Sholto Byrnes: Talking Jazz

If the Neil Cowley Trio doesn't win the rising star or even the best album category at the BBC Jazz Awards this year they will be entitled to feel cheated. If they're not even nominated, I'll eat my beret. What's so remarkable is that this group emerged seemingly from nowhere. Their first album, Displaced, on Hide Inside records, simply arrived last year and engagements across Britain and Europe, including at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival in May and the Canal Street Blues and Jazz Festival in Norway in July, have swiftly and quite rightly materialised.

The leader is a pianist who performed the second Shostakovich piano concerto at the Queen Elizabeth Hall aged only 10, but who later immersed himself in pop, working with the likes of the Brand New Heavies and Gabrielle. Returning to an acoustic trio, and performing entirely his own material, Cowley, now 34, brings a sharp freshness to the British jazz scene. His compositions vary from the angular and highly rhythmic to the rock-influenced. Some of the material is reminiscent of the Esbjörn Svensson Trio but as enjoyable as EST's work is, I would say that Cowley's is a step up. It draws the listener in, demands attention, and mesmerises with its insistent, quietly dazzling rhythms.

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Perhaps it's the fact that Cowley hasn't worked his way up through the American Songbook that makes his trio sound so different. There are echoes of that tradition but in terms of sheer bravura and producing a sit-up-and-take-notice reaction, the only other contemporary pianist who comes to mind is the brilliant young Japanese, Hiromi; and she is known to barely a handful in the UK. Like her, his skill is in presentation of rhythm rather than traditional melodic improvisation.

"Harmonically," says Cowley of his album's opening track, "Little Secrets", "it was aimed at pleasing the ears of both Shostakovich and Ahmad Jamal." The fact that he considers himself to be more a fan of the piano than of jazz, is perhaps of benefit to all. Who cares if his trio don't know the chords to "Autumn Leaves" when they sound like this?

See www.neilcowleytrio.com for current tour dates