This Fresno musician is up for a Grammy. Nominated album an ode to composers of color

Kevin Cooper smiles somewhat shyly just thinking about attending the Grammy Awards next month at the newly minted Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles.

This is a “musician’s prom,” as his friend calls it, and nominees get a free invite. His wife is already busy looking for the right dress.

And even if he doesn’t win, Cooper gets to add “Grammy-nominated guitarist” to his résumé.

“Every step of the way has been dominoes falling in the most opportune way,” says Cooper, a guitar instructor at Fresno City College and a founding member of Agave Baroque, an instrumental group that performs centuries-old chamber music.

Make that, a Grammy-nominated instrumental group that performs centuries-old chamber music.

The group’s latest album, a collaboration with noted singer Reginald Mobley, is nominated for Best Classical Compendium, a category that puts it up against works from the San Francisco Symphony and jazz legend Chick Corea.

America’s black and brown classical composers

“American Originals: A New World, A New Canon” was recorded at Fresno’s Big Red Church in September 2020 at a time when it was one of the few spaces that hadn’t been shuttered by the pandemic. The church was open and accommodating to the group, whose members traveled from across the state and country and set up inside the chapel for several days.

The result is a musical journey that spans 400 years and two continents and spotlights works from black and brown composers — a group that has long been underrepresented, or simply forgotten in some cases, in the canon of American classical music.

In the album’s liner notes, Mobley writes that he “suppressed the disappointment that nothing worth hearing and knowing in classical music was ever written by anyone who looked like me.”

The album is an acknowledgment of the whitewashing of music history, he writes.

“The diversity we seek to recognize and celebrate in living composers has in fact always existed.”

“American Originals” features works from Black composers like Florence Beatrice Price, Scott Joplin and Justin Holland.

Price was the first Black woman to have a symphonic work performed by an American orchestra and Joplin is known for his ragtime compositions. Holland was classical guitarist from Virginia who built a name for himself as a performer, composer, and arranger before the Civil War.

He was also a well-known civil rights activist at the time, was involved in the Underground Railroad and worked alongside the likes of Frederick Douglass.

Says Cooper: “I went all through college getting classic guitar music degrees and had never heard of this composer.”

Stories that resonate in today’s social climate

“It feels like we’re archaeologists,” Cooper adds, about bringing forth the stories within the music.

Like that of Brazilian composer Jose Mauricio Nunes Garcia, a contemporary of Haydn and Amadeus Mozart. The grandparents of Nunes Garcia had been slaves, but he ended up being knighted as the composer for the royal family of Portugal, despite rampant racism of the time.

The idea for “American Originals: A New World, A New Canon” originally came from a tour Mobely did playing the music of Black American composers, and Agave Baroque had actually performed the pieces several times in concert before they decided to record the songs.

But the increased attention on social justice brought on by the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor added an urgency to the work, Cooper says, and helped it resonate with audiences, including the Grammy nominating committee.

“We struck a chord with the idea of this album.”

“There’s no reason the canon can’t have room for these composers.”