Bill Kopper
I am a Boulder, Colorado based guitarist mostly known for my grasp on
jazz and world music. I also do a fair amount of R&B and pop music and
have produced some recordings in that vein of late. And I love the music
of Brazil and have gotten into a branch of it called Choro - it's sort
of like their jazz music down there. It's what everone talks over at the
clubs until the samba starts. I also cannot escape the blues since I
grew up on the Mississippi River. I try to find that stuff in everything
I play.
Around here I've been doing a fairly large variety of
gigs - I played for several years with the late, great Billy Tolles.
Billy was a huge force - a link to the source of Jazz and Blues, a
masterful tenor saxophonist, and a peerless comunicator of all of these
things to the listener. I also have had a long-time musical friendship
with Sonya Vallet, a luminous, creative comet - She's a musician in the
original meaning of the word. Listen to her on "Samba de Chueca" as she
conjures this incredible Gypsy-Flamenco-Carioca spirit (She also wrote
the lyric).
We've worked together quite a bit over the years,
including an appearance at the Aspen Jazz Festival, and some gigs in New
York and Brooklyn. We will be finishing Sonya's debut recording this
summer, and playing some venues in Boulder and Denver while that is
going on. Stay tuned.
I have the fortune to be in the hippest,
most relaxed wedding band in the world, led by the incomparable Peter
Yellin. He's a first-rate vocalist and with genius stage chops. I
colaborated with him on his debut recording "Number One in China", which
was released last year.
Another recording that came out last
year was Rekha Ohal's second disc "I MIss Everything But You"; I played
on this and helped with some arrangements. She's done some world-class
song writing on this endeavor and it's not to be missed - check out her
stuff on rekhamusic.com
I've also done some gigs lately with MaxJazz artist Rene Marie (the best
working Jazz singer around right now); and I've just joined the quartet of
Bob Montgomery, who has put together a group that intergrates the guitar
into the horn section in a very unique way... Great arrangements and a very
fun project.
I've been working with Dexter Payne in a choro project
- I mentioned choro earlier - and this has been a real labor of love. It's
notoriously trickly to play and seems to delight in throwing off all but the
most studious musicians. Dexter has done this stuff for real in Brazil and
is probably the premier clarinetist in this idiom in the region. And I'm
also proud to be a part of the great Brazilian drummer Henrique de Almeida's
band "The Brazilian Jazz Project" along with keyboardist Jeff Jenkins and
Kim Stone (Rippingtons, Spyro Gyra).
Henrique just put out a superb
drum method book called "Brazilian Rhythms for the Drum Set" published by
Carl Fischer - the audio examples from the book include some of the group's
recent studio recording called "Samba Songs".
Another project that's
been really taking off is a group called "Ginga" - we do a wide range of
Brazilian music and some Venezuelan "Joropos" (up-tempo waltzes). We also do
some of my tunes, which is a real blast since this group can really play
them well!
And for fans of bi-tonal music, there is Brad Goode's
group - We've done a few gigs over the past year and this music is nothing
if not cutting edge. Brad is easily one of the top ten trumpeters in the
world - I never thought I'd be playing regularly with someone on his level.
Lastly and hardly leastly is a new recording that I produced and did
the musical arrangements on - "Cristina - La Aurora: Icaros from the
Amazon". Check out the tunes on the "music" page. As far as I know, this
music has never been formally recorded before this - only some field
recordings exist and those are relatively brief and/or of fairly low
recording quality.
