His compositions, often for small and unusual instrumentations (e.g., The City the Wind Swept Away is scored for piano, solo strings, two trombones and two bass trombones)[4], are slow, creating tension and interest through unpredictable change within a generally repetitive idiom.[2] Fox studied composition with Phil Winsor[1] at DePaul University, Chicago. He also studied composition as a postgraduate with Barney Childs[1] and taught electronic music, orchestration, and acoustics at the University of Redlands.
Fox’s Cold Blue Music label, from the early 1980s through the present, has championed the works of many composers, often those with West Coast connections of one sort or another, especially the work of John Luther Adams, Peter Garland, Daniel Lentz, Chas Smith, Michael Byron, Michael Jon Fink, and Rick Cox.[5][6][7][8]
Some interviews with Jim Fox:
Textura, June 2021. “Five Questions with Jim Fox” by Ron Schepper[5]
Kathodik (Italy), December 16, 2022, “Interview with Jim Fox, CEO of American Record Label Cold Blue Music” by Marco Paolucci.[9]
New Classic LA, April 30, 2018. “An Interview with Jim Fox of Cold Blue Music” by Cristina Lord.
Mark Alburger: “Foxy Composer-Producer, ” 21st-Century Music, vol.12/1 (2005), 1–5
Barney Childs: “Interview with Jim Fox,” Perspectives of New Music, vol.24/2 (1986), 236–40
^Unrein, Scott, Jim Fox’s ‘The City the Wind Swept Away’: Considering Juxtaposition and Decay as Structure., Paper presented at the Second International Conference on Music and Minimalism, September 2009{{citation}}: CS1 maint: location (link)
