Jessie Cox

Jessie Cox has written over 100 works for various musical ensembles including electroacoustic works, solo works, chamber- and orchestral works, works for jazz ensembles and choirs; for performers such as Claire Chase, String Noise, ICE, Rebekah Heller, Vasko Dukovski, Either/Or Ensemble, Promenade Sauvage, Janet Underhill, Greg Saunier of Deerhoof, etc. 

As a performer he has played in Europe, Africa, the Caribbean and the USA; with musicians from all over the world including Roman Filiu, Maher Beauroy, Tomas Sauter, Weston Olencki, Lester St Louis, Sam Yulsman, Barbara LaFitte, Jeremie Jolo, Lucy Clifford, Alexander Levin, etc.  He has been studying composition with Richard Carrick, Derek Hurst, Gabriele Vanoni, Andrew List, Marti Epstein, Manuel Kaufmann and Vuk Kulenovic, and Drums with Neal Smith, Tony “Thunder” Smith and Carlos Kort. Jessie has played at the Accra Jazz Festival and the Martinique Jazz Festival with the Maher Beauroy Trio, Rhythm and Thought Festival with High Key People, has been performed at NUNC3 at Northwestern University and New Music Gathering, and won the Leroy Souther’s Award (2015) and the Bill Maloof Award (2017) for his compositions. He was a finalist in the international composition competition ALEA III with his piece Earth for two Bassoons, and two of his compositions have been selected to be featured regularly on the NPR WGBH.

Jessie Cox graduated from the Berklee College of Music on scholarship in 2017, with a degree in composition.

Jessie Cox’s musical career began when he was only three years old. He took rhythm and solfège training at the music school of his hometown Biel/Bienne in Switzerland. At the age of six years his interest in percussion instruments started showing and he began taking Djembe lessons. This was also the time when he first started composing his own music. 

When he was twelve years old he started playing the Drumset in different cover bands and he started taking lessons with the internationally acclaimed latin-music artist Carlos Kort.

Jessie Cox is a Swiss composer, drummer, and scholar with roots in Trinidad and Tobago currently completing his doctoral studies at Columbia University. He has created works for a variety of musical settings, including works for solo instruments, ensembles, orchestra, voice, electronics, dance, improvising musicians, and more. Taking Afrofuturism as a core inspiration, Cox’s work asks questions about existence and the ways we make spaces habitable.

A dedicated collaborator, Cox has worked as a composer and drummer with ensembles and musicians all over the globe, such as the Sun Ra Arkestra, LA Phil, Ensemble Modern, the International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea, Ensemble Contrechamps, and the JACK Quartet; at Festivals such as the Lucerne Festival, MaerzMusik, Spoleto Festival, Moers Festival, and Opera Omaha. For his work as a composer he has been recognized with a commission by the Paul Fromm Foundation at Harvard University, features of his work in the New Yorker, LA Times, Van Magazine, Suddeutsche Zeitung, and his commissions have been funded by the Ernst von Siemens Foundation, Pro Helvetia, New Music USA, and others.

As a scholar, Cox engages socio-political questions through music, and sits at the intersection of black studies, musicology, ethnomusicology, critical improvisation studies, and critical theory. His scholarly writing has been published in liquid blackness, Critical Studies in Improvisation, Positionen Texte zur Aktuellen Musik, Sound American, the American Music Review, and others. Recently he has published the chapter “Stories of the Mothership” in the edited collection Composing While Black (Wolke Verlag, 2023), which he also helped translate.

At Columbia University, Cox also runs the interdisciplinary and international study group the Comparing Domains of Improvisation. The group has welcomed distinguished scholars and artists from a variety of fields, across the humanities, sciences, and arts.