Pete Cooper
Born in the Midlands, long based in London, Pete Cooper teaches, plays, composes and writes about fiddle music. He’s also, on a good night, a decent singer. Drawing on a wide knowledge of fiddle playing, gained over years of teaching, study, travel, practice and too many late-night sessions, he brings a relaxed, good-humoured delivery to his workshops, concerts and folk-club shows alike. Pete and Richard Bolton (cello and guitar) have worked together as Cooper and Bolton since 2000, performing English roots fiddle music and songs, including many of Pete’s own tunes. ‘Not a dud track’ wrote one critic of their latest (2006) CD ‘The Savage Hornpipe’ (BC 103). Pete also sings and plays in the English/ Old Time trio Rattle On The Stovepipe, with Dave Arthur (vocals, 5-string banjo, guitar, melodeon) and Chris Moreton (guitar and vocals). Their new (2006) and much-praised CD ‘Eight More Miles’(WGS 333) is on the WildGoose label.
It’s as a fiddle teacher and workshop leader that Pete is best known to many. A stalwart of Hands On Music weekends in Witney, Oxfordshire, he’s also tutored since 1996 at Folkworks events in the north-east of England, inspiring many of the new generation of young performers on the British folk scene. Since 1998 he has directed annual courses for classical violinists and young fiddlers, initially with violinist Michael Spencer, at London’s prime chamber music venue, Wigmore Hall, and at the Dartington International Summer School. Pete also coaches the Stockport-based Fosbrooks youth group, and in 2004 performed with them in China, representing Britain at the 6th International Folk Arts Festival, Huangshan City. He’s been a visiting fiddle tutor on the folk degree course at Newcastle upon Tyne, and at the University of Cork, Ireland. He’s led workshops in Scotland, at the Edinburgh Fiddle Festival, at Blazin’ At Beauly (2002) and Taransay Fiddle Week (2003), as well as organising his own annual weekend workshops, at Glebe House, Cornwall (1988-1995), Barton Pines, Devon (1996-99), in the Somme, France and elsewhere.
Background
Born in 1951, Pete studied classical violin while at grammar school in Stafford, though with no plan to become a musician. He gained his BA degree in English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford, before moving to Brixton, south London. There he became a ‘political’ squatting activist. He also played fiddle in ‘Cuckoo’s Nest’, who once played support for ‘The 101-ers’, Joe Strummer’s band before The Clash. Pete recently took part in Vanessa Engle’s documentary film ‘Property Is Theft’, in BBC TV’s ‘Lefties’ series, and talked about his political activities in Villa Road in the 1970s, including joining a Primal Scream commune. He also sang Leon Rosselson’s ‘The World Turned Upside Down’, which is about the Diggers. Writing on the website of the right-wing Social Affairs Unit, reviewer Richard D. North commented: ‘It seems to have been a narrow world, divided into Marxist and Freudian tribes - into sloganisers and primal-screamers. Only Pete Cooper - now a fiddle player - seems to have belonged to both. His lovely singing nearly made one like those nasal whinges of the primordially dissident.’
Pete in Villa Road Brixton in 1975
After a spell in Co. Donegal, Ireland, Pete set out to make his living as a musician, first as a busker on the streets of Europe, and later, after an inspiring fiddle trip to West Virginia in 1978, as a folk club performer, initially with dulcimer player and singer Holly Tannen, whom he met in Ostend while both were waiting for a night ferry back to England. They recorded ‘Frosty Morning’ in 1979 (including a couple of tracks with Martin Simpson on guitar), and their two-and-a-half year partnership ended with a successful tour of California in 1981.
  
Frosty Morning LP with Holly Tannen
Pete’s subsequent duo (1982-1990) with folk revival singer Peta Webb won widespread praise on the English folk-club circuit. ‘Smashing music from a winning combination of two strong voices and twin fiddles,’ said Folk Roots magazine of their 1986 LP ‘The Heart Is True’, which also featured, among others, Rory MacLeod on harmonica.
 
