Vinny Golia Trio in Northampton

In our age of university-educated jazz artists, the number of self-trained musicians is small and dwindling. Vinny Golia, who brought his trio to the Parlor Room in Northampton, MA on January 10, is one of them. Trained as a visual artist, Golia started his musical journey at age 25 when he bought a soprano saxophone with money earned creating album art for Chick Correa. The Los Angeles-based multi-instrumentalist, who turns 80 in a couple of months, can be found on over 500 recordings, and has mentored generations of southern Californian improvisers. Pretty good for an autodidact.

The trio was to include bassist Ken Filiano, whose relationship with Golia began in 1978. But Filiano recently had hand surgery and was unavailable. Drummer Michael TA Thompson, whose shared history with Golia also dates to the late-70s, suggested Cooper-Moore, the iconoclastic pianist. The only problem: there is no piano in the Parlor Room, so Cooper-Moore, who also turns 80 this year, brought his array of handcrafted string instruments. It changed everything.

Instead of a band of long-time collaborators, we saw the first interaction between two highly regarded elders. That Golia and Cooper-Moore had never played together and only met the day of the gig, gave the evening a miraculous quality. Where else but in the jazz world can artists create beautiful music together with no pre-conception?

By centering the blues throughout the performance, Cooper-Moore rooted the improvisation and gave us footholds. I don’t know that Cooper-Moore considers himself a shaman, but on Saturday he was definitely connecting us to the spirit world. The sounds he produced on his home-made instruments: diddley-bow, harp, fretless banjo and mouth harp, felt both ancient and contemporary, conjuring African kora, early Delta blues guitar, the funky bass of Fred Thomas, and the electronics of Morton Subotnick, all of it filtered through an expansive (avant-garde) sense of time and harmony. The results were transcendent.

Cooper-Moore has lived the bifurcated life of a contemporary creative musician: making ends meet busking on the streets of New York and receiving a Lifetime Achievement award from the Vision Festival in 2017. Born and raised in Virginia, he spent time in Hartford, where his brother-in-law, pianist Emory Smith, was a mentor. He also lived in Boston and knows Easthampton through a long-ago girlfriend. He’s a trusted colleague of William Parker, David S Ware, Bill Cole, Chad Taylor and Gerald Cleaver, and has created music for theater and dance with Rita Dove, Laurie Carlos, Marlies Yearby, Emily Mann and Carl Hancock Rux. Cooper-Moore is a fierce, one-of-a-kind musician who has lived an extremely rich life in the arts, a thoughtful, kind and soft-spoken renaissance man with a wise demeanor. 

Michael TA Thompson sat on stage between his band mates, providing pulse and connective tissue. His responsive rat-a-tat, played at just the right volume, propelled the music and gave it shape. Repeatedly, he locked in with Cooper-Moore, the evening’s de facto bass player, to groove, although invariably the groove would change and move on. His use of wooden xylophone and thumb piano gave the evening a hint of Codona. As loose, sinewy lines emerged from the stage, I kept coming back to the words of Elliott Sharp: “Rightness, not accuracy, is necessarily the goal.” Thompson, who grew up in the U.S. Virgin Islands, is Golia’s east coast drummer of choice, and at 70 he remains a talent deserving wider recognition. Roy Campbell, Jr. was his entrée into the New York scene, where he has collaborated with William Parker, Joe McPhee, Charles Gayle, Oliver Lake, Matthew Shipp, Henry Grimes and Jason Kao Hwang. He also has a foot in the Caribbean music world, having toured and recorded with Clypsonians, The Mighty Sparrow and Owen Gray.

With the exception of Scott Robinson, Vinny Golia plays more horns than anyone I know. He has mastered dozens of saxophones, clarinets, flutes and other reed instruments; he brought six of them to the Parlor Room, including tenor, soprano and sopranino sax. His brief turn on piccolo, with Cooper-Moore on harp, produced beautiful overtones of Japanese shakuhachi and koto music. Nine Winds, the label Golia established in 1977, has done major work documenting the creative music scene in southern California. Its catalogue of 170 recordings includes work by Bobby Bradford, John Carter, Mark Dresser, Bert Turetsky, Nels and Alex Cline. As a self-trained outsider who only came to music in his 20s, it’s interesting that Golia ended up in the academy. He has mentored (and hired) generations of students at CalArts, where he has taught since 1999. Golia told me that having access to talented students who could bring his large scale compositions to life, was a blessing for both him and his students. He played with an open heart and open ears, happily enmeshed in the spontaneous, wide-ranging, three-way conversation.

Golia and Cooper-Moore were both part of William Parker’s Little Huey Orchestra in 1995 when over two nights at the Knitting Factory, they recorded Sunrise in the Tone World. But Golia and Cooper-Moore performed on different days, so we have Michael TA Thompson to  thank for providing the impetus to bring these two titans together for the first time.