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The Abreviated Life Story of Christopher Robin Cox:
I spent my formative years in Guerneville, California, a very small Northern town that sits along the Russian River - one of California's real gifts. Guerneville turned from a socially liberal, artist/beatnik/hippy/New York transplant refuge with cheap housing and beautiful scenery, to another unfortunate casualty of the 1990s economic boom that swallowed much of the Bohemian culture of the Northern California coast in its wake. It's still beautiful, but really only available to those who can afford it.
Guerneville was also home to a now defunkt institution called the River Theater. It was there that my musical urges were pushed on, seeing bands like Zero, Tower of Power, Johnny Otis, the Zazu Pitts Memorial Orchestra, and hundreds of other world class acts that lived local really made me want to play something.
I picked up the trumpet in the fourth grade, along with the saxophone, the baritone horn, and then the trombone; never knowing which one I wanted to take seriously. Everything changed when I got a brand new trombone from the band teacher, Mrs. Anita Styles. What a ball of fire she was! Not more than a few years before her death, she had her picture in the local paper, as a result of chaining herself to a giant Redwood tree behind her home, in an attempt to save it from certain timber. That's another thing about the Russian River, the humongous and incredibly beautiful Redwood trees, the largest trees in the world. Anyway, Anita Styles had some money to blow for new band instruments, and since I "look like a trombone player", she bought one for me. I'll never forget seeing that thing brand new in the case. May she enjoy many returns in whatever form she is living now.
The rest is history. By the time I was 16, I was already playing big band gigs locally and sitting in with blues bands at every bar in town, spending my set breaks sitting on the stage, part of the deal I worked out with the bar owners. Then came the jazz. George Cremaschi, a bass playing veteran of the New York loft scene, had relocated to Guerneville to open up a health food store called Food for Humans. I know, it sounds like a Tom Robbins plot, but I don't think even Tom Robbins could come up with this one. Every time my mother and I would go to George's store, usually because we were next door doing our laundry, he would give me a new tape of some jazz to listen to. Sometimes I long for those simple days before the Internet, reality TV, and fascistic Presidents.
I devoured Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Craig Harris, Ornette Coleman, and many others, and by the time I was 17 I was jamming In Walked Bud (the first jazz tune I ever learned) with George and a drummer who went by the name Ceon. It was amazing, being a young man playing in a trio with two heavy duty avant-garde jazzers from New York City.
On it went. Upon graduating high school I studied jazz at the Santa Rosa Junior College, while playing trio gigs at local coffee houses, often playing with bassist Ron Crotty, who played with Dave Brubeck way back in the 1950s.
From there, I got accepted to Manhattan School of Music. I needed to go there to learn that being a straight ahead jazz player was anathema to who I really am, and that conservatory culture sucks. Nevertheless, I learned amazing amounts not only from great teachers like Steve Turre, Jack Gale, and Hal Janks, but from being in school at Manhattan at the same time as Chris Potter (Steely Dan), Eric Lewis (winner of the Monk piano competition), Ari Ambrose (Boz Skaggs), Michael Leonhart (S.Dan), and Ryan Kisor to name but a few. The real education was going out every night, and I mean pretty much EVERY night, to hear the most amazing musicians in the world.
In the end, conservatory life was not for me. I did go back to New York again, twice, to make a stab at "making it". I had great bands, and actually did okay, but I just could not learn to live in New York while being poor. For me, it was not worth it. The music education was though.
Off and on, from 1993-1995, I worked on board cruise ships for Carnival and Norwegian. The traveling was cool, but the partying wasn't, so I had to take a break from that. Then, I ended up at Sonoma State University, a small school back in Sonoma County. The music program there was so good, I scarcely can understand why I didn't take advantage of it way earlier one. Guitarists Liberty Ellman and Dave MacNab, Saxophonist Eric Crystal, Bassist Hillel Famillant, and drummers Jameo Brown and Elliot Humberto Kavee all graduated from SSU's very small but focused jazz program.
Still, I found that the straight ahead thing was just not going to work for me. So I started a band called the Fifty-first Monkey, and we played all original funky jazz free-form stuff. A newspaper once said we were, "King Crimson meets Ornette Coleman." That lasted quite some time, and I consider it the most important growth period in my playing in my whole career. Around the same time I met Marco Eneidi, one the greatest alto players alive bar none, who you will never hear about. He is a fierce improviser, who could give two shits about a "two five one". He is the reason I got heavy into the deep creative improvised music scene of San Francisco, leading to gigs with the late Glenn Spearman, Bertrum Teretsky, Wadada Leo Smith, ROVA, and even Cecil Taylor. Playing with artists like that changes a person for good. Once you have slid your chair across the stage at a giant theater, as part of the Cecil Taylor Orchestra, the finale performance of the San Francisco Jazz Festival, one's ideas of the limits of music and art simply de-conventionalize, right before your eyes.
Skipping forward a bit, I needed to make money. So, I started playing with a "neo swing" band, during the huge swing resurgence that took San Francisco by storm in the early 90's. With Acme Swing Company, I toured the US and Canada, and opened for the likes of Big Bad Voodoo Daddy (who we hated), and Royal Crown Review (who we loved). We played the Fillmore, Bimbo's 365 Club, and even Candlestick Park. We lived like rock stars for about two years straight, and you know what that means. Again, I needed to take a break. This time I went back to cruise ships, but not to become a better musician; I did it for the travel, and travel I did.
Fifteen countries later, I found myself in Budapest, Hungary, working on a book - which I don't think I will ever finish, but who knows. That is where I met my wife at the same time I was figuring out that being a professional trombonist began - for me - to mean playing other people's often shitty music for money and playing my own music for nothing or next to nothing. It was time for an extended break from the music world.
All my life, I had been obsessed with politics, but could not live without music; call it an addiction if you like. So I thought, why not go back to school for a degree in what I am obsessed with? What's the point in studying the thing I am addicted to, the thing I can't live without? Do junkies study heroin? No, they just do it. I once knew an old musician who said, "I work a day job to support my musical addition." He was the best trombonist I have ever known actually.
In 2003, with a new Hungarian finance, whom I am married to now, I re-enrolled in Sonoma State University as a political science student, and it was the best damn decision I have ever made. Well, I guess it's all relative. Anyway, it is as a result of that degree in political science, and my two year internship with the world-renowned media watchdog organization Project Censored, that landed me here in Saint Paul, Minnesota. In my mind, the Twin Cities is the last sane urban locale in the United States, and it has a music scene that puts San Francisco to shame! I am proud to call myself a Minnesotan, at least until I decide to become an ex-patriot again and move back to Hungary to live out my days on a small organic farm/yoga studio/publishing house/recording studio.
In the meantime, I work a day job to support my musical addiction.
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