The Heart is True LP with Peta Webb
Pete teamed up with guitarist and piano-player Lawrie Wright in 1983 to play the first of several month-long, six-nights-a week bar gigs in Norway (until 1986). There, with four 40-minute sets a night to fill, they developed, along with fiddle tunes, a big enough repertoire of rock, country and jazz standards never to be short of a song at a party again. (Pete also took the opportunity to learn hardanger fiddle tunes from local players on his night off.) Nearer home they played until the late 1990s at countless weddings, parties and pub gigs, and for dances as the ‘Ragged But Right’ string-band with bluegrass maestro Pete Stanley (banjo) and Laurie Harper (bass). The dance caller was Nigel Hogg, with whom Pete still works.
with Nigel Hogg
Pete set up his teaching business ‘Fiddling From Scratch’ in 1986, and from 1987 ran adult education courses in traditional fiddle at the Working Men’s College and the Mary Ward Centre, London (continuing to do so until 1998 and 2001, respectively). His classes and one-off workshops were soon attracting up to forty fiddlers at a time. He taught tunes by ear, with written music to take home. The twice-weekly demand for fresh course material, combined with his kid-in-a-sweetshop response to hearing ‘new’ fiddle styles, stimulated Pete’s researches, not only into the Irish and Old Time music he already played, but English, Cajun, Scottish, Swedish, Norwegian and, after visiting Hungary in 1990, central European and Balkan styles as well.
Books etc
Pete put together his first tunebook, ‘All Around The World’, published by Dragonfly Press, in 1990, and produced a tape of the tunes. The book is now long out of print, though the Scandinavian, and some of the Old Time, tunes have recently been re-released on his 2004 compilation CD, London Sessions (Big Chain BC102). From 2001 he brought all his regular group classes under one roof at Cecil Sharp House, home of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, and set up his own London Fiddle School.
 
Fiddle Album - many of the tunes are now on
London Sessions
By 1990 Pete had started writing tunes himself, prompted initially by a request for an Italian-style fiddle piece for Peter Greenaway’s 1987 film Belly Of An Architect, which he speedily delivered. When his musical partnership with Peta Webb ended, he formed Vivando with composers Kathryn Locke (cello) and Geoff Coombs (mandola and tenor guitar), and (for a while) New Orleans fiddler Neti Vaan. (Kathryn and Geoff also played on ‘All Around The World’, as well as on Pete’s 1993 ‘Irish’ album, ‘The Wounded Hussar’.) The band became the vehicle for some highly original new pieces inspired by celtic and east European music, several of them captured on their tape-only demo album,‘Vivando’ in 1995. Sadly, the original master tapes were lost after the band’s demise.
Vivando in 1995
Among Vivando’s high energy performances at folk clubs, theatres and arts centres, some of the best were at Joe Giltrap’s legendary pub venue, the Weavers, in Newington Green, which became Pete’s musical home from home for several years. He played monthly ‘Pete Cooper and Friends’ gigs there in the late 1990s, often with Lawrie Wright on guitar, Alan Gibson on double bass, and various visiting guest musicians, including some of his students at the time. In 1992 the same pub, The Weavers, was the birthplace of the London Fiddlers’ Convention, a remarkable annual gathering of London-based fiddle players, now in its fourteenth year. Along with fiddlers Bob Winquist and Chris Haigh, bass-player Bernard O’Neill, and others, Pete is still actively involved with the project, both on and off the stage. After the Weavers closed down in 1999 the Convention transferred to Cecil Sharp House.
Also in the early 1990s, Pete wrote a tutorial book/ double CD The Complete Irish Fiddle Player (Mel Bay, 1995), which, though originally a labour of love, has gone on to become an international bestseller. His latest book/ CD, imaginatively entitled English Fiddle Tunes (Schott, 2006), presents ninety-nine tunes from English fiddle traditions, past and present, while Irish Fiddle Solos, published in 2004 by Schott in Europe and Mel Bay in America, explores Irish regional fiddle traditions from Cork and Kerry to Donegal. Pete writes a regular ‘Fiddle Corner’ column in FiddleOn magazine, and has contributed reviews and articles to fROOTS, Musical Traditions, Music Teacher and The Strad, as well as study notes for all the Wigmore Hall ‘Fiddle Days’.
Concert Poster
In 2000 classical violinist Simon Blendis commissioned Pete to write ‘The Dartington Jig’ for his Bach tribute, ‘Partita’, and the two fiddlers also performed a concert programme at Wigmore Hall in March 2006. Karen Tweed and Timo Alakotila recorded his tune ‘Melting’ in 2001 on ‘May Monday’ (FYCD003). Pete has also written incidental music for various radio, TV and film productions over the years, and fiddle compositions continue to flow in his partnership with Richard Bolton. He appears (as himself) in Mark Norfolk’s new film ‘Crossing Bridges’ (Prussia Lane, 2006), playing his tune ‘Angel’s Waltz’.
Pete’s a member of the Performing Rights Society (PRS) and Musicians’ Union.
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