EOU Music Professor collaborates on award winning song
By Laura Hancock
EOU Marketing, Development and Public Affairs
Posted 10/15/2009
Six musicians, two and a half days and one reel-to-reel tape recorder proved a winning combination for a jazz album showcasing the talents of Eastern Oregon University's own Matt Cooper.
Cooper, a professor of music at EOU, is the featured soloist for one particular song on the album that recently garnered the attention of the international music organization Just Plain Folks (JPF). The ballad "Blues for Julia" won third place for Best Jazz Instrumental at the 2009 JPF awards in Nashville.
"The JPF awards are like the Grammy's for musicians not represented by major record labels," Cooper said. "It's an honor for our group to receive this kind of recognition."
The song features an unaccompanied solo by Cooper as the introduction and another solo later on.
"The piece is not composed in a traditional 12-bar blues form," Cooper said. "It's a really beautiful and melodic song—very smooth jazz station material."
JPF selected "Blues for Julia" for an award out of thousands of entries from around the world. Composer Garry Hagberg said submissions included former Grammy winners. Hagberg, a philosophy professor at Bard College in New York, also said there is just one criterion for the award: the piece must move the listener.
Hagberg wrote the song for his wife, Julia.
"Blues for Julia" is on the album "Clovis," produced in 2005 under the Teal Creek Music label. Other musicians collaborating on the project are Tom Bergeron, Keller Coker, Graham Lear and Glen Moore. Bergeron taught at EOU in the late 1980s and is now a faculty member at Western Oregon University. Coker also teaches at Western. Lear and Moore are professional musicians living in Portland.
While the "Clovis" group is entertaining the possibility of another album, Cooper is busy playing piano and Hammond organ in his own group, the Matt Cooper X-Tet, featuring Greg Johnson on saxophone, the vocals of Sharon Porter and Teun Fetz on drums.
Cooper also directs the EOU Jazz Ensemble and plans to bring saxophonist Barry Bergstrom to La Grande for a performance Nov. 20.
"Clovis" is available at Sunflower Books, the Bookloft in Enterprise, Betty's Books in Baker City and online at CDBaby.com, where a clip of "Blues for Julia" and other songs from the album are also accessible.
