 For
reggae aficionados the question "Where did you first hear
Bob Marley?" is a bit like asking a born-again Christian
when they were saved. Reggae bassist and anaesthetist
Dr Andrew Cooper's answer is fittingly mystical. It was
1981 when the then 20-year-old university dropout
was a newly minted Buddhist monk
sitting on a mountainside in Kathmandu. As he ate his
lunch at the monastery, he had a decidedly un-Buddhist
epiphany. Bob Marley's "Johnny Was" came on the radio
and his life changed forever. Again.
"I had no idea about popular culture,"
he says.
"I wasn't interested in worldly
things — or so I thought." But when he heard the
song, that all changed. "It was as if Bob Marley was
speaking to me directly. It was really quite magical."
Fast forward 25 years. Dr Cooper,
now an upstanding citizen and critical care specialist
at Sunnybrook and Women's College Hospital, is gearing
up for a show at Toronto's legendary Horseshoe Tavern
with his reggae band, Bliss. In Toronto's cutthroat
music scene Bliss is a success story. The band has a
small but loyal following of fans, a slot in the semifinals
of a nationwide music competition, and was the subject
of a recent feature on CTV News.
But it's been a long, strange trip
from the foothills of the Himalayas to the stage of
the Horseshoe for the soft-spoken doctor.
MEDITATIVE
PAST LIFE
Dr Cooper's first epiphanic moment was when he discovered
Buddhism. As a troubled teen lodged in a BC boarding
school while his parents got divorced, he had a helpful
teacher who taught him how to meditate, and got him
reading about Zen. Later, a university research assignment
put him in touch with Lama Tashi Namgyal in Victoria,
and he wound up studying with him for several years.
A relatively easy convert to meditation,
medicine was a harder sell. After a brilliant first
year in sciences at UVic, he started to lose his way.
"I'd been reading all these amazing things about relativity,
black holes and stuff, but when I got around to actually
studying it, I just thought, 'this is so dry, I'll never
be able to do it.'" His interest plummeted; after a
couple of missed exams, he quit altogether. "I drew
pictures of Jupiter in the exam books to pass the time.
I swore I would never go back to university."
As his love of science waned, his
attraction to Buddhism began to feel more like a vocation.
The next step was obvious; he saved up for the plane
fare working at a sawmill, and then went to India to
become a monk.
He didn't stay long. "In retrospect,"
he recalls, "I was too immature to follow the path the
way it was meant to be followed." He returned to North
America, and took up with Sakya Dagchen Rinpoche, a
Buddhist teacher in Seattle, who told him he needed
to work on the basics first. He suggested he develop
more love and compassion — and get a job.
ROCKSTEADY
CAREER CHOICE
It turned out to be the best advice possible. He followed
a monk friend's suggestion and applied to a college
course in nursing. "It was a fantastic time," he says.
"My intellectual curiosity was reawakened." He wasn't
considering medicine at first, but constant encouragement
by family and goading from patients urged him on. "Although
I'd vowed never to go back to university, I had to know
whether I could do it or not."
It was another good call. He loved
medical school, although he remembers his first year
back at university as the hardest of his life. Reggae's
repetitive rhythms and up beat riffs became his solace.
"I found it very soothing," he recalls. "I listened
to it more and more as my training got harder and harder."
After a brief stint as a GP, he
went on to study anesthesia. "I like it because it's
so concrete — in so much of medicine, you do things
for benefits that you never see; with anesthesia, it's
easy to tell if you're doing it right." He laughs. "Maybe
I'm simple-minded, but I find it very gratifying."
Anesthesia led him to Toronto,
where he started working with burn patients at Sunnybrook.
"We'd have long days in the operating room, watching
the sun come up and go down, all on one operation, with
25 degree temperatures and terrible smells..." How did
they cope with the extended hours and harsh conditions?
You guessed it: "We started listening to reggae."
CRAZY
RHYTHM MDs
At this point, Dr Cooper was still just a fan, and not
yet a reggae man himself. When he and his wife enrolled
their young daughter in violin lessons, they read about
the Suzuki method — a theory that encourages early
exposure to music, much like learning a language. Although
he was a little past benefiting from early exposure,
Dr Cooper decided to join his little girl and explore
his own musicality, choosing the funky bass guitar —
a key ingredient in reggae's rhythm section. "I found
Suzuki's idea that everybody has musical talent, but
we just have different opportunities to develop it,
very liberating," he says.
It was rough at first. He joined
a band with some colleagues, playing "mostly crusty
old songs from the 70s and 80s." They called themselves
3MP. "It was an ICU in-joke — we chose it because
it sounded like 'MP3', but it's also a term for the
maximum amount of mucus you can suction." They played
one gig on a staff boat cruise, an experience that convinced
Dr Cooper he needed a few more lessons before he'd hit
the stage again!
He decided to switch instruments,
and joined a local band called Jahmalama playing percussion.
But the complicated polyrhythms the music demanded were
hard to lock in with for an amateur musician. "After
a year and a half," he says, "I finally decided that
I wasn't getting better on either instrument, so I went
back to bass." But it wasn't all wasted effort. During
his stint as a percussionist he met Raffa Dean, an exceptionally
talented reggae drummer, who gave him some invaluable
pointers. When he left Jahmalama, he asked Mr Dean to
play with him in Bliss.
AY,
THERE'S THE DUB
"I couldn't do this if I wasn't a doctor," he observes.
Having a doctor's income instead of a musician's means
he can hire good players who stretch his abilities.
Clearly, given the band's success, the strategy has
worked.
Now that he's achieved what he
set out to do, Dr Cooper's dub days may be nearly through.
"I get a tremendous lift out of doing this; I love the
message of the music and the power of it. But what I
don't like is how it's keeping me from things that should
be a higher priority in my life — mainly my daughter."
So how's he going to balance his love of music with
his love for his kid?
He's given the problem a lot of
thought. "I may take a holiday from being a bass player,"
he says, "and take up the violin."
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