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| Mike Cooper in Wellington British born avant-folk legend Mike Cooper performs in Wellington from 7 – 10 March. For the past 40 has been an international musical explorer, performing and recording, solo and in a number of inspired groupings and a variety of genres. Initially a folk-blues guitarist and singer songwriter his work has diversified to include improvised and electronic music, live music for silent films, radio art and sound installations. He is also a music journalist, writing features for magazines, particularly on Pacific music and musicians, a visual artist, film and video maker, collector of Hawaiian shirts and appears on more than 60 records to date. Starting in the mid sixties, a solo country blues singer and slide guitar player, he was one of the handful of acoustic players who pioneered the British Blues Boom, playing with and alongside such blues legends as Son House, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Bukka White, Howlin Wolf, John Lee Hooker and Jimmy Reed. His 1969 l.p. Oh Really!? is widely acclaimed as one of the best acoustic blues albums of the period. In the early 1970s he recorded five solo albums which chronicle, through his own songwriting, a fascinating shift from pure blues through to free jazz. Collaborating with jazz, improvising and avant-garde musicians, in particular South Africans Dudu Pakwana, Harry Miller, Louis Maholo and Mongezi Feza, Zimbabwean composer and arranger Mike Gibbs and British saxophonist Mike Osborne he produced perhaps some of the first and finest rogue folk. 30 years later these recordings, along with those by Wizz Jones, Roy Harper, The Incredible String Band and Davy Graham have inspired the recent 'Free Folk' explosion in the USA, with Thurston Moore and Jim O'rourke from Sonic Youth and The No-Neck Blues Band confessing to be fans. In the late 1970's he began to develop a parallel career and establish himself on the avant-garde and free-improvised music scene, working initially with members of the London Musicians Collective, such as Keith Rowe, David Toop, Steve Beresford, Max Eastley, Paul Burwell, Eddie Prevost, dancer Jo-Anna Pyne. and vocalist Viv Corringham. The Recedents, a trio formed with legendary sax player Lol Coxhill and drummer Roger Turner is now in its third decade. He continues to work with these and other international improvisers. In 1987, together with the extraordinary French slide guitarist Cyril Lefebvre and incorporating the talents of Lol Coxhill, Steve Beresford and Max Eastley, they formed the Uptown Hawaiians to play and record a repertoire of Hawaiian, Exotica and other Lap Steel Guitar musics, re-affirming a life-long passion for Pacific music and cultures, both old, new and imagined. They still play together often with Paris based Tahitian musicians and dancers and the 'Ukulele Tiki Party'. A more recent Pacific collaboration is with Richard Nunns from New Zealand, an improviser who plays traditional Maori instruments. Travelling often through the Pacific, Mike has written extensively on Hawaiian Slack Key guitar styles and performers. He also wrote the Hawaii chapter for the Rough Guide to World Music. Ambient Electronic Exotica is the genre and subtitle of recent solo performances, often accompanied with film or video, and three c.d. releases, 'Kiribati', 'Globe Notes' and 'Rayon Hula'. Ambient recordings made in the Pacific, South East Asia, Australia and New Zealand, treated electronically, combined with acoustic and electronic instruments and re-located to produce 'virtual soundscapes'. "....a masterpiece of contemporary exotica." (Rayon Hula reviewed in the Wire). Ten years of performing live music for silent films at festivals around the world has proven a rich and rewarding way of combining a variety of different musical styles and of seducing people into listening to music they might not normally encounter. The current programme includes Tabu and Sunrise by F.W. Murnau, Nanook Of The North - Robert Flaherty, Man With A Movie Camera - Dziga Vertov. Sergei Eisenstein classics Strike and October, South by Frank Hurley and from 1958 Last Paradise by Fulco Quilici as well as his own scratch video 'Stolen Moments'. write your comments about the article :: © 2006 Jazz News :: home page |