‘Weaned on the Horn’–The Mysterious Life of Ann Cooper

It’s a story almost as old as jazz itself: A musician is born in New Orleans, some time between 1900 and 1920, drawn magnetically to its music. After cutting their teeth in local bands they strike out across the nation, making their name in the dance halls and speakeasies of New York and Chicago. But occasionally that journey was made in reverse, as was the case with the little-recorded trumpeter Ann Cooper. Little-recorded in the sense that she cut few sides—although cutting any at all was an achievement for a female horn player in 1930s America, according to the Historical Dictionary of Jazz—and in the sense that we know relatively little about her life. Even the dates of her birth and her demise are so uncertain that Sherrie Tucker, the leading researcher of early 20th-century female jazz players, lists none in her comprehensive thesis A Feminist Perspective on New Orleans Jazz Women. Other than a few contemporary news cuttings, Cooper is referred to only tangentially in books about her various employers. So the following review of her career draws substantially from Tucker’s thesis, plus a few other sources not referenced by her. It’s the story of a trumpeter who strove to be and became prized not just as a “girl player” but as an outstanding musician—a fact attested to by the time she spent working alongside some of the Swing Era’s top talents. Ann Cooper was