Glasgow Jazz Festival
Neil Cowley Trio
St Luke’s
Rob Adams
four stars
IT IS easy to understand why Neil Cowley’s piano skills have been sought by pop singers including Adele and Emeli Sande. Cowley’s own music may be about as far away from mass market acceptance as his group is from the conventional jazz piano trio, yet underneath the knotty motifs and aggressive minimalism there is a pop sensibility and the kind of digging into the rhythm elbow grease that gave birth to Rolling in the Deep’s essential groove.
NCT’s latest work takes them further into prog rock territory, especially with computer-driven chords that sound a bit 1970s despite the involvement of state of the art software and bassist Rex Horan’s doubling as rather grandiose and endearingly theatrical keyboard lick provider. With his bearded boffin mien, he surely missed a trick with early Supertramp or Van der Graaf Generator.
This is all part of the wacky charm, though, not to mention part of a masterly dynamic plan. If ever a band knew what it was doing, down to the very demisemiquaver, it’s NCT. Where a conventional piano trio might improvise, NCT introduces pin-sharp variety of colour or abrupt and brilliantly choreographed changes of mood, and in The City and the Stars, even allowing for a very NCT-like stop-start figure, it has a pop song working its way through the arrangement.
They stand accused – and may plead guilty – of using repetitiveness for effect and of bombast, although these are contrasted with prayerfully sensitive solo piano passages or downright lovely tender, bowed bass reflection. The most repeated phrase, though, with the exacting drummer Evan Jenkins somehow finding added layers of intensity, produced undeniable, audience-lifted-from-seats excitement.
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