Harold Cooper

Sometimes credited as just plain old Harry Cooper, this early jazz trumpeter moved to Kansas City as a child and first took up his horn in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps Band. He was still in high school when he began gigging with the likes of Bennie Moten and George E; Lee, i.e. very heavy musical company. In the early '20s he was studying architecture but continuing to gig with local bands. After moving to Baltimore he began backing up singer Virginia Liston, who was responsible for providing the trumpeter with his first recording dates in the early '20s. Adding a few more players, Liston's group evolved into the famed Seminole Syncopators, pianist Graham Jackson assuming the main leadership duties. The band became quite popular in Atlanta, Georgia, where it was booked into one theatre for no less than three months. By the end of 1924 the trumpeter was hanging in New York and playing with Billy Fowler and Elmer Snowden. In 1926 Cooper was in, then out, then back in, then back out of Duke Ellington's steadily enlarging cavalry. Sometimes he would bow out of an Ellington gig in order to lead his own unit. By the end of the '20s he had taken up an opportunity that would completely change both his career and life. Bandleader Leon Abbey took the trumpeter to Europe where a musical relationship also developed with another famous early expatriate, Sam Wooding. Cooper never returned from Europe, even hanging around France during the Nazi occupation and managing to make a few recordings under the noses of stormtroopers who sometimes also happened to be swing lovers. Collections such as Jazz Sous l'Occupation: Under the Nazis on the Universal label deal with this fascinating period. Cooper died in Paris. ~ Eugene Chadbourne, All Music Guide