Zach Cooper is a Grammy award winning composer, producer and songwriter based in North Carolina. He has contributed to works by Leon Bridges, SZA, The Weeknd, Jazmine Sullivan, Jon Batiste, Moses Sumney, Billy Porter, and Helado Negro, among others. Zach is also a founding member of experimental soul group, King Garbage. His work has been featured in Pitchfork, The Fader, Rolling Stone, and Guitar World Magazine, and he’s released records with RVNG Int’l, Styles Upon Styles and Mike Patton’s Ipecac Recordings.
Artist Statement:
I am a musician exploring fluidity and polarity through the musical practices of composing, improvising, recording, and songwriting. I strive to honor all that flows through my channel as myriad gifts of inspiration to be harnessed, shaped, and developed as “my work.” I’m interested in hearing where my work takes me, as it is often a mystery or surprise. I try to equally embrace, but not limit myself to musical habits, genres, mediums, or instruments.
This governing philosophy has sent me across the western musical canon; from collaborating within the Black American Music tradition, and the major-label pop music industry, to composing experimental chamber music, and developing an improvisation protocol. I value rigorous practice and study (in its many forms), and work to cultivate my own unique sounds and ideas to present a fresh and personal interpretation of the traditions that I contribute to (BAM, Pop, American Experimental Music). In this way, I aim to honor the ancestors of these various traditions, create economic and cultural multiplicity, and resist appropriative copycat tropes.
My current focus is two-fold; (1) using a DAW to write, record, and produce “popular music,” and (2) composing music within the RUT protocol. I can’t help but receive harmony, melody and lyrics. They come to me, from where I know not. So I heed these unique gifts by following their threads to completion, the best I can. On the other hand, RUT takes me into a more instrument-focused, abstract and conceptual frame of mind, centered in creating limits around improvisation as a means of composition. These 2 paths don’t necessarily cross or influence one another, but they do complement as parallel creative paths that fulfill me in unique ways.
I see myself in a lineage of Jewish American Composers. John Zorn once said “Jazz music went from Jelly Roll Morton to Cecil Taylor in 40 years, why can’t Jewish music do that?” This notion really interests me, and challenges me to consider my music as innately Jewish, whether I imbue my religious and cultural upbringing into my work intentionally or not. The innate politics of Jewishness also interests me, as I reckon with my ambiently zionist upbringing and the American-funded Israeli occupation and genocide in Palestine. A percentage of the taxes I pay on income I make from my music pays for Israeli weapons used to kill Palestinians. How does that make this Jewish composer feel? Ideally, the answer must be inextricable from the ethos, pathos, and logos of my work. Lastly, but most importantly, I acknowledge my privilege as a white cis-man from the United States, and the innate socio-economic benefits of my identity that have impacted the success of my career, and make it more likely for me to continue to succeed in my field. That said, I aspire to embody an egalitarian, anti-racist, anti-zionist, equity-politic in my immediate and national community as a husband, father, friend, neighbor, voter, and music-maker.
