Jessie Cox

An experimental percussionist-composer pushing the limits of music

Jesse Cox smiling at a table with music notes and a book, with drums and cymbals behind him

Jessie Cox  |  Photograph by Stu Rosner

“I follow sounds,” says percussionist-composer Jessie Cox, who joined Harvard last fall as an assistant professor of music. “For me, playing music, or finding a new sound, is about hearing something that was unthinkable.” That’s an apt statement. Cox’s compositions often feel like a leap into the unknown: wildly, playfully, disquietingly experimental, crossing genres and geographies and pushing the limits of what counts as an instrument. He’s interested in the sounds of extinct birds and the oral histories embedded in traditional drums. He once wrapped cotton around instruments’ strings to hear their whispering, hissing overtones. (Rubber bands, he found, elicit a bell-like sound.) A graduate of the Berklee College of Music and Columbia University, Cox began his music career at age three, when his mother enrolled him in solfège classes to learn rhythms and pitches after she noticed him hitting objects around the house just to hear the sounds they made. By age six, he was learning the djembe drum and writing music; at 12, he was playing in cover bands and studying with internationally acclaimed artists. He was also learning to navigate a different kind of cultural landscape, as a black child with roots in Trinidad and Tobago growing up in the bilingual Swiss city of Biel/Bienne. There’s no national conversation in Switzerland about race, he says, and no word for blackness. His exploration of the subject—mediated through music, including a piece about George Floyd by Nigerian-Swiss composer Charles Uzor—culminated in a book, Sounds of Black Switzerland: Blackness, Music, and Unthought Voices, published in April. When he’s not following sounds, he’s practicing bonsai. He enjoys its slowness, a contrast with music’s immediacy. “But,” he adds with a grin, “there is an ulterior motive which is musical: it would be very nice if the bonsai could someday become an instrument.” 

Read more articles by Lydialyle Gibson

You might also like

This Astronomer is Sounding a Warning on 'Space Junk'

As debris accumulates in low Earth orbit, the danger of destructive collisions continues to rise.

Isaac Kohlberg to Step Down as Head of Harvard Technology Development

Partnerships and licensing office could become more critical as funding cuts loom

How AI Energy Demand Costs Consumers

Utilities shift AI infrastructure costs onto consumers.

Most popular

The Standoff: Harvard’s Future in the Balance

Introducing a guide to the issues, players, and stakes.

The Professor Who Quantified Democracy

Erica Chenoweth’s data shows how—and when—authoritarians fall.

How the Brain Replays Actions During Sleep

Experiments using a neuroprosthetic reveal nocturnal motor neuron learning.

Explore More From Current Issue

Nicolo Maestas in a grey suit and wearing glasses sits with her arms on a table

The Harvard health economist not afraid to get in the weeds

A color illustration of students from a diversity of backgrounds eating and talking together at a long dining hall-type table

The Undergraduate asks if intellectualism is really on life support.

Alexander Gardner’s 1868 photo shows federal peace commissioners with Sophie Mousseau, the lone woman at center.

The wealth gap, shamanism, the life of David Nathan, and more