Mike Cooper - Soprano: An Homage to Lol Coxhill (2024) [Official Digital Download 24/48]

Mike Cooper fashions a heartfelt ode to the much missed Lol Coxhill here, enlisting a raft of soprano sax players to pay their respects to the free-improv great's overwhelming influence.

There aren't many soprano sax players who have cast a shadow as long as Coxhill has. Cutting his teeth on US air force circuit playing jazz and blues, he dipped into the Canterbury scene in the '60s, going on to collaborate with everyone from Mike Oldfield and Shirley Collins to David Toop, Derek Bailey and Fred Frith. Cooper was long tangled with Coxhill; they had known each other since the '60s, and eventually formed an improv trio called The Recedents alongside drummer Roger Turner. The band lasted a good two decades, and Coxhill played on Cooper's 1996 solo plate 'Island Songs'. So who better to put together a memorial album? And typically for Cooper, 'Soprano' is a freewheeling set of experiments that capture Coxhill's outsized personality. Each track is made with a different soprano sax player, all of whom Coxhill touched in some way, and each track seems to veer in a completely new direction thanks to Cooper's eccentric hand.

Opening track 'Warp and Weft' puts free jazz veteran John Butcher in the spotlight, who weaves and winds around Cooper's molten electronics, while on 'Koko Monteti', Cooper bolts together a set of stuttering breaks, leaving just enough room for Tzadik alum Eliott Sharp to add spouts and spurts over the top. 'Aimlessly' is even knottier, featuring a reverberated performance from Italian player Errico Di Fabritiis and a hallucinogenic boil of fragmented noises from Cooper, and on the wonked 'Downtown Rank Topping', Cooper splits piano phrases into loose, discordant grains, letting Brit legend Larry Stabbins wail over the surreal tangle of sounds.

“I had known him and worked with him since 1971 and felt privileged to play with someone who was both virtuoso musician and uniquely funny, original and generous as a person. When he died in 2012 iI felt the sadness of losing contact with a truly remarkable man. In my blog I wrote: “He actively sought out tricky situations. To me this is the measure of an improviser: a player who moves beyond their comfort zone, chips away at their own aesthetic and tics, risks foolishness and failure yet builds operational spaces in every situation, no matter how rote or ridiculous. The rest are just stylists. I say this knowing that Lol was never graced with the status of try improviser by the commissars of the game; his sidelines were his centre, his rambling ways the shadow of his bald soprano, its convolutions and folds, its serpentine unfoldings in the inaudible dark. he was dogged by eccentricity, busking, the look of him, his clothes, his baldness, his comedic turn yet never shied away from the heavy responsibility of lightening proceedings” - by David Toop from Flutter Echo Living Within Sound.

Tracklist:
01 - Warp And Weft
02 - Mr. Butterfly
03 - Koko Monteti
04 - Aimlessly
05 - Eternal Breath
06 - The Cox On The Hill
07 - Dings
08 - Requiem For One
09 - Above Water Sax
10 - Downtown Rank Topping
11 - Shimmer


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