Mike Cooper
For the past 40 years British guitarist Mike Cooper has traced a path completely his own. With his roots lying in acoustic country blues, Cooper has arguably stretched the possibilities of the guitar even more than his better known contemporaries. After his defining debut 'Oh Really!?' in 1969, Cooper cut five important LPs in the 1970s leaping fearlessly from pure blues to folk flecked with free jazz and improvisation, in turn arriving at the avant-garde in the late 70s. Along with a gang of renowned free-improvisers including saxophonist Lol Coxhill, he formed the Uptown Hawaiians in the 1980s and thus began expanding his oeuvre to focus on his life-long love of Pacific music and culture. 1994 marked his first visit to Australia and he has been back every year since performing a culmination of all his musics, as well as live scoring for classic silent films, installations and collaborations, all under the genre Ambient Electronic Exotica. Cooper who also runs his own CDR label Hipshot.
Cooper's sound is an eclectic mix of all the styles he has practiced over the years. He tries his best to keep it sounding fresh for himself and his audience. It's a mix of the blues, folk and free improvisation and electronics combined with the sounds of the Pacific, mostly played on lap steel guitar in the true Hawaiian style, with Cooper's vocals sitting atop. It is evident that Cooper is all for challenging himself musically at any given concert. "I try to make as much of my concerts as improvised as possible. Even if I'm singing songs I try to play them different each time if I can these days... I don't have an act or agenda about the music other than to be entertaining, poetic, poltical and provocative."
http://homepage.mac.com/cooparia
http://www.myspace.com/cooparia
http://www.myspace.com/hipshotrecords
