William Parker & Cooper-Moore

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | The Carriage Barn Music Series and Usdan Gallery present a concert by William Parker and Cooper-Moore, with featured guest Michael Wimberly.

This event is part of a collaboration between the Carriage Barn Music Series and Usdan Gallery. The exhibition Milford Graves: A Mind-Body Deal is on display at Usdan Gallery February 27–April 27, 2024. This nationally touring exhibition gathers the many-layered and multifaceted work of Milford Graves and explores the practices and predilections of an extraordinary jazz innovator.

William Parker is an American free jazz double bassist, improviser, composer, educator, and author. Born in 1952 in the Bronx, New York, he studied bass with Richard Davis, Art Davis, Milt Hinton, Wilber Ware, Jimmy Garrison, and Paul West. While Parker has been active since the early 1970s, he first came to public attention playing with legendary pianist/innovator Cecil Taylor for over a decade, and has led the Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra since 1981. Parker is a prominent musician in the New York City experimental jazz scene, where he leads a number of groups and is associated with the Vision Festival, organized by his wife, the dancer Patricia Nicholson; he is also frequently noted for his community dedication, mentorship, and status as "free-jazz caretaker" and "unofficial mayor of the New York improvisational scene."

Cooper-Moore is a composer-improviser, instrumentalist, designer and builder of musical instruments, and music educator, living and working in New York City. A native of the Piedmont area of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, Cooper-Moore began studying piano at age eight. Four years later, he was listening to the musics of Thelonius Monk, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, and working on improvisation. He earned a BA in Music Education from The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. and later studied composition-arranging at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA. While his attention was focused on piano performance in New York clubs and touring abroad, Cooper-Moore began designing and building musical instruments and played them in collaboration with all kinds of artists at lofts, galleries, artist spaces, museums, and in the streets of New York City. He has over the years built an extensive instrument collection, using such material as paper, bamboo, metal, wood, and acrylic. He most often performs with his ashimba (a type of xylophone), bass diddly-bow, horizontal hoe-handle harp, three stringed fretless banjo, and electric mouth bow.