Lindsay Cooper

This article deals with the bassoon and soprano saxophone player. For the bassist, see Lindsay L. Cooper .

Lindsay Cooper (born March 3, 1951 in Hornsey , England ; † September 18, 2013 ) was a British bassoon and soprano saxophone player and composer of rock music , jazz and new music .

Live and act

Lindsay Cooper was born in Hornsey, North London . At the age of eleven she took piano lessons, but turned to the bassoon some time later. Between 1965 and 1968 she studied classical music and bassoon at Dartington College of Arts and the Royal College of Music . She played in the UK's national youth orchestra and became a member of the Royal Academy of Music in London. During a one-year stay in New York City in the late 1960s, she opened up to music styles outside of the classical period.

Cooper returned to Great Britain in 1971 and now finally turned away from classical music to join the then thriving Canterbury music scene . She joined the progressive rock band Comus . Although she was only part of the band for a year, this experience had a major impact on her musical stance. She expanded her instrument repertoire to include oboe and flute and became active as a session musician. Among other things, she can be heard on the album Hergest Ridge , published by Mike Oldfield in 1974 . She is sometimes mistakenly associated with Oldfield's earlier album Tubular Bells , on which her namesake Lindsay L. Cooper plays the double bass.

During a theater project, Lindsay Cooper got to know the avant rock band Henry Cow , with whom she worked from 1974 and 1978 and thus made her breakthrough to become one of the most sought-after musicians in the country. She was also active with the art rock groups National Health and News from Babel . In 1978 she was one of the co-founders of the Feminist Improvising Group . She wrote film music , a. a. for films by the filmmaker Sally Potter , and the cycle Oh Moscow , which was shown live in numerous countries in 1987. She has recorded a number of solo albums, the most famous of which are Rags (1980), The Gold Diggers (1983) and Music For Other Occasions (1986). Their unconventional, partly electrically amplified way of playing the bassoon , which u. a. Heiner Goebbels was enthusiastic and opened up interesting possibilities for using this instrument.

She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1991 ; In 1998 the disease made it impossible to recur. In her last few years she has mainly made her mark through compositions - a. a. for the Californian Rova Saxophone Quartet - to attract attention.

Cooper died on September 18, 2013 at the age of 62 as a result of her illness.

In November 2014 Chris Cutler , Fred Frith , John Greaves , Tim Hodgkinson , Sally Potter , Annemarie Roelofs and Dagmar Krause as well as the Belgian bassoonist Michel Berckmans, Alfred Harth , Veryan Weston , Phil Minton and Zeena Parkins performed their compositions for Henry Cow, News from Babel, Music for Films and Oh Moscow at the London Jazz Festival at the Barbican Center in London , at the Lawrence Batley Theater as part of the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and at the Teatro Diego Fabbri in Forlì , Italy .

Web links

• The Canterbury website . Lindsay Cooper biography .
• Lindsay Cooper biography . Paris Transatlantic Magazine .
• Lindsay Cooper Discography .
• Lindsay Cooper in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Lindsay Cooper at Allmusic (English)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Message of death ( Memento of the original from September 21, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
2. ↑ Chris Cutler on Henry Cow, Lindsay Cooper and Huddersfield
3. ↑ Program Teatro Fabbri, November 23, 2014 ( Memento of the original from January 4, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.