Assif Tsahar (tenor saxophone, bass clarinet)
Cooper-Moore (homemade instruments)

Cooper-Moore is a composer-improviser, instrumentalist, designer and builder of musical instruments, and music educator living and working in New York City. A native of the Piedmont area of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, Cooper-Moore began studying piano at age eight. Four years later, he was listening to Monk, Mingus, and Ornette and working on improvisation.

Moving to New York in 1973, Cooper-Moore took over the five-floor 501 Canal Street building and transformed it into an artist living/work space, making a wealth of experimentation between performing and visual artists possible. While his attention was focused on piano performance in New York clubs and touring abroad, Cooper-Moore began designing and building musical instruments and played them in collaboration with all kinds of artist at lofts, galleries, artist spaces, museums, and in the streets of New York City. Over the years, Cooper-Moore has built an extensive instrument collection using such material as paper, bamboo, metal, wood, and acrylic. He most often performs with his ashimba (a type of xylophone), diddly-bow, and horizontal hoe-handle harp. Cooper-Moore is also respected as the official storyteller of Prospect Park in Brooklyn.

Assif Tsahar was born in Israel on June 11, 1969 and grew up in Tel-Aviv. He started playing guitar at age 14 and at 17 switched to saxophone. 12 years later he picked up the bass clarinet and added it to his musical studies. In 1990 at age 21, in pursuit of music, he came to New York and made it his home. Here in New York Assif has had the chance to play and record with a lot of the musicians who were the reason for making New York his home. In 1999 Assif started Hopscotch Records, a non-profit record label where the artist produce themselves and are in complete control of all artistic decisions.