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Christopher Robin Cox

Christopher Robin Cox is a veteran creative improvising trombonist, originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, who has been living in Budapest, Hungary for several years.

After nearly 10 years away from playing music full time, earning three academic degrees, including a PhD in Geography, he decided to return to his horn with a vengeance after the Covid pandemic. He has since toured all over Europe, including several stints in the Balkans, and has relased two trio recordings with bassist Péter Ajtai and drummer Attila Gyárfás, the most recent on the PMG Jazz label.

He brings a huge, dark tone, and a style that utilizes bluesy, gravely split-tones, plunger, and other prepared techniques. As an improviser, he is equally comfortable playing with lots of space and in more intense improvisation settings. During his time growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, he played with greats like Glenn spearman, Marco Eneidi, Donald Robinson, Garth Powell, and George Cremasci to name a few. He has also recently toured with Jason Robinson, Tracy Lisk, Akira Ando, Nathan Hanson, and Elliott Levin.

During his time away from playing free music, when he wasn't in school, he was playing with the "jazz version of Rage Against the Machine," Junkyard Empire. He also worked with many poets, including Amiri Baraka, EG Baily, Sha Cage, Khyle "Guante" Myhre, and others.

Most recently, he has begun playing a group called Dunyha, which is mix of dark Transylvanian folk music and doom jazz. Other projects are in the making as well.

Gear

King 4B straight horn (roughly 1979)

Tags

"“The Cox / Ajtai / Gyárfás trio creates an authentic nexus of presence, true hand-wrought sound impression, during an era when many forms of attention are outsourced and cobbled from stray traces of the ether- in a way that might anticipate our field of diminished expectations. The truth is here; we move in concert together, and there’s no mistaking it with this kind of evidence- that it’s possible, even necessary and a reality that three musical forces can join in constructing something so elemental from the ground up- or that they can echolocate and find a map together that makes that kind of construction seem completely inevitable." - Joshua Roseman, from the liner notes to Urgent.