Jerome Cooper: “I have traveled to Africa, Malaysia, India, Indonesia, Europe and Mexico. In these cultures there are drummers who once they get to a level in their art, can pursue a career as a soloist. This has not been the case in American music, but it must happen if Jazz is going to be considered American classical music. All instrumentalists must be able to have the option of becoming a soloist. So this – for the past thirty years has been my goal; to improve the quality of American music.”

This is stated by a guy who has been working his way through the American soundscape with collaborators as Oscar Brown Jr., Steve Lacy, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Alan Silva, Anthony Braxton, Cecil Taylor and many others.

Jerome Cooper elaborates further in the CD booklet: “After dealing with polyrhythms I began to hear layers of sounds and rhythms. Divided into many parts and facets, the drum set and secondary instruments I use and play are all aspects of the drums. In the future there will be many changes and developments in the area of the mind – so what we (humankind) think and hear, is what we shall see and hear. In order to play the drum set you must be able to manipulate four or five things at one time (i.e. bass drum, snare drum, high-hat, ride cymbals and maybe voice). An instrument’s name and structure doesn’t stop me from playing it like a drum. You have instruments that are structurally different from the drum, but which have the same characteristics in the approach to the drum (i.e. piano, balaphone and shoes with taps). In order to find the music of the drums, I had to change my assumptions and beliefs about music in relation to the drums, which is sound in the creation of multi-rhythms. […]
The chiramia is a wind instrument. It is played with double reed. Mine has six stops (some have three, four or two). They are from Mexico. To me, the chiramia is my voice synthesizer. In Mexico some musicians play it along with their drums. In my performance I use two, mostly played individually, but sometimes together. […]
During the period of the Revolutionary Ensemble (1971 – 1977) I would play the drum set and then go over to the piano. The problem was external duality. When Yamaha and Casio introduced the electronic keyboard and drum synthesizer, it became part of my drum set (i.e. bass drum, snare drum, high-hat, cymbals and electronic tonal rhythmic activator). […]
A lot of drummers carry and play percussion instruments (gong, whistles, bongos etcetera). I do the same thing, except all of my percussion instruments are synthesized into one instrument.”

This CD consists of live takes from Roulette and The Knitting Factory in the late 1990s, featuring, as the recording company puts it, “Cooper’s multi-dimensional drumming”.

Track 1 is “Bantul”. Cooper explains that the piece was composed while he was living in Java, Indonesia. He says: “Bantul is the name of the area of the city of Yogyjakarta. It is my musical impression of certain gamelan music. It has two parts, which I would describe as the pedal tone and then the groove.”
Beginning on a note which reminds me heavily of the water drums of Burundi, Cooper soon moves into a rhythmically jerky and swaying gamelan sound world, even resembling the bamboo gamelan of Sangkar Agung in Bali, but the general rhythmic values also harbors similarities to the sounds of a westerly oriented vinyl from Ravi Shankar in the 1960s, on takes like “Tala Rasa Ranga” (flute, sitar, tabla, dholak, kartala, manjira) and “Tala – Tabla Tarang” (tablas). The wonderfully clear and spherical sounds – like brittle Christmas balls shining up in the tree! – roll and shine through the music, which moves on steady as a locomotive across the Montana expanses a smoky cold winter day of high skies and sharp air. This is refined and bare-stripped rhythm-and-blues.

“Monk Funk” is an older piece of Cooper’s, re-recorded at Roulette in May of 1996. Metallic ganglia sway and swirl in front of a steady bass rhythm, which repeats in a minimalistic idiom deep inside the web of sounds, conjuring a feeling of density, of high-voltage and urgency, if not relentlessness. The silver of the close-up metal rattling spurts shiny, gray metal dust across the situation, and metals and minerals have the say here!
Eventually the background comes forth, as the metal withdraws, and a jungle jingle of deep-throated rhythms progresses in a brownish and woody drum-frame skin-feel of almost military properties of the Civil War at a get-together at the Mason-Dickson line! Tally-hoe!
The chiramia plays the soaring bee-swarm snake-charm spirals of North India shahnai dust hours. Elephants team up in a stomping, vibrating, ground-shattering circle, as the rhythmic grand stand of here and now soars and hovers like an alien space ship right at the center of attention!

“My Funny Valentine” is a very traditional tune, of course, but Cooper states that he is implying the theme on and off during what otherwise is a total improvisation.
The piece kicks off in a peculiar multi-rhythmic, layered fashion, envisioning lustrous early 20th century small town America social gatherings in town squares of the orderly and only in secrecy sinning citizens. The feeling is that of a quirky, sarcastic Charles Ives or a more head-on Lou Harrison. A funny property of the piece is the persistent bass beat of bop America, applied here in a Charlie Parker mimicry, or like a wall-paper pattern, in front of which the soloist – sounding like a whole gang of people – performs his Funny Valentine obsession! The chiramia emerges again just like an Indian shahnai oboe, rendering the by now slowed-down music an introverted, nose-tip sensuality of introspection and cow dust hypnosis of Rajasthan. This section with the chiramia dangling and swaying above the sparse, transparent bass accompaniment is utterly beautiful, and I could listen to just this part for hours. If I could influence Cooper I’d have him make a double CD containing only this bass and this chiramia. This is the music of winter night meditations inside heated confinements of the outside cold where the snow is crunching under threading Red Wing boots.

“My Life” is, says Cooper, completely improvised. Cooper’s life has got to be fast and speedy, because this rocks and rolls frantically down the line, like a haywire engine of some adventurous jail-brake movie of North America. This could well be the hectic – but still poetic – sound space of the emergence of the writings of the likes of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg; “On the Road”, “The Dharma Bums”, “Mexico City Blues”, “HOWL”, “Kaddish”, “Planet News”… wow!!! It hits hard with inspiration through smoky cities of the eastern and western seaboard, right across the great mystical night of this elusive continent, from New York City to san Francisco on a Budweiser and a Marlboro and tons of poetry inside the shaking, trembling and growling dump truck of existence!
I instantly burn some incense, turn up the volume and let the piece make another spin through the laser box. This music inspires me to put on my winter garments and head on out into the forest with a notebook and a pencil to take down whatever poetry might descend on me!

“Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” is a funny title indeed! Of course it’s a classical piece of music too.
Deep bass chords of modal properties open this poetic surge of the chiramia, which suddenly takes on the guise of a soprano saxophone, howling and growling in the density of the moment, building up into an epic story of the soul on foot in American cityscapes of brick walls and asphalt streets, high-rises of the downtowns and worn-down tenement barracks of the forced poverty of structural violence. Cooper is on the side of the human spirit through all this structural indecency of society, which one can easily tell from the surging force of his almost desperate outpour inside this “Pork Pie Hat” catharsis!

“The Indonesian” concludes this brilliant set of pieces from the mastery of Jerome Cooper. He says that this piece was conceived during his Indonesian residency, as an impression of the people of those parts. This is the only piece of the set where you can distinguish the sound of a synthesizer, the way you usually envision one, in progressions of walls of string-like sounds – but this is merely at the outset, because Cooper constructs a density of sound wherein a strong but somehow laid-back melody is whisked ahead by whistles and an arching head-on rhythmic waveform.

This CD has given me much inspiration and soul power.