Mike Cooper - Soprano - An Homage to Lol Coxhill (2024) [Hi-Res]

Mike Cooper fashions a heartfelt ode to the much missed Lol Coxhill here, enlisting a raft of soprano sax players to pay their respects to the free-improv great's overwhelming influence. There aren't many soprano sax players who have cast a shadow as long as Coxhill has. Cutting his teeth on US air force circuit playing jazz and blues, he dipped into the Canterbury scene in the '60s, going on to collaborate with everyone from Mike Oldfield and Shirley Collins to David Toop, Derek Bailey and Fred Frith. Cooper was long tangled with Coxhill; they had known each other since the '60s, and eventually formed an improv trio called The Recedents alongside drummer Roger Turner. The band lasted a good two decades, and Coxhill played on Cooper's 1996 solo plate 'Island Songs'. So who better to put together a memorial album? And typically for Cooper, 'Soprano' is a freewheeling set of experiments that capture Coxhill's outsized personality. Each track is made with a different soprano sax player, all of whom Coxhill touched in some way, and each track seems to veer in a completely new direction thanks to Cooper's eccentric hand. Opening track 'Warp and Weft' puts free jazz veteran John Butcher in the spotlight, who weaves and winds around Cooper's molten electronics, while on 'Koko Monteti', Cooper bolts together a set of stuttering breaks, leaving just enough room for Tzadik alum Eliott Sharp to add spouts and spurts over the top. 'Aimlessly' is even knottier, featuring a reverberated performance from Italian player Errico Di Fabritiis and a hallucinogenic boil of fragmented noises from Cooper, and on the wonked 'Downtown Rank Topping', Cooper splits piano phrases into loose, discordant grains, letting Brit legend Larry Stabbins wail over the surreal tangle of sounds.

Tracklist:
1.01 - Mike Cooper - Warp And Weft (6:19)
1.02 - Mike Cooper - Mr. Butterfly (5:26)
1.03 - Mike Cooper - Koko Monteti (4:05)
1.04 - Mike Cooper - Aimlessly (7:38)
1.05 - Mike Cooper - Eternal Breath (7:38)
1.06 - Mike Cooper - The Cox On The Hill (6:09)
1.07 - Mike Cooper - Dings (6:56)
1.08 - Mike Cooper - Requiem For One (5:32)
1.09 - Mike Cooper - Above Water Sax (6:01)
1.10 - Mike Cooper - Downtown Rank Topping (6:09)
1.11 - Mike Cooper - Shimmer (4:17)