Dale Smoak

Benny Golson joined the ancestors on September 21 and is moved to the In Memoriam tab.

Don Menza, Mikhail Kostyushkin and Alfred 23 Harth added.

Seeking birthday and/or whereabouts info for Ronnie Beer, Kenneth Terroade, Tyrone Washington, Ron Bridgewater, Ed Petersen and Bob Ralston.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-4GiLr1_t1I-gl5bKiKWVTNlra7yngrDWfzKkTpIHRw/edit

Bill Holman passed away May 6, 2024, age 96.

Frank Tiberi, 95, born December 4, 1928, is now the oldest jazz tenor saxophone master tracked on this list of living tenor players aged at least 75. Larry Ochs, born May 3, 1949, is the youngest musician on the list.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-4GiLr1_t1I-gl5bKiKWVTNlra7yngrDWfzKkTpIHRw/edit

Here is a list of living jazz tenor saxophonists, age 75+. Included are musicians initially or primarily known as tenor players.

Lindsay Cooper Interview 

Taken & Transcribed by Dale Smoak 

Conducted October 5, 1989, Eliot Hotel, Boston

Published in Cadence Magazine, June 1990

© Please use freely but credit with my name and the magazine name and publication date. Creative Commons copyright. 

(ed. note: Lindsay Cooper was in Boston, a few days before the annual Victoriaville Festival, to perform “Oh Moscow”)

CADENCE: When and where were you born? 

LINDSAY COOPER: The third of March, ’51, in London. 

CAD: A musical family? 

L.C.: Not particularly, no. My father used to sing in a choir when he was much younger, and my grandfather owned a violin; I’m not sure that he played it in very many years. But no, I really certainly wouldn’t describe it as a musical family. 

CAD: What is your first musical memory as a child? 

L.C.: Well, from when I was born, I was born the same year that the Royal Festival in London opened. The Festival of Britain was held in 1951, because it was the centenary of the Great Exhibition of 1851, songs about which I was later to include on my album Rags. I’m giving you lots of threads of oral history here. (laughter) So the Royal Festival was opened in ’51 and my father worked there doing publicity for concerts and the Royal Festival of Ballet of London was based there. So he did publicity for the ballet season each year as well. And he took me to all the concerts and all the ballets, and I just grew up with it. I mean like, I can’t remember how often but I guess once a week, once a fortnight, I would see a performance of some sort. So it was just part of my way of life as a small child. 

CAD: When did you start playing? 

L.C.: I did have a toy piano. My father got me a toy piano when I was about four, which may not seem a very important kind of an instrument, but I used to play it a lot because I could very quickly pick out tunes by ear on that, so I really liked this humble little instrument. The first real instrument was the violin. I had violin lessons when I was about nine, just because they were free lessons at the junior school that I went to, and it was like, there was a class every Saturday morning, which was held, I mean it just sounded every bit as dreadful as you can imagine nine-year-olds playing the violin would sound. So, I made very little progress. I don’t think I ever practiced the entire two years that I learned to play, it just sounded dreadful. I showed no promise whatsoever, musically. I then moved on to piano, and ’cause then I went to a different school when I was 11, which was the standard rote then, I don’t know if it still is when you change schools in England, and there you could have piano lessons as kind of extracurricular classes. And my parents, it’s kind of interesting, my parents said that I could have piano lessons but they weren’t going to buy me a piano until there was some indication that I was going to stick at this. So they said I could have lessons as long as I went to Mrs. Williams down the road, to practice at her house, and if I did that for a year or two, then they’d buy me a piano. So that’s what I did, and they kept their word, they did buy me a piano. And Mrs. Williams’son used to play the bassoon in the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, so he became this sort of mystical figure. She was always talking about her son, Edgar, who played the bassoon, and so by the time I finally got to meet him he’d really become this sort of legendary figure, and as soon as I heard him play the bassoon, I was completely captivated, and asked him to teach me to play. So that was how I came to pick bassoon. I just really loved the instrument as soon as I heard it. 

CAD: So when did you add on the saxophones? 

L.C.: Oh, not for a long time. I took up the oboe and the flute when I … the first group that I joined which was called Comus. I was in Comus from about 1970 to ’71. The person that I was replacing played flute and oboe, so they weren’t so sure the bassoon was going to be enough and they asked me to learn flute and oboe, which I did, sort of reluctantly because they weren’t instruments I was terribly fond of. And then when I

joined Henry Cow, after I had been with Henry Cow for two or three years, I decided to learn the saxophone because I wanted to learn an instrument which had no classical music connotations, so those were my reasons, really, for choosing the saxophone. And I started to play the soprano saxophone because all the saxophone players that I liked at the time played soprano and I just thought it sounded the nicest, so I went and bought a soprano saxophone, which has since been replaced by sopranino. 

CAD: Did you buy records as a kid, or listen to the radio? 

L.C.: I seem to remember that I listened to a lot of Tchaikovsky. I mean, I used to buy Beatles singles and things like that, but I did use to buy classical records. I mean nothing terribly adventurous when I was younger, it was all fairly staple parts of the classical repertoire, and pop music. It was about singles that were in the charts at the time, which during the early middle sixties were quite good, it was a great period for pop music, so the stuff I was listening to was quite good. 

CAD: I’m asking these questions because your music crosses genres. So you went from a classical to a rock direction? 

L.C.: Relatively speaking, yes, I did. Yeah, I mean after I stopped playing classical music that was the next … there was a brief period when I worked with a theatre group that used improvised music, and it was after that that I joined Henry Cow. 

CAD: Was there some point in your youth when you knew you were going to pursue a musical career? 

L.C.: There was certainly a point when I knew I was going to play music, which was very early on, when I’d just been learning bassoon for a very short time. And it was going. I mean I made incredibly rapid progress with it, much quicker than the violin (laughter) for example. I was practicing a lot. And there was one particular lesson when my teacher, Edgar Williams, said try my instrument. And the instrument that I had was … a reasonable, a sort of nice instrument that I’d insisted my school bought for me. When I played his instrument, which was a real switch, it was so fantastic that I think I did actually know from that moment that that was what I was going to do. And I

think I wanted to be a composer before that, actually, before I even started the bassoon. It was one of those things that I wanted to do, and then it kind of lay dormant for several years afterwards, it was something when I was about 12, I wanted to be a composer. I can’t quite remember why, but I was very attracted to this idea, and then sort of forgot all about it until. .. 1 can’t remember when I actually did start composing, I mean not really all that long ago, it was only about 10 years ago that I really started composing seriously. 

CAD: The second side of Henry Cow’s Western Culture from ’78 is yours. 

L.C.: That was the first thing that I wrote, really. There is some juvenilia (laughter) which 1- 

CAD: Such as on the toy piano? 

L.C.: (laughter) Well, not quite on that level. But yeah, there were one or two pieces earlier than that, but not that I would really play to anybody. 

CAD: Henry Cow existed before you joined it? 

L.C.: Yeah. For quite a long time before I did. 

CAD: What drew you to it? Before this interview we talked about oppressor/oppressed dynamics in lyric settings, which Henry Cow did. 

L.C.: Well, at the time I joined Henry Cow it was an instrumental band, there was no singer at all. So, although the band was quite obviously engaged politically, and that was one of the reasons I was drawn to them. The band wasn’t working with songs, so any kinds of ideas about songwriting didn’t really enter into it at that time. 

CAD: What kind of material were they working with then? 

L.C.: At the time I joined them they were doing quite complex written material. I mean, I think what they used to say about themselves at the time was that they progressed by writing stuff which they couldn’t play, and so would kind of force themselves, pull themselves up by their bootstraps and get their chops ’round things which were too hard, and it’s true that a lot of the music that they were playing was very cornplicated. I

mean far more complicated than what most other rock bands were doing at that time. 

CAD: Were you drawn to them in part because of the political dynamics? 

L.C.: I was drawn to them because … it’s not a question that I’ve really considered for many, many years. I liked them very much, as people, and I found them very, very interesting, musically, because I think it was really about the first time that I could see the possibility of doing something that engaged me musically, but wasn’t classical music and wasn’t pop music, and wasn’t jazz. I mean Henry Cow was a very unplaceable sort of group. Yeah, I just saw it as a very interesting kind of musical challenge. I think it would be distorting the truth to claim that they were these fabulously right-on political people that I felt a deep empathy for, that wouldn’t actually be true if I said that. I mean I certainly did feel a political sympathy but that wasn’t the most important reason for me to join the group. 

CAD: What books were important to you, particularly in terms of political education? 

LC.: I can’t re- … during the period that I was touring with Henry Cow I used to read an incredible amount. I don’t read so much anymore, hardly at all, but I did read political stuff. I mean, the late ’70s were the peak period for particularly feminist writing, and left-wing writing of all kinds. And I wouldn’t particularly single out any particular writers, but I did, you know, do the mental and political rounds of those sort of late ’70s feminist, left-wing kind of ideas. That’s when I did the most reading. 

CAD: What draws you to the kinds of lyric settings you’re involved in? 

L.C.: I like lyrics that work on a lot of different levels, lyrics that engage the listener emotionally as well as intellectually. And I like lyrics that are about unusual things. I found that one of the most appealing things about David Thomas, that he would write songs about extremely unexpected things and make great songs out of them. And I do think there is the need for songs about the present time. I think there always has been and probably always will be, songs that in their different way tell the truth about people’s experiences of the present. 

CAD: When and how did the Feminist Improvising Group (FIG) come about? 

L.C.: It came about – this is now a famous legend. (laughter) It came about because Maggie Nicols and I were at a musicians’ union branch meeting. We were both very active in the union at the time, and we were out for a cup of tea afterwards; it was a time when there were beginning to be quite a few women’s rock bands, this was in the summer of ’77 or something. Yeah, in England there were quite a few women’s rock bands, that did benefits and things like that, and we were saying how frustrating it was that there were still hardly any women who did improvised music, and we decided there and then to get a group together, that was a group of women who did improvised  music. So that was how the group was born. At that time there was an organization in London called Music for Socialism, and they had a festival coming up. So that was where we did our first gig. And then we started working ’round through contacts that I’d made with Henry Cow mainly, and we continued until about 1982 and worked a great deal. And I think it’s an unsung sort of group really, because I think it actually changed a lot of people’s lives but it didn’t make a record and it sort of, in some ways it’s kind of got written out of history, which Maggie and I sit around griping about sometimes. (laughter) But on the other hand I stili go around to places, ’round Europe, and I meet people who were at a FIG gig in, you know, whatever year, and I completely changed their lives. When things like that happen it makes it worthwhile. 

CAD: Who was on the first gig and who subsequently played in the group? 

L.C.: On the first gig it was me and Maggie, Georgie Born, Corinne Liensol, trumpet player, there was one called Cathy – god I can’t remember her other name because I think she only did about one more gig with us – and the people who joined afterwards were Annemarie Roelofs, who I met at a Henry Cow gig in Amsterdam, and invited her back to London that night because there was a FIG gig the next day or something. (laughs) So she … and then there was a Dutch saxophone player called Angele Veltmeijer, who lives in London. She was in the group for quite awhile. And then there was Irene Schweitzer who I met when Henry Cow was playing in Zurich, and she joined the group and then Sally Porsche, who Georgie met somewhere or other. And so most of its life the group was me, Maggie, Sally, Georgie, Irene and then sometimes Annemarie and sometimes Corinne. The lineup fluctuated a bit from gig to gig. 

CAD: Are there specific influences on you as an improviser, or some way you can describe your growth as an improviser? 

L.C.: Yes, I always found it terribly hard to talk about improvisation ’cause for me everything seems to go on a fairly subterranean level, actually, I never quite know where it comes from. Probably I get slightly influenced as an improviser by everything I’ve ever heard but I’m sure there must be some specific influences except I can’t think of them at the moment. I know I used to admire Evan Parker very much, in the very early days when I started improvising, and certainly when the theatre group that I was in, which was a group called Ritual Theatre, in 1973 or something. The other musicians in that group were Clive Bell, who’s a flute and shakuhatchi player, and Billy Curry, who later achieved fame and fortune as a member of Ultravox and I think I was quite impressed by both of them actually since they were the first people that I had kind of a regular improvisation partnership with. So I’m sure that had an influence on the way I thought about my instrument. 

CAD: That’s interesting because I picture a lot of people as hearing some person or persons they admire and then going through a stage of “I want to sound like this,” then growing out of it. 

L.C.: As I said I really admired Evan but I never made much attempt to sound like him. I mean occasionally I find myself doing things that are a little bit like him but, no, I’ve never really done that very much. I mean sometimes I think I ought to, maybe I should be listening to saxophone players and going through little periods of learning all their licks and things, but I’ve never really done that. 

CAD: I’ve noticed that a lot of European groups have a theatre music sense to them, more so than American groups and I’ve wondered why. 

L.C.: The Feminist Improvising Group was always overtly theatrical, which at the time was totally going against what most improvisers were doing, and in fact made us quite unpopular in some cultures. It’s quite interesting to see that in fact we were quite influential, ’cause a lot of improvising musicians then started doing quite similar things to what we were doing. But at the time – a lot of the Dutch improvising musicians were quite theatrical, but we were doing – I mean we were right over the top, I mean we would improvise entire operas and have entire plots and dramas going on, you know which was very successful and sometimes absolutely diabolical. But that’s how it is  with improvisation anyway. (laughter) I mean I think what happened with FIG, it was quite interesting because, when we started our first gig, we were very consciously working with the idea of improvising our lives, we had things like bowls for washing up and things, on the first gig. We were just playing around with the kind of characters that we were in our lives as women, and a lot of the theatrical stuff in FIG grew out of that kind of thing. 

CAD: So this group should have been documented on video? 

L.C.: Certainly, yes. I think there was one video. I don’t think I ever even had a copy of it; but somebody once did film a gig we did in Rotterdam but I think that’s vanished. 

CAD: About FIG and the Canaille festivals, what is it about women presenting women? Is it to address some imbalance in the gig situation for women musicians? 

L.C.: Yes, I think there was certainly that, there was certainly a kind of statistical drive that was going on, but I think it was also exploring particular qualities and skills that women have which are actually very suited to improvisation. I mean I think women have a particular way of thinking on their feet, which is very interesting to use in an improvisation context. 

CAD: Is women presenting women a stage that addresses an imbalance, and then perhaps the imbalance someday no longer exists, or is it a thing in and of itself? 

L.C.: I think it’s both, really. I think that obviously we would all want there to be a time when it’s no longer necessary to draw attention to the imbalance because the imbalance doesn’t exist anymore, but at the same time, it is kind of like a positive celebration of women working with 

each other, rather than saying … this is not the mean, dispirited “there aren’t enough women in music so we’ve got to show you that we can do it.too.” I think the women’s movement has kind of moved on, or I hope it has, from that kind of winge-ing attitude. It is now, particularly I notice among the women that I work with, like in the Canaille group, that there’s been such a musical development, that it’s just a very, very positive thing, you know. It can just be a real celebration of working with each other. 

CAD: How long have you been working with (lyricist/singer) Sally Potter? 

L.C.: We met 10 or 11 years ago and we’ve been working together more or less ever since, on various things. The first major thing was the Golddiggers film which was, I can’t remember, ’82 or ’83. I suppose the Golddiggers film and Oh Moscow are the main things we’ve done. 

CAD: How did Oh Moscow come about? 

L.C.: Well, I’ve been thinking for a long time that it was time I wrote some sort of largish scale piece, and talked to Sally about it a bit. And I’ve wanted to write something about Europe, because I’m just terribly conscious of being European rather than English.

Mainly because I hardly ever work in England, and I identify completely as a European.

The idea of Oh Moscow came … Sally had spent quite a lot of time visiting the Soviet Union on various occasions, so bit by bit this idea of doing a piece about Europe and the Cold War grew. Then it was over a period of probably a year or two that I was doing little sketches of music and Sally was writing lyrics. And it was only when the Zurich Jazz Festival wrote and said, did I have anything that I could bring to the festival that year that I thought I should take that as an opportunity to finally get this piece done and put a group together to play it. So that provided the catalyst for getting it to actually happen. 

CAD: How many performances have there been so far? 

L.C.: There’ve been about almost 20, I think. 

CAD: And you’ve written for film and television? 

L.C.: Umm, yeah.

CAD: In England, mostly?  

L.C.: I did one film in Germany. All the others have been in England. It’s practically the only work I do in England mostly. I hardly perform there at all, but I do do film and theatre and dance writing in England. 

CAD: Can that music be described by instrumentation or genre? 

L.C.: I don’t know. My film music’s very different, it depends a lot on the film. I use wildly different instrumentation, and fairly different genres, although it’s all clearly my sort of style, but it just depends on the film a lot. 

CAD: Are you self-taught as a composer? 

L.C.: Yes, I am yeah. 

CAD: Is there anything I’ve left out that you feel a burning desire to talk about? 

L.C.: Um, I’ll probably remember it tomorrow. I guess I haven’t talked too much about what I’m actually currently involved in. You seem to have gone fairly comprehensively over the past, and the present does actually consist of things other than Oh Moscow because Oh Moscow, by its nature, doesn’t actually happen all that often.