Karlsen Cowley

Neil Cowley Trio - Spacebound Apes (2016) {Hide Inside Records HIDECD002}
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Jazz / Modern Jazz / Beyond Jazz / Progressive Jazz / Piano

The pop-aware UK jazz pianist Neil Cowley – frequently a thinker outside boxes – has not only spent three years developing this Arthur C Clarke-inspired concept album, but is releasing the results as a sheet-music “single”, an interactive website, a graphic novel and more. His hypnotic music has often resembled a soundtrack to visuals, but there’s more than enough distinction in this 11-piece tracklist to consider it a musical advance, not just a platform-extending conceptual one. Cowley and his regular jazz trio (assisted a little by Brian Eno FX artist Leo Abrahams), deliver a characteristic programme of sonorously looping song-hooks, pounding rock-piano patterns and baroque counterpoints, but this time in a more laid-back and low-lit manner.

When guitarist Jacob Kellermann and conductor Christian Karlsen devised the programme of this recording, one inspiration was the legendary jazz album Sketches of Spain on which Miles Davis performed arrangements of Spanish folk music, along with a version of the Adagio from Joaquín Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez. Rodrigo’s work is a re-imagining of times past and of courtly life in the gardens of the Royal Palace of Aranjuez, and as such it is the perfect opening to Kellermann’s and Karlsen’s project, intended to conjure up Spain ‘as if through a prism – as a concept rather than a place’. In order to achieve this they have enlisted the help of Francisco Coll and Pete Harden, who have each contributed a concertante work for guitar and ensemble.