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Clare Cooper with Fred Lonberg-Holm
Lampo; Sat 23
We must give credit where it’s due: Joanna Newsom has raised the public profile of the harp considerably in nonclassical circles. What her audience probably hasn’t noticed is that, even though she (rather successfully) conceals it with her own heaping helping of magic pixie dust, her technique is pedestrian, at best.
It’s one of the reasons why we’re thrilled to catch Australian harpist Clare Cooper, who makes her Chicago debut this weekend. The 26-year-old has said she wants to “break this typecast of the harp being just angelic and soothing. It still is those things, but I would like for people to know it can sing songs other than lullabies.”
Her awe-inspiring technique and daring collaborations show she is doing just that. Cooper plays both the concert harp and the guzheng, a traditional Chinese harp, and has collaborated with German lip-sucking trumpeter Axel Dörner and the city’s own brilliant percussionist Michael Zerang. On both instruments, she is the kind of thrill-seeker the music world usually loses to the electric guitar. Taking self-avowed inspiration from Harpo Marx (an exceptional improvising harpist—see YouTube for proof), Jimi Hendrix and Sun Ra, Cooper spins tumbling thickets of extreme beauty and atonality, while the harp’s resilient beauty is left untouched.
Fred Lonberg-Holm, the Chicago cellist a few decades her senior, has taken a similarly maverick path in his career. He’s not the first to improvise on cello, but by using amplification, effect pedals and a postmodal vocabulary; he has reinvented the instrument’s place in improvised music. Together their approach to these traditionally classical instruments should be revolutionary—no pixie dust needed.
