difficult, you know? They were making statements.

The music came out of politics, yes. Yes, it’s very political, very political. Very, very, very, very, very. How can you say that Mingus’ music wasn’t or Duke Ellington’s music wasn’t? It’s very political. It was full of race and racism – all that stuff. Anger. Guys covering up their hands so white cats couldn’t see what fingers they were using. Yeah, it was very political. Are we talking political like Democrat, Republican, government political? Yeah, that too. Yeah, it’s very political. Assif [Tsahar] and I being on stage together is political, you know? In Europe it’s a whole other acceptance there. Here, I don’t even know what it is here – confusion. People are very unclear about art in general, how it works, what it’s for. Maybe some people say it’s not political because they don’t want it to be political. They want to escape the fact that we live in the world.

But for me, yes, and if it’s possible to make statements about what’s going on, if you can make a difference, I’m gonna make a statement. I’ve been chopped down already. They can’t chop me out any more than I’ve been chopped out. I mean, I’m on the bottom rung economically. What else are they gonna take away from me? Bullshit. I’ve just decided that I’m gonna survive it. But I do want to produce work, so the decision is to produce the work whether it gets distributed or not.

Solo from Bordeaux

I thought that the piano should be on to inform those who don’t know who I am, [of] where I come from.

You’ve said that your relationship with the piano is a very different one...

Painful!

...and that sometimes you find it difficult to incorporate that with your other instruments.

Yes, because it’s painful. The flute isn’t painful, [or] the diddley-bo. None of those instruments are painful. The piano is painful. It causes me lots of pain and injuries, yeah, because it’s a wild thing. The deal is, you get in it and you think you’re trying to control it, and that’s where the pain and injuries come. It’s like my Sunday school teacher, she’d look at me, she’d say, “You must be born again.” It’s the idea that you surrender to it. You just surrender to it. You have this faith, you have this belief, you have some kind of energy inside of you that lets go and allows yourself to play it or be manipulated by it in some kind of way. It’s a very strange thing. When it works well, I don’t feel that it’s my energy doing it, because it takes too much energy to do what I do when I do that, OK? A lot of times when I fail, it’s me. I’m all beat up and exhausted from it and it’s just hard to do. But when it works it’s not hard to do. You can still be exhausted and you can still get injured, but if I do get injured and I become exhausted, it’s because I haven’t surrendered enough to it. That’s the truth. I have to surrender to the instrument.

It takes over. Like the piece that’s on the recording, that I did in Bordeaux, the sound came off of a video – that’s why it’s [of] that quality. But the performance, it’s unbelievable for me because of the logic of the playing. I don’t anticipate that I’m going to play with such structure as I was playing then. That’s another occasion where I get to a performance, I don’t expect there to be an instrument, there’s no instrument there for the soundcheck. A half hour after I get there, a truck gets there and backs into the space and they unload this huge nine-foot Steinway that they’ve shipped in from Toulouse, far away, and it’s costing them about $1200 to rent the instrument. ... I didn’t expect to play it, but I sat down in the afternoon and I practiced it and I said, “Oh, this is a wonderful instrument. It’s going to go by itself,” and it did.

The Death Queen

The vocal that I do of “The Death Queen,” the music is not [made on] instruments that I created. ... I created the sounds [on] an old synth, an M1. ... The idea there was, why do people buy new instruments? They buy new instruments because they don’t exploit the ones that they have. Here’s an instrument which is still used by many people because they go inside there and program it, and it works. Usually people just get another instrument, get another sound chip. They don’t want to go inside. I went inside and programmed the instrument, programmed the sounds. That’s why I think of it as mine, because you won’t hear those sounds anywhere. You listen to it, you say, “What is that?”

I think what I do best is set words [to music]. I don’t work at it as much, but I really think that’s my greatest skill. ... “The Death Queen” is a song out of a theatre piece. ... It’s a very dark piece. It’s hard. There’s no light. Many times when I perform I would like to be positive and up. This piece is not positive and definitely not up.

The final drum solo is meant to be akin to the last moments of the heart beating?

No, that’s the chatter, you know, the death rattle, the breath. Your body, a lot of stuff happens when you expire. You’re expiring. We walk around all day long holding our water, holding our bowels. You die, all those muscles release. Your shit comes out, your piss. You make sounds, gurgling sounds, stuff is bubbling. These are the sounds. Maybe [for] those who are listening, the thought when the drum is going on is [that] something else is going to happen. Nope! When you’re dead, you’re dead. That’s how I see it. When you’re dead, you’re dead. You’re living and then the chatter, that’s it. That was how I was thinking when I created that piece.

Brian [Wesley Smith] wrote the words to that and I got to be with him when he was conscious and all hooked up to machines and stuff, and how he was struggling. ... They were just keeping him alive. [The song is] not meant to be anything scary – it’s just an observation. When I was with him I just held his hand and talked to him and knew he was leaving us. That’s just what happens. You live and make a little noise and you go. (laughs) Hopefully you can make a little noise while you’re here and then that’s it.

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You have said before, in terms of playing all these instruments, “It’s not easy being all these people.”

