Jazz reviewers have to check all mindsets in at the door when the assignment is a Neil Cowley gig. The musician whose role as the intro player on Adele’s Hometown Glory made him statistically the most listened-to pianist on the planet, works with what looks and sounds like a regular acoustic jazz-piano trio – but that’s where the resemblance ends, because he inventively turns a traditionally laid-back lineup into a rousingly charismatic instrumental pop band. Cowley’s knack for electrifying hook-driven themes and some cinematically potent reflective music has made him many friends – several hundred of whom were queueing around the block at the Union Chapel for this week’s music-visuals-and-lights presentation of his self-penned sci-fi story Spacebound Apes.
Cowley ran through the tracklist with his regular partners Rex Horan on bass and Evan Jenkins on drums (plus Dom Monks on synths and effects), and then segued into a standing-ovation trio sprint through his hit themes of the past decade. A throbbing ambient hum scythed through by Horan’s bowed-bass squeals ushered in the sparing Weightless motif as illustrator Sergio Sandoval’s images of helmeted spacebound apes filled the onstage screen. A snappy staccato dance was stalked by Jenkins’s whiplash snare hits as an unaccompanied Cowley stroked the prettiest ballad-like theme of the night and the album – the rapturous Grace. Hard-hit rocking passages, wistful chord themes and dramatic piano-percussion exchanges followed in a set that confirmed Spacebound Apes to be a nuanced balance between heartfelt rumination and Cowley’s signature rock-piano blitzes.
The trio then stretched out on some classic earlier material (including the stuttering, rolling His Nibs, with its serpentine contrapuntal undertow) and a breakneck encore in which bassist Horan took centre-stage and the trio ecstatically blossomed into a single organism. Jazz or improv it ain’t, but as pop music of headlong vivacity, refreshing eccentricity and a big idiomatic sweep, Neil Cowley’s work remains in a class of one.
•At St John the Evangelist Church, Oxford on 4 November.
