The format of this concert was inspired by my friend Pat Thomas and a concert that he gave in Koln where he played the first half on acoustic piano and the second half with electronics from his lap top computer, exhibiting his talent improvising with both instruments.

Due to current restrictions and expense, not to mention the possibility of damage and loss, of travelling by air with an acoustic guitar I don’t get to do so many concerts these days of this type. I am mostly playing a folding electric lap steel guitar to avoid all the afore mentioned hazards.

My National guitar, which has been with me for 66 years, is a Tri-Cone Resonator made in 1932 just ten years old than me. National guitars were invented by John Dopyera who loved Hawaiian music but wanted a guitar that would be loud enough to be heard above other instruments in an ensemble. This was pre-electric guitar times.

The invention or discovery of playing guitar with a steel bar, or the lap steel style, is credited to a Hawaiian named Joseph Kekuku. At the end of the 1890’s he not only invented this new way of playing guitar he also revolutionized the guitar by raising the strings away from the finger board and, also in search of more volume from his new instrument, he invented finger picks worn on the ends of the fingers to pluck the strings. No one had ever done this before.
Resonator guitars are at their loudest when played with finger picks a method that I pursued, and some sometimes still do, for many years. In recent years I have also begun to play without finger picks and developed a different technique as a result. Both have advantages and disadvantages. For the most part this concert is played without finger picks.

In the 1990s a luthier friend the late lan Timmins made me a copy of my National in carbon fibre. Alan was a clock maker who also built racing car bodies, which is why he knew about carbon fibre and why he called the guitar an F1 Resophonic Tri-Cone. That is the instrument that I play on this session.

The first half of the concert is totally acoustic recorded with exterior microphones and, despite a member of the audience thinking otherwise, is completely improvised, much like Pat Thomas’s piano concerts. There might be references to some other musical styles; even a passage from a song or tune but they are passing moments witnessed as in a dream perhaps. A violin bow and an electronic e-Bow are employed in some sections emulating a string section or voice or birdsong. The body of the instrument is also a perfect drum kit and various timbre and rhythms are explored in certain passages.

The second half of the concert is presented using an iPad mini 5, again Pat Thomas recommended this piece of equipment to me. I explore a couple of apps which allow me to do some live sampling and live manipulation. Again it is an improvisation and nothing planned until the final moments when I sing a version of a Bob Dylan song across a harmonically totally unrelated backing from the iPad produced ‘on the wing’.

I don’t see this music as falling into any particular genre other than improvised music even though some hard core ‘improvised music’ fans might not even think of it as that. It is just the result of my playing a lot of different music on these particular instruments for six decades. Blues, Hawaiian, Greek, Free Improvisation, Pop Songs, Reggae, Jazz tunes, Vietnamese, Korean, Folk, African, Indonesian, Balinese, European Avant New Music, Australian, New Zealand (Maori), Morton Subotnick, Xenakis, Stockhausen, Scelsi, Warren Burt, Bob Ostertag, John Zorn, David Toop, Lol Coxhill, Sonny Sharrock, Eugene Chadbourne, Henry Kaiser, Elliott Sharp, Steve Beresford, Pat Thomas, Son House, Fred McDowell, Sam Ku West, Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra and more Sun Ra, have all influenced this music.

This is a live recording in front of an audience which is for me the best situation for recording improvised music without resorting after the fact to extensive editing. Thanks to Marco Contini for facilitating the situation for it to happen.

Dedicated to Richard Nunns, Cyril Lefebvre and Geoff Hawkins. You exuded light with your music and friendship.

– Mike Cooper