Cooper-Moore was born Gene Y. Ashton on August 31, 1946, in the Piedmont region of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Local church elders recruited him as the town's piano player at around age eight, and by twelve he was working out improvisation against the sounds of Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, and Ornette Coleman. He earned a B.A. in Music Education from the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., then moved to Boston in 1967 to study composition and arranging at Berklee College of Music. It was in Boston that he met tenor saxophonist David S. Ware; the two formed the collective trio Apogee with drummer Marc Edwards in 1970, a partnership rooted in formative Boston years that would resurface, on and off, for the next four decades.

Apogee relocated to New York in 1973, opening for Sonny Rollins at the Village Vanguard that year, and Ashton settled into the fertile downtown loft scene, sharing a collective house at 501 Canal Street with saxophonist Alan Braufman, drummer Jimmy Hopps, bassist Tom Bruno, and vocalist Ellen Christi. His earliest surviving recordings date from this period: a duo session with Braufman taped live at Columbia's WKCR radio station on May 22, 1972 (not issued until 2021, as Live at WKCR, May 22, 1972), and a credit on Braufman's Valley of Search (1975, India Navigation), his first commercial release. Apogee's own session, recorded in 1977, wasn't issued until 1979, as Birth of a Being.

The scene's momentum didn't hold. After a punishing European tour in the early 1980s, Ashton smashed his own piano and stepped away from performing, returning to Virginia to spend roughly a decade, from 1975 to 1985, developing music curricula for children through the Head Start program. It was a fallow period for his public career but a foundational one for what came next: working with found materials and no budget, he began building instruments from reclaimed wood and salvaged metal, the seed of a practice that would come to define him as much as his piano playing ever did.

He returned to New York in 1985 and, changing his professional name to Cooper-Moore — a combination of his two grandmothers' maiden names — rebuilt a career around composing for theater and dance (Rita Dove's The Darker Side of the Earth at the Guthrie, Laurie Carlos's Feathers at the Flame, Emily Mann's A Still Life) and film, while continuing to design and construct his own instruments: the horizontal hoe-handle harp, an eleven-note ashimba xylophone, the twanger, a three-stringed fretless banjo, the diddley-bow, mouthbow, and TeZe, most of them built, in his own description, from whatever a dumpster or a hardware-store scrap bin happened to hold that week. The turning point back into the front ranks of the jazz scene came when bassist William Parker invited him to join a new working group, In Order to Survive, launched in 1993 alongside alto saxophonist Rob Brown and a rotating drum chair — the quartet that, across Compassion Seizes Bed-Stuy (1996), The Peach Orchard (1998), and Posium Pendasem (1999), reestablished Cooper-Moore as an active recording pianist after roughly two decades largely off record. He became a fixture of Parker's orbit more broadly, appearing across the Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra's Sunrise in the Tone World (1997), Mayor of Punkville (2000), and Mass for the Healing of the World (2003), whose own catalog is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile.

Cooper-Moore didn't release music under his own name until the 21st century. His solo debut, Deep in the Neighborhood of History and Influence — recorded live in Guelph, Ontario, in September 1999 — appeared on Hopscotch Records in 2001, followed by a duo partnership with reedist Assif Tsahar across America (2003) and Tells Untold (2005), a self-titled solo LP (2004, a hand-numbered 300-copy box set on 50 Miles of Elbow Room), and Outtakes 1978 (2005), an archival release drawn from a 1978 New York session that reunited him on tape with David S. Ware. In 2004 he co-founded the piano trio Triptych Myth with bassist Tom Abbs and drummer Chad Taylor — whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile — releasing a self-titled debut and 2005's The Beautiful, with liner notes from Parker. Three years later he, Tsahar, and Taylor formed a second trio, Digital Primitives, built around a fusion of blues, funk, and Cooper-Moore's homemade-instrument palette, documenting it on a self-titled 2007 debut and 2009's Hum Crackle & Pop.

His most enduring rhythmic partnership, though, runs through drummer Hamid Drake, whose own catalog is documented in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile. The two first recorded together as a trio with Tsahar on 2005's Lost Brother, nearly two decades before Drake joined Cooper-Moore inside a reconstituted In Order to Survive quartet — captured on 2019's Live/Shapeshifter, recorded live at Brooklyn's ShapeShifter Lab in 2017 — and, finally, alongside Parker as the stand-alone trio Heart Trio, whose 2024 self-titled AUM Fidelity release formalized more than three decades of collaboration among the three men. In between came 2011's Planetary Unknown, which brought Cooper-Moore into the studio for the first time with Ware, Parker, and drummer Muhammad Ali all at once; a live document from the following year's Saalfelden festival captured what turned out to be Ware's final public performance before his October 2012 death. The 2010s and 2020s brought a run of William Parker vocal-theater projects (Stan's Hat Flapping in the Wind, 2016; Meditation/Resurrection, 2017), a series of piano-tenor duo albums with saxophonist Stephen Gauci beginning in 2018, a trio with guitarist Brandon Seabrook and drummer Gerald Cleaver (Exultations, 2020; In the Swarm, 2022), and a session with drummer Francisco Mela and Parker for the second volume of Mela's McCoy Tyner tribute trilogy, Music Frees Our Souls (2023).

Alongside performing, Cooper-Moore has maintained a teaching association with the New School's Jazz Department, served for a period as storyteller-in-residence in Brooklyn's Prospect Park, and in 2017 received the Vision Festival's Lifetime Achievement Award from Arts for Art, recognition, in his own words, "that during my life I've in some way been a contributor to and instrumental in the creation and growth of the communities where I have been a part."

Cooper-Moore's dual identity as a highly individualistic avant-garde pianist and a self-taught builder of his own instruments made him one of free jazz's most singular sonic explorers — a musician whose formidable session catalog with William Parker and others long preceded his first record under his own name. His piano vocabulary traces back to Ahmad Jamal, Charles Mingus, and, by his own account, Jaki Byard's work inside Mingus's bands, but the instruments he builds from reclaimed wood, wire, and found metal are not novelty props: the diddley-bow, mouthbow, and hoe-handle harp function as full compositional voices in his working groups, carrying blues and gospel harmonic roots that piano alone doesn't reach. That willingness to abandon the instrument entirely — literally, when he destroyed his piano in the early 1980s and spent a decade teaching children through Head Start before returning to New York — runs through everything after it: a career built as much on rupture and reinvention as on technique, and a decades-long gravitational pull toward William Parker's ensembles that turned a formerly obscure sideman into one of the music's most trusted collaborative pianists.