Cooper-Moore 5x7" box

This is easily one of my favorite releases of the year. Venerable jazz pianist/multi-instrumentalist Cooper-Moore playing a different instrument on each side. I wrote a draft of a review of it that was never published...

Five 7" records come affectionately packed in a square cedar box, branded starkly with only "Cooper-Moore" and numbered (out of 300) on the back. The box itself smells and looks like something you'll want to play. A 16-page booklet containing photos of Cooper-Moore along with personal accounts of the songs and instruments on each, rests atop the five records. The plant labeled a couple of the discs incorrectly, so a set of replacement labels is included, with a note referencing notorious El Saturn and ESP-Disk labeling errors, emphasizing the set's spiritual kinship to the records of Albert Ayler, Sun Ra and the Holy Modal Rounders. It is a substantial thing, this box, kissing cousins to last year's Dust-to-Digital gospel collection, a sculpture as much it is five little records.

These sides radiate out from the banyan tree of jazz -- slave songs, church music, folk, blues -- presented in a remarkably modern and individualistic hue. Cooper-Moore plays an instrument per side, many of these constructed from his own hands and mastered over a number of years. They are listed as: diddley-bo, horizontal hoe handle harp, ashimba, bamboo fife, twanger, piano, storytelling [sic], mouth-bow, three-stringed fretless banjo, synth + percussion + vocal. Even the most rustic of instruments is played with a postmodern sensibility. Check the heavy electronic effects on the fretless banjo tune, “Crow Shit on the Window.”

The songs (and even side 7's story, “A Sunday Tale”) can only be labeled fairly as "jazz" since it's the tradition from which Cooper-Moore operates. However, he acknowledges no distinction between what is normally referred to as "jazz" and the dustiest international folk music. The hoe-handled harp, appropriating a Malian kora, is pensive on the lullaby, “Where Do Old Friends Go?” The ashimba tune, "Emancipation," (the ashimba is a xylophone-type instrument) clatters along on a repeating rhythmic phrase and a Balinese tinkle, the sound of a disappearing sun. The twanger, an amplified device consisting of a long “neck” and two banjo strings squeezed and released to play, evokes wobbly resonating sheet metal on "That’s Right.” The song conveys the twanger's dense aural quality with a speed and lightness of use; the instrument is driven by Cooper-Moore's hands. Connections between the sides solidify on the live piano piece, “Solo from Bordeaux” where Cooper-Moore emerges as a macrobiotic Cecil Taylor, sprouting compact lyrical phrases with a big-picture musicality. As with Ayler’s best stuff, the simplicity of folk music belies the inherent harmonic sinew of Ellingtonian jazz. These records imbue reserve, joy, endurance, and nostalgia.

“Well, my instruments are made out of stuff, first off.” It's a shame jazz audiences won't recognize that "serious" music can be made on a diddly-bo. Cooper-Moore takes a century of musical investigation, compresses it into the bodies of woody homemade instruments, and delivers it to the avant-garde.