It’s easier. Well, a couple things have happened. I’m older. When I was 50, the hormones – we’re talking about testosterone – my hormone level [came] down. I will always say that the music – this free jazz music or creative improvised music or avant jazz music – all this form of music is informed by hormones. Men’s hormones (laughs) pretty much has defined the music. This didn’t come from women. It didn’t come from Zen masters. It came from men, many of them...Well, we won’t get into that, but my hormone level, I know that pushed what I did because it pushed my social relationships with women, my perversions, all kinds of stuff. But when my hormone level came down, my focus became clearer. I saw what I could handle and what I could do. My thinking changed. I’m a calmer person. I’m able to handle more and do business. I’m able to allow the piano to play itself or me to play the piano, you understand? Allow that to be able to happen.

Playing with Apogee – Marc Edwards and myself and David S. Ware – our image that we had when we were playing was to bust through that wall. ... We talked about it. “We’re gonna break through the wall!” We could maybe just go three steps around the wall and get where we wanted to go, you know? Many times, you know, that wall knocked us down. Get back up and start busting it down again – keep pushing. But yeah, we could’ve sometimes walked around it, right around it, easy. But that wouldn’t have projected about who we were at that time. That’s not what we thought we were. We had to break down the wall because we couldn’t see that the wall wasn’t a wall that went forever and ever both left and right and up and down. We were focused ... “We gotta bust down the wall!”

But then later on I became a quieter person and said, “Oh, there are other ways of doing it.” That’s the way the instruments came. There are other ways of doing it but it still comes out of that energy space, whether it’s the banjo or whether it’s the fife, [or the] diddley-bo. I’m still going to try to go to that, because you know what it is? I found that on piano, less now, but it used to be that I had to warm up, practice for at least two hours before I could become creative on the piano. It was all about getting rid of all that energy.

But that place that I did get to was so fine. That informs the other instruments now and where I want to go. That and the fact that you can do it any kind of way. That’s what I learned from Mingus and Don Cherry – you can go all kinds of ways, and it’s not necessarily about this community of musicians or that. It’s about who your audience is and how you’re going to affect them.

I find it’s important to be in touch with the audience. It’s not necessarily about me. It’s about the audience. ... They come because they have a need. How can I fulfill that need and mine too, at the same time? That’s a great thing. Like having sex with your lover, coming to orgasm together, how you can do that. ... It’s like being brought up in a town or community, or growing up where I never turned down a music job because it was a wedding or a boat ride or a picnic, a funeral, a church band, country and western, funk, rock ‘n’ roll. Because if it’s for people, the challenge is how do you use this to affect people and make ’em feel good, feel better about themselves? Something like that, you know what I mean? That’s pretty much what it is. People clap for me, they feel good, or they go to some place and they get released some kind of way. Sometimes you might play something sad – that could release them also. It might be energy and powerful, it might be quiet, but some kind of release, fulfilling stimulation for the audience.

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[Regarding] the vinyl project, the instruments are just where I am now. [The songs] are a document of where I am. I mean, I could dream that it’s in a higher place, but that’s where I am with the instruments right now. But it will go on ... until I leave this Earth because it’s a fun thing to do.

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Who was it who told you that the wood you used to make your ashimba would be your future?

Jimmy Hopps. I’d just found the bundle of wood. I was sitting on the floor looking at the bundle of wood. ... He’s coming through the hall, he looks over, he says, “That’s your future,” then he goes in his room. Just like that, “That’s your future.” That’s the world he lived in. He lived in the Impression Place ... not the Thinking and Planning Place. You do some of that too, but it’s like the Living-in-the-Moment-All-the-Time Place and you get it done that way. I don’t think I could ever do it. Hopps talked about meditating with your eyes open. A lot of people meditate with their eyes closed. He said, “No, meditate with your eyes open and that is it.” When you’re in meditation and you’re functioning in the world, everything is easy. You know all the right decisions. You don’t hold onto the past or things, ever. The attachment thing leaves you. It’s important.

So when I started building instruments, it was like, I build this instrument but it doesn’t have great value because it’s made out of stuff. If it gets broken or gets lost, so what? Make another one. You don’t have attachment with it, but as you keep them, they have attachments. The ashimba bars have an attachment. I can get rid of the body and throw it away. I can never cut my ashimba bars and have it tuned the way that I tune it because the wood doesn’t work that way. The harp has an attachment, but that’s it. I don’t think I would ever be able to build another harp that would fit my body in the way that fits my body, the way the strings fit my hands. If I didn’t have it anymore ... I’d feel badly for a moment. The ashimba bars would be, I feel, a great loss. Everything else I don’t care about – it’s like all the other stuff, the computers. But the ashimba bars, they’re most important. That’s the symbol: “Emancipation.” ... It may have, in fact, had more meaning in my life than most people, and I’ve had a lot of people who have been very influential and important who have died and gone and I’ve mourned them less than I would mourn my ashimba bars if they were burned up or lost. But if I got to the point where they didn’t matter, I think I would be a very free person.

Anything else? That’s pretty deep.

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Cooper-Moore, East Harlem, NYC, 1999. Photo by Clare O'Dea.