Press
A Celebration of Lindsay Cooper review – avant garde pioneer remembered
The Guardian
John Lewis, November 23rd, 2014
Ageing revolutionaries, prog aficionados and Italian communists pack this London jazz festival event, as Henry Cow reconvene 36 years on.
The show transforms when we revisit News From Babel, Cooper’s mid-80s quartet with harpist Zeena Parkins and two Henry Cow members. A lavish arrangement of Moss, with Greaves singing Robert Wyatt’s part, is quite lovely, as are Dagmar Krause’s ululating vocals on the haunting Late Evening, and Phil Minton’s howling, hiccupping performance on Dragon at the Gate.
Henry Cow and others play the music of Lindsay Cooper
AMN Reviews
November 22nd, 2014
The concert was conceived by Chris Cutler as a tribute to Lindsay Cooper. After getting commitment by the musicians to do it, if someone would present it, Cutler went searching for a gig. Finally he got someone associated with the London Jazz Festival to do it, and that was tonight’s concert.
Lindsay Cooper: a rebel with applause
The Guardian
Sally Potter, 20th November 2014
Classically trained musician Lindsay Cooper radicalised British jazz while battling multiple sclerosis. A year after her death, collaborator and friend Sally Potter pays tribute
When Lindsay Cooper stepped on to the stage of the Battersea Arts Centre, picked up her bassoon and started to play, I was transfixed. As a group, Henry Cow projected a radical image, rejecting the trappings of rock-star status and, it seemed, 4/4 time as well.
Lindsay Cooper gave rock bassoon a humane voice
The Boston Globe
Matthew Guerrieri, September 13, 2014
A year ago this week, British musician and activist Lindsay Cooper died from complications of multiple sclerosis. To label Cooper’s career unlikely says more about our own prejudices than about Cooper herself.
She was a woman in the then-overwhelmingly male world of rock; her favored instrument — the bassoon — was hardly standard equipment for the genre. But Cooper became an essential figure in avant-garde, politically-conscious rock.
Lindsay Cooper: Bassoonist with Henry Cow who who went on to write film music
The Independent
Pierre Perrone, October 4, 2013
In the belated rush to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Virgin Records there has been a tendency to forget the groundbreaking acts who were signed to Richard Branson’s label in the mid-1970s.
The bassoonist and oboist Lindsay Cooper was a member of the British avant-rock group Henry Cow, whose unusual, experimental approach took them to the outer edges of progressive music and free-form improvisation and earned them a strong following on the Continent.
Lindsay Cooper Obituary
The Guardian
John Fordham - 24 September 2014
The musician Lindsay Cooper, who has died aged 62 of complications from multiple sclerosis, was once concerned that an ensemble specialising in conventional opera would not be able to play one of her technically challenging compositions. Its conductor, a former biologist, advised her to think of the bee: aerodynamically, it should not be able to fly, but oblivious to this theoretical limitation, it does so nonetheless. Similarly, if left unaware that they were not designed for such cutting-edge work, the musicians would probably come up with the desired result anyway.