Canadian Brass - FEATURE STORY

Chris Cooper Gets his Gold-plated Horn

By Ulla Colgrass, 1999

Chris Cooper, French horn player with The Canadian Brass, loves risk taking and adventure. He got plenty of both during his first concert as the youngest member of the famous quintet. It was played to a crowd of 40,000 who cheered at the popular Last Night at the Proms in London. Even freezing rain didn't dampen the enthusiasm in Hyde Park on that fall evening in 1998.

A year later, Chris is 32 and much has changed in his life. He has found four close friends in the seasoned Canadian Brass players: Ron Romm (trumpet), Gene Watts (trombone), Chuck Daellenbach (tuba), and in Jens Lindemann (trumpet) who, at 33, is close to Chris' age. The repertoire is coming together in all its dazzling variety for Chris, who had a classical background when he left San Francisco for The Canadian Brass.

"I love playing in an orchestra, and I also enjoy playing chamber music and brass quintets of Bach and Gabrieli. But I was always looking for more ways to express myself. So I was ready to stretch from Bach to the Beatles and actually found it was easy."

With the French horn, Chris was handed the hardest brass instrument to play, when he began his studying at age 12 in his San Jose, California, school band. Yet it turned out to be the perfect match.

"Luckily I never paid attention to people who said the horn was really hard to play. Soon after I started, my family moved to Rockport, Massachusetts, where the school had a great band program. Being near Boston I had access to a whole bunch of youth orchestras, so I spent weekends in Boston playing music. My father would drive me or I went by train."

"I consider Rockport my home, because I never really enjoyed myself until I moved there. I went from a city of over 100,000 to Rockport with 5,000 people. I was right on the ocean, my kind of living."

Chris thrived on his love of nature and love of music. Soon he joined the Greater Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra and won numerous competitions, including the New England Young Performers Solo Competition and the Presidential Scholars Award. He went to Boston University and continued at the San Francisco Conservatory.

"I was the only one in my family who moved back west, in 1992. I had been playing with the Empire Brass in Boston, but it wasn't going where I wanted to go. So I went to San Francisco to study with David Krehbiel who was principal hornist with the San Francisco Symphony. I had heard him on recordings. He's incredible all sound and musical line. He turned out to be a great teacher for me. We didn't spend much time on technique, but he worked on musicality, on being calm. After two years, he kicked me out and told me to get a job."

Chris brought his superb skills to the San Francisco Symphony where he was the first called sub, and he performed in Miami, Honolulu and Japan. At Tanglewood he studied on fellowships and received both the Harry Shapiro and Henry Kohn awards. He also married violist Gina Feinauer, who has kept her post with the San Francisco Symphony. The couple keeps their romance alive with lots of trans-continental flights.

"My wife loves me playing with The Canadian Brass. We spend quite a bit of time apart because we are musicians. If she lived in Toronto, we would be together more, but not a lot more because we are on the road so often. We have no children, just two cats."

The call from The Canadian Brass must have been irresistible. What did Chris know about the group?

"Everybody in the brass world knows The Canadian Brass! They have pushed the envelope in brass performance. They have created their own audiences. I got lucky because I didn't even know there was an opening. My name had been mentioned to them, and when we finally met and played together we fit quite comfortably. In the beginning, I was rather quiet until I understood the dynamics of the group. Now I look at them as colleagues and friends."

Chris has a special bond with Jens. After playing a show, the two sometimes sneak out to a video arcade and play head-to-head racing games. That is the only manifestation of the age difference between them and the other three Brass members Chris can think of.

Chris has been known to run off the edge of a mountain and paraglide from 9,000 feet. His leap into The Canadian Brass must have given him some of the same thrills and anxieties, having to learn a huge new repertoire, new musical styles, and even acting in the group's well-loved musical "playlets". He had a good resource in the hundreds of works that The Canadian Brass has published by Hal Leonard.

"It was a lot of work, but I like being on stage and being that much more responsible for a performance. I enjoy doing Carmen, for instance, but luckily I don't say a word. To speak into the mike and then turn around and play is difficult. Only Gene and Chuck do that. My playing has expanded with all this new repertoire. I have to dig deeper into my musical self to make Ellington sound good."

The Canadian Brass are on the road about 200 days of the year. They see each other more than they see their families. They all work on keeping their equilibrium to continue the ongoing creative process, and they need to stay healthy and fit to stand up to this strenuous life style.

"At first I just lived it up. I just loved touring and would eat big meals after performances, but that stopped when I gained too much weight. So now I'm going to a gym, and there is no more eating late at night. I even cut out my quadruple cappuccinos for breakfast."

Chris claims that he is not one to play it particularly safe, though that may apply only to his motorcycle riding, skiing and paragliding. (He'd love to parachute, but his wife won't let him.) How about breaking a limb or worse as he braves the elements?

"I don't think I could give an honest performance if I lived life that way. You have to be yourself. If you start changing your basic stuff you lose it."

In conversation Chris is very grounded and easy going, qualities that he takes with him on stage. This is no adrenaline-crazed adventurer. He has an effortless playing style on the horn, the gold-plated Yamaha that matches the other Canadian Brass instruments.

"I don't use a lot of pressure when I play and I stay very relaxed. As a result I get through a show without getting particularly tired it's more energizing for me. That may be because of my training or my nature or because I meditate every day (as do all members of The Canadian Brass).

New CDs are being added to over 50 already in circulation by The Canadian Brass. Chris appears on the latest two and he is on the group's much anticipated "Goldberg Variations" on the RCA Victor label.

" I have no idea where The Canadian Brass may be going. All I know is that we are always doing something new. I have seen how Chuck and Gene keep talking and talking and all of a sudden after many hours an idea pops up. I'm trying to open up my imagination so I can start contributing ideas for us. Right now I look forward to our 30th anniversary tour this coming season."

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