A new breed of British jazz artist is emerging. Erudite, thoughtful and with a strong sense of purpose, they are redefining the language of modern jazz and opening up new musical vistas. Growing up in an era when British music was a dominant force in the world, the cultural experiences of these rising stars are very different from those of their predecessors in the 1950s and 60s and it is this background that informs their attitudes and ideas. Pianist and composer Neil Cowley is the epitome of the new face of British jazz and, on the release of his trio's rapturously received debut album, Displaced, he spoke to Jazznotes in an exclusive interview that provides a fascinating insight into the development of a contemporary jazz musician.

THE INTERVIEW

Do you come from a musical family?

Yes I do come from a musical family, my father was musical director for Max Miller, slightly later on in his years. He went to Kneller Hall which was a military musical academy and served during the war – got away without fighting by playing piano and from that he went on to produce – he wrote various numbers with Dickie Valentine, Bruce Forsyth…he wrote his hit My Little Budgie which he was always boasting about, my dad's career is hilarious and he was Frankie Vaughan's musical director. He managed to put a piano in the house so from a very early age I was tinkling around. My mother was musical – she didn't play anything but she was a musical person and when I was about six she said "Well I think we should take you for lessons" so I went to this old lady, Mrs Rickson, and had the usual piano lessons and just went from there, one stage to another.

You went to the Royal Academy of Music – that's quite a leap, how did that come about?

Well, I went to these early piano lessons and then the Borough Adviser – a guy called Mr Stevenson, heard that I was helping out in school assembly because we were already getting educational cuts at that point and there was no teacher wise to play in assembly so I got dragged in and told "You're going to play hymns now" and he heard about this and came down. He was a very influential man actually and very well connected at the Academy, he used to run the Hillingdon School of Music and he also coincidentally ran the auditions for the grants to go to the Royal Academy of Music. It sounds like a loaded game but he did judge me very fairly and he took me away from this old lady and he taught me for free for two to three years and trained me up so that I would be worthy of the Royal Academy. In between times he used to run these concerts on the South Bank with youth orchestras and he tutored me to play Carnival of the Animals by Saint Saens on the piano – piano solo - and Shostakovitch's Piano Concerto No. 2 - I spent six months learning that - so I was really put through the mill as a kid which kind of scarred me for life but he really geared me up for the Royal Academy and I eventually passed the audition and went in and had a wonderful teacher called Mrs Anderson – a New Zealand teacher – and she saw me up to the point where I was about sixteen, when it all kind of went wrong for me – when I got too many hormones and rebelled. The Royal Academy was every Saturday as a kid – it's a junior exhibition thing, you go every Saturday. I probably just wanted to be playing cricket really but that's all I did.

What happened was that I really didn't want to do music. I think that because I'd been so… I mean no lunch break at school was ever my own because I was always called in for choir practice or this, that and the other and I remember a young music teacher saying "You've got to watch this, you've got to stand up for yourself, you've got to learn to say 'No'.." but I didn't learn to say no until I was about 25.

So you were comfortable with that, because plainly going from a situation of looking for a career and knowing that one in music was not what you would consider as a professional career…

No well, I'm an impatient person and it was pretty much painted as a long term dedication. I was told that I might not work properly until I was in my thirties - as a classical musician. I had all the ability to go that way but it was going to take me a long, long time and it was going to be years and I just didn't have the love for it. I'd learned to love Eastern Bloc music but there were huge swathes of it that just didn't do anything for me - now it does, now you look back on it and it's wonderful classical music, I love it but at the time it didn't do anything for me because I didn't understand the emotion of it. I wasn't that mature and I think that's a great mistake actually, it goes on in musical education … young musicians just don't have the emotional palette to draw from to put it into music and if you step out of it, of course you never step back in because it's such a tough discipline, it's like ballet, it's lifelong dedication and I've never understood children who are able to dedicate themselves to it that much.

So you were working with this blues band and presumably working on a regular basis

Yes, once or twice a month – I was semi-professional

And you were still at school but starting to get around and see how it all works

Yes, and also being introduced to a million new things, you know, black American music, it was such a revelation. It's rather clichéd to say but the Blues Brothers film was a major moment for me, I know that the Blues Brothers is very clichéd, very cheap but if you're just introducing yourself to American music or soul music there are so many things you can draw from it, so many paths you can go down, I mean somehow from the Blues Brothers I was introduced to things like Pat Metheny. Because of the people I was involved with, was hanging around with, people I was talking to, discussing these things with I was introduced to huge swathes of American music, it was a starting point for me.

And was there anybody in particular that influenced you?

Yes well, there were key moments, I think that it's always the case when you're that young that it's the commercial things that draw you in and it's Sting's Bring on the Night album – that band, do you remember with Kenny Kirkland, Branford Marsalis, that band, when I saw that video I wanted to be Kenny Kirkland! So it's people like Kenny … and I remember sitting down and transcribing his solos, I've still got the notes that I wrote out – he's got a ten minute solo in Bring on the Night and I transcribed that out - so it was really good jazz session men at that early stage that were doing it for me.

It went on for how long with this band?

Well, I still play with this band – it's a nostalgic trip, a reunion every time we meet.

Still semi pro?

Still semi pro but I still feel as one with them, you know. I play a dodgy pub now and then and it's wonderful …this went on as my main thrust for three years, until I was about seventeen at which point I'd done two months at sixth form school and gave that up because it just wasn't doing anything for me and then I answered an ad in the Melody Maker for a five piece singing harmony soul band.

So at this point it was now professional?

Yes, it was professional. They paid me a pathetic wage but it was professional and I was still living at home with mum. I think I did manage to move out but it was great, I went to Japan, it was the first flight ever in my life, it was on my eighteenth birthday which falls on Guy Fawkes night and as we took off there was a great sea of fireworks going off all around us – a great way to take off on your first flight.

Yes so we did something in Paris, an Emporio Armani opening and then toured France and then we came back to this country and we supported Alexander O'Neil on a Royal Albert Hall kind of tour - astonishing, I couldn't believe it, I couldn't believe my luck and I really felt justified in what I had done but I had a fairly bad experience, actually, generally speaking on that tour. I was kind of sidelined, I was a young spotty kid with no clue as to the right things to say, I didn't understand the etiquette of being on the road – I said all the wrong things and was sidelined and it really turned me off the whole session thing and I buried myself for the next two or three years until the Brand New Heavies.

What you're saying is you felt pretty much on your own?

Totally on my own which is a scary thing for a young eighteen year old, just broken away from his mum's apron strings and there are all these grown, very grown men and also the Pasadenas were all into island humour – it was all Caribbean island humour which was quite a revelation to me: it would be the ‘Trikidadian’ against the ‘Bajan’ against the ‘Guyanian’ and it was just island humour, it was just one taking the mickey out of the other and I was from Hayes and it didn't make any sense you know.

And they decided not to include you?

Well it wasn't that but it was just so difficult, I mean patois and "What?" It took me ages to understand what the hell was going on so I was a spectator really and if I opened my mouth there was just a long silence so after a while I learned to keep my mouth shut.

But it was a very quick learning curve?

A very quick learning curve and I played with some amazing musicians when I look back: Julian Crampton who was playing with Jason Novello at the time and Tony Mason on drums, Prince Samson, Pete Hinds from Incognito and a great brass section, Phil Smith from Haircut 100 and Wayne Nunes from the JB's, yeah, great players but I was largely uncomfortable with the whole thing.

But you kept going and then came the Brand New Heavies which was the next big break, how did you find them?

Well, I joined a session agency and the first week I got an audition with Marcella Detroit from Shakespear’s Sister, she didn't choose any of us, and then a week after that – I mean I was walking around in flairs anyway and had long hair and I was an early 90s hippy – you know when the 90s met the 60s for about two months – I was one of those and very much into the Brand New's – I loved them and went to see them when I was a kid and when I got the audition, because of the way I'd been teaching myself to play funk for so long, I knew I'd get it and when we did the audition I pretty much ran it, I kind of said, "I think we should play this.." and we played all the stuff I wanted to play and it was just a real… I knew I'd got it and then N’dea (Davenport), who was the singer, asked me if I smoked or not and I realised that was the key because I later found out – a major key question – and I looked at her and thought "Should I say yes or no?" because I did at the time but I said no and I think that was what swung it because she can't stand smoking within about four miles of her.

What was it that attracted you to the Brand New Heavies?

I was doing this whole retro thing that so many kids or young people were at that time, they were looking back beyond their birth date to artists that came before to influence them – we were all playing James Brown records, we were all nuts about James Brown, we were nuts about all the old soul classics, funk classics and they totally reflected that and their music called on all those influences, it was completely retro, I mean when I look back it's almost so retro it's conservative isn't it really, conservative with a small c.

Did you get involved with any writing?

No I didn't. No, that was a clear-cut line, no, you don't go over that line and however much I looked like them and however much hung out with them, I was never going to cross that line into writing. One of the singers actually said to me once, "You know, you should be included in the writing, what's going on here, the scenario we've got here” but there was a management team, they were pop stars and I was no one, no writing was never an issue. It was such a contentious issue between them let alone towards me.

When did you actually start writing?

My earliest writing experience was with a band called Samuel Purdy – we were a drummer who played with Jarimoqui, a guitarist who played with Jarimoqui and myself who played with the Brand New Heavies. We somehow hooked up – can't remember how – and they put this demo together before I came along that caused a great deal of interest – Sony decided to put a load of money into it. It was essentially a Steely Dan covers band but without doