(Translated from my original Italian text by Gemini and Piero Scaruffi)
Bassoon and oboe player Lindsay Cooper of Henry Cow attained international status both for her instrumental skill and for her arcane and suggestive compositions.
Rags (ReR, 1981), featuring Sally Potter (vocals), Fred Frith on guitar and Chris Cutler on drums, revealed her accessible musical structures, and her warm, humble approach to songwriting.
Her first major work was the soundtrack for a feminist film (featuring Lol Coxhill on sax and Dave Holland on piano), Gold Diggers (SyncPulse, 1983),
directed by Sally Potter with an all-female cast.
Seeing Red - Iceland - Celeste's Room - Banker's Song - Celeste's Dream - The Ballroom - The Empire Song - Melodrama - Perfect Clue - Ruby's Gold - Dawn Skyline - Horse Waltz. She then played woodwinds in Mike Westbrook's jazz orchestra and served as a session musician for dozens of avant-garde records.
Cooper composed themes for films and performance shows, collected on Music For The Small Screen (Sync Pulse, 1984) and Music For Other Occasions (1986).
With Chris Cutler (percussion), Dagmar Krause (vocals), and Zeena Parkins (harp, accordion), she formed News From Babel, for which she composed the music. Work Resumed On The Tower (ReR, 1984), their masterpiece, is a frightening fresco of modern alienation and paranoia through three long nightmares: Arcades, Victory, Anno Mirabilis.
The CD version also contains the six "lieder" from Sirens and Silences (ReR, 1984): Odysseus, Auschwitz/Babel, Klein's Bottle, Black Gold, Devils, Dry Leaf.
Letters Home (Re, 1986) features nine poems by Cutler set to music by Cooper and sung by Krause, Robert Wyatt, and others.
News from Babel are perhaps the most imaginative heirs to the creative rock of Art Bears.
(Original English text by Piero Scaruffi)
Her solo career reached another peak with Oh Moscow (Victo, 1991),
a 1987 opera that boasts
a series of acrobatic vocal performances by Sally Potter and Phil Minton.
The theme (the suffering caused by the Cold War and the Berlin Wall) is
not particularly interesting, but the music is always challenging and
inviting.
In the same prolific year she also released the song cycles
An Angel On The Bridge (ABC, 1991)
and
Schroedinger's Cat (Femme Music, 1991).
Sahara Dust (Intakt, 1993) is another opera
(Phil Minton again on vocals), structured in five parts,
that musically belongs to jazz more than rock.
Pia Mater (Resurgence, 1998) is a lengthy solo improvisation, altered
via a computer by Charles Gray.
A View From The Bridge (Impetus, 1999)
is a 2-CD compilation of Cooper's work, including the entire
An Angel On The Bridge (1991),
the Concerto For Sopranino Saxophone And Strings (1992)
and the
Songs For Bassoon And Orchestra (1993).
The live Angels On The Edge Of Time (may 1992) featured Lindsay Cooper on soprano sax & bassoon, Fred Frith on guitar, violin & radio, Gianni Gebbia on alto & soprano sax & bird calls, and Lars Hollmer on accordion, melodica & keyboard.
Lindsay Cooper also composed A Face in the Crowd
for Rova's Bingo (april 1996).
Cooper died in 2013 at the age of 62.
