Three of American free jazz's most respected elder statesmen are converging on a 35-seat room in South St. Louis this weekend, bringing hand-built instruments, decades of shared musical language, and a rare chance for local audiences to hear them up close. William Parker, Cooper-Moore, and Hamid Drake — collectively known as Heart Trio — arrive at Dissonant Works for a two-day residency featuring two ticketed performances and a free community workshop.
The residency, dubbed Small Room Sessions 06|07, runs Saturday and Sunday, with concerts each night at 7 and 9 pm at the venue's home at 2218 S. Jefferson Ave., according to St. Louis Magazine. Tickets are offered on a sliding-scale, pay-what-you-can basis and must be reserved by email, with seating strictly limited given the venue's tiny footprint. The St. Louis stop is one leg of the trio's broader September tour, which also brings the group to Chicago's Sound & Gravity Festival, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, according to AUM Fidelity.
Three Decades of Musical Partnership, One Recent Album
Parker, Cooper-Moore, and Drake have played together in various configurations for more than 30 years, including in projects like In Order to Survive and Digital Primitives. Yet Heart Trio as a distinct, self-titled recording act didn't formally exist until the group released its debut album on the AUM Fidelity label on June 28, 2024, per a report from The Lab. St. Louis Magazine describes the trio's performances as composed collectively in the moment, with the musicians drawing on a shared musical language cultivated through more than three decades of collaboration and improvisation.
Parker, the group's bassist, is also known for playing the doson ngoni, shakuhachi, bass dudek, Serbian flute, and ney flute, per St. Louis Magazine's account of the residency. His resume includes more than a decade performing alongside Cecil Taylor and appearances on roughly 500 recordings, and in June 2024 — the same year Heart Trio's debut dropped — he received the Lifetime Achievement Award at New York's Vision Festival, according to Roulette Intermedium. That same month, AUM Fidelity also released Parker's first spoken-word poetry album, Cereal Music, recorded with vocalist Ellen Christi.
Hand-Built Instruments and Cross-Cultural Rhythms
Cooper-Moore brings a set of instruments he built himself, including the wooden ashimba and the hoe-handle harp, constructed during the 1970s New York loft jazz era, St. Louis Magazine notes. He received his own Vision Festival Lifetime Achievement Award in May 2017, as Arts for Art has documented. Drake, who plays frame drum and drum kit in the trio, launched his career in Evanston, Illinois, in 1974 alongside saxophonist Fred Anderson before developing a signature style blending free jazz with West African, Afro-Cuban, and Indian rhythmic traditions, according to a Wikipedia entry on the percussionist.
Parker has described the philosophy behind the group's approach in stark, poetic terms. “The theory behind this music is the music itself. Empty and fill the heart and soul with sound, letting it dance. Without pretense. We are trying to get to a flow — earth, sky, and flowing water sounds that jump out of the painting,” Parker said, per St. Louis Magazine.
A Free Workshop and a Fast-Rising Venue
Beyond the ticketed evening shows, the residency includes a free community workshop on Sunday, September 6, running from 1 to 2:30 pm at Dissonant Works. Funding for that workshop came directly from New Music Circle, St. Louis's oldest active presenter of experimental and avant-garde music, founded in 1959 by local architects and university composers, according to New Music Circle's own account of its history. Additional financial support for the broader residency came from the Missouri Arts Council and the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis, per information published by Dissonant Works.
Dissonant Works itself has quickly built a reputation since opening in summer 2025 inside the historic former McKinley Theater. The volunteer-run, 35-seat listening room won Best New Venue (Small Room) at the St. Louis Music Awards in August, according to a post shared in a local Facebook arts group. The venue has already hosted other major names in improvised music, including free jazz pianist Matthew Shipp, who performed two sets there in September 2025, per event listings on Eventbrite. Given the room's tiny capacity, exactly how many people the free Sunday workshop can accommodate remains unclear.
