Part 1

Name: Jeff Cosgrove
Occupation: Drummer, composer, improviser
Nationality: American
Current Release: Jeff Cosgrove teams up with Noah Preminger on sax and Kim Cass on bass for Confusing Motion for Progress, out now.
Recommendations: The book the Midnight Library by Matt Haig really inspired me. I’ve given it to a lot of friends. It is a story about living the life we have and how we show up for the people in our lives. I loved it.
Music would be Steve Olson’s X Trio Decorating Time. There is a freedom and playfulness that I love in this record. Everyone is listening and it just feels good.

[Read our Noah Preminger interview]

If you enjoyed these thoughts by Jeff Cosgrove and would like to know more, visit his official website. For an even deeper dive, read our earlier 15 Questions Jeff Cosgrove interview.



Do you think that some of your earliest musical experiences planted a seed for your interest in improvisation?

Honestly, I think that my life experience planted more seeds in my connection to improvisation than my early musical experiences. I would hear the change in people’s tone of voice or sense a shift in their body language and adapt to that moment. It gave me a great sense of openness and connection while being able to move within a situation.

The music I was exposed to growing up was very structured – show tunes, military bands, soul music, etc. Musically, those life experiences just started to flow over and kind of mixed with more of the structured music I was hearing.  

When did you first consciously start getting interested in musical improvisation?

Improvisation started to manifest when I started to become more serious about music in late high school and in college. I would be playing with musicians where I didn’t know the music and would lean into my ability to read body language or focus on where the sound was going. There is a feel and anticipation that started to happen.

Part of it too was hearing music where people were letting themselves go into the flow of improvisation. It started for me when I really started getting into rock music of the 1960s and then was able to start to enjoy that improvisational nature within something I could understand.

As that grew, friends would introduce me to new things and my horizon of improvisation would expand. I needed to hear that reckless fire in improvisation before I could start to connect to the story the improvisers were telling.

The improvisation helped me understand a moment where I could be free, whether or not I could fully conceptualize that.

Which artists, teachers, albums or performances involving prominent use of improvisation captured your imagination in the beginning?

The albums were the first thing I really connected to. Jimi Hendrix (Axis Bold As Love), Led Zepplin (IV, I, and The Song Remains the Same), Cream (Live), Derek and the Dominos (Live), Medeski, Martin, & Wood (Shackman), Grateful Dead (Live + Europe 72), Leftover Salmon (Ask the Fish), Miles Davis (Kind of Blue), John Coltrane (My Favorite Things), Art Blakey (Moanin‘ and Live at Cafe Bohemia), and Ornette Coleman (The Shape of Jazz to Come).

I could go on forever with the records. I keep revisiting stuff and find new inspiration in it, along with all of the records that are out there. It is pretty incredible how much access is avaible to music.

[Read our Billy Martin of Martin, Medeski & Wood interview]

I’ve been unbelievably fortunate to get to study with some amazing teachers but there were 4 teachers that really pushed me and opened my eyes to the path that I am on now.

Mike Shepherd was the first of those to appear for me. I credit Mike for putting me back on the path. Mike really helped me see how to connect emotion to improvisation. The next was Tony Martucci who helped me open my eyes to possiblities. Tony encouraged me to take risks. Andrew Cyrille was next and he helped me connect my foundation to an improvisational story. How to speak more clearly within the music. And then there was Matt Wilson. Matt helped me see commitment to sound and the understanding of the space within the music.

All four of them really stressed sound and my sound and the sound around me.

Tell me about your instrument and/or tools, please. How would you describe the relationship with it? What are its most important qualities and how do they influence the musical results and your own performance?

I love drums and cymbals and have a lot of them. Different drum sets, snare drums, big cymbals, small cymbals, thick cymbals, thin cymbals, weird sound making things. I love to experiement. I get a different feeling and sound from all of them but the common feeling is that I feel at home with all of them. My drumsets are pretty similar jazz size drums (smallish) and I’m a pretty small guy, so there is a weird optical illusion that makes me look bigger than I am, which I think is funny.

I like big cymbals and they create an interesting contrast to the small drums. I like to find all of the sounds that each cymbal provides me and how they make me feel as the vibrations pass through and around me. I want to hear the full sound of each part of my drumset as they blend together.

The drums and cymbals I choose for particular performances change the sound of those performances to me. It is likely just in small ways that most people wouldn’t notice but to me I can hear the length of a cymbal or I can feel if a drum is not responding the way I am hearing the music. The biggest thing for me is hearing the music within the drums and cymbals.

Recently, I did a recording with Matthew Shipp and Ivo Perelman called Live In Carrboro. I brought my own cymbals but played provided drums. The drums were all tuned and mic’d up when I got there and it wasn’t really possible for me to tune them. They were lower and slower responding than I would usually tune them but they sounded great. The drums influenced the way that I played that night within the music Matthew, Ivo, and I were making.



I used my drums, two different drumsets, on the Welcome Home and Confusing Motion for Progress records. It all sounds like me, I think, but there is a different response to the music based the different drums and cymbals on each record.

I cue into how long a drum decays or if there is a specific sharpness and/or warmth to a cymbal strike. That all influences me within the music. I’m not analyzing it while the music is happening, it just kind of flows naturally.

Again, most people wouldn’t notice it but it gives me something to obsess over.

What do you personally enjoy about the act of improvisation? Are you finding that this sense of enjoyment is changing over time?

I find a sense of freedom when I improvise. It is almost an out of body experience to feel the music and what is going on around me while being totally present. It is one of the rare moments in my life where the internal chatter is quiet and I can just be consumed by a moment.

My sense of enjoyment is growing stronger as I get more comfortable with this freedom.

Can you talk about a work, event or performance in your career that's particularly dear to you?

I have to say that the performance that appears on the Welcome Home recording, is certainly memorable. It is a live recording that was captured at a bar / brewery in Shepherdstown, West Virginia.



It is a really small town that I lived in for 18 years – most of my adult life. I had moved away but was back to town for this gig with Jeff Lederer and Mark Lysher. The gig was 3 hours long and it just felt like an experience you can only have in Shepherdstown. The bar was owned / run by friends that I went to college with and I knew right from the outset when the bartender told Jeff Lederer to “go back where he came from“ … I knew it was going to be interesting.

About halfway through the second set, the crowd was rowdy. One patron started to heckle us and Lederer started to chase her around the bar, playing his clarinet at her. I was laughing hysterically and so were the onlookers.

The music was great but if you listen to the end of the recording, you can hear this woman start to get into it with Lederer again. They banter and it really felt like a moment of … “I miss this crazy place!“