Electronic
Ronald Cooper
Chi è Ronald Cooper
Genere
Electronic
Funky cello? Golf balls? Gliding music? These strange terms represent the type of information that listeners interested in an artist such as cellist Ronald Cooper must come to grips with. Once that is done, there is not all that much else to absorb, since this type of studio musician comes wrapped in a shroud of obscurity that rivals foreign spies or the identity of voices on late-night television commercials for local pizza delivery. Scholars whose heads are buried deeply in research on studio musicians report that there is perhaps less than one paragraph of data, in total, on the entire population of studio violinists, violists, and cellists, most of whom are also part of the population of various classical orchestras, wherever they may reside.
This is in contrast to studio players such as drummers, bassists, or guitarists. The latter individuals have been more and more the subject of glowing biographies and historical reappraisal, in which the credit for making a record a hit grows in size as if these were snowmen, not sessionmen, being rolled down a hill covered with melting slush. It is a rare distinction in the music business, one of the few that actually has something to do with music rather than sex or money. Studio players in rhythm sections come up with grooves and feels that are an essential part of a hit record. Guitarists and keyboardists concoct stylish licks, often more important to the success of a rock or country song than the lyrics. A studio cellist such as Cooper, on the other hand, is asked to play material that a good deal of a given genre's audience simply wishes wasn't there at all. This is where terms such as "golf balls" and "gliding music" come in. The former expression is a good description of what a musical arrangement consisting mostly of held whole notes looks like. These types of string arrangements are common currency in pop music and orchestral pop concerts, resulting in
a lush string sound that's of little interest. "Gliding music" is one of the inevitable results, a term used in the '70s to describe so-called jazz productions on the CTI label. "Gliding" in this case is not a reference to aerial sports, but to making out or "hooking up" in new-millennium parlance.
Funky cello, on the other hand, can be viewed as an artistic pinnacle for Cooper, perhaps a shock to funky folk who feel there couldn't possibly be such a thing. The stack of Earth, Wind & Fire records that this cellist appears on proves differently, however. For the most part, the charts played by Cooper obviously improve as the listener moves backward in time, with this '70s Earth, Wind & Fire material obviously a vast improvement over '90s recordings by the ghastly Michael Bolton. Even more ambitious activity by the cellist can be traced back to the '60s, when he undertook projects on behalf of such adventurous arrangers as Quincy Jones, Doc Severinsen, and Don Ellis, the latter composer and bandleader obviously feeling that "golf balls" are something better hit with a club than a bow. ~ Eugene Chadbourne
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