For a handmade fiddle, Jonathan Cooper once accepted a 1951 Chevrolet pickup truck as full payment, and by his own account it was a fair trade. Cooper, a Portland, Maine violin maker whose instruments were played by touring fiddlers, bluegrass pickers and concert soloists for nearly five decades, died before dawn on Labor Day, September 7, 2026. He was 76.

Cooper was born in 1950 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and grew up in New Jersey, leaving for New England after a year of college. He played guitar in a run of bands in the early 1970s, and in 1973 he was on stage with the Con Fullam Band the night it opened the first-ever show at CBGB in New York City. It was also through a band, one called Chicken Wire, that he met Liz Bieber, who would become his wife. Somewhere in those same years he picked up a friend's viola at a rehearsal, taught himself to play, and began entering fiddle contests around Maine and New Hampshire, years before he ever picked up a woodworking tool.

The turn toward building instruments, rather than just playing them, came in stages. In 1976 he took a course in violin construction at the University of New Hampshire. Three years later, on a European tour with his band, he took a day trip to Cremona, Italy, the city where the Stradivarius violin was born, and did not go home. He left the band and spent the next three years apprenticing under the American luthier Gregg Alf in Cremona's violin-making workshops.

Back in Portland, Cooper opened Acoustic Artisans, first tucked into the Hay Building at the corner of Congress and Free streets, later moving the shop to the State Theatre building on High Street. At his most productive he finished roughly one instrument a month, and over the following decades he built more than 500 violins, violas and cellos by hand, becoming one of roughly 100 violin makers nationwide recognized as a master of the craft. Grammy-winning fiddler Mark O'Connor has said he played a violin Cooper built for him in 2002 as his primary performance instrument for the next sixteen years. Cajun fiddler Michael Doucet, who founded the band BeauSoleil, described the sound of his own Cooper violin this way: "It was even, not too high, not too low, and it just rang out." Of Cooper himself, Doucet said, "There's nothing that Jon couldn't do. He could eat more than you, fish more than you and he could make violins better than you." Bluegrass fiddler Jim Van Cleve of Mountain Heart put it just as plainly: "In my opinion, Jon Cooper is THE premier violin maker in the country right now. I've been playing my Cooper for a little over three years now, and I have to say, this violin never ceases to amaze me." Fiddle shop owner Fred Carpenter, who had known Cooper for thirty years, called him "one of my absolute favorite violinmakers."

Cooper worked by consultation, not by formula. Each instrument, which he priced around $15,000, began with conversations about a musician's touring schedule, playing style and the sound they were chasing, a process he described to Maine Public in 2015 as starting from a concept and building toward the player. That same year, producer Ron Cody organized a tribute album of musicians, including Darol Anger and Mike Barnett, performing on instruments Cooper had made. He also built violins in memory of the slain journalist Daniel Pearl, later given each year to promising young musicians at Mark O'Connor's string camp, according to Slippedisc.

Cooper trained his son Seth as an apprentice in the workshop, and friends describe a man who treated craft and community as the same pursuit. Maine musician Jenny Van West recalled the fiddle-for-truck trade: "In the deal of the century, Jon made me a fiddle, accepting for payment a 1951 Chevy pickup. That was Jon." Another friend, Lesley Hoey, remembered him leaping off a stage mid-song, spinning her once around a dance floor, and climbing back up without missing a note. His brother, Matthew Cooper, said he "didn't have a lot of fear about life" and was "infectiously likable."

Cooper is survived by his wife, Liz Bieber; three sons, Amos, Seth and Wyatt; his first wife, Leanne Daniels Cooper; a brother, Matthew Cooper; and a sister, Ellen Cooper. "Music and community was his life," Bieber said. "He was a really kind, loving, old-school, musician's musician." A funeral service was held at Jones, Rich & Barnes Funeral Home in Portland.

More than 500 instruments carrying Cooper's hands still sit under the chins of orchestra players, bluegrass soloists and Sunday fiddlers, from the concert violin Mark O'Connor played for sixteen years to the memorial instruments still handed each year to young musicians at his own string camp. His son Seth continues the work at the bench where he trained. The workshop above a corner of downtown Portland, and the sound Cooper spent five decades chasing, outlived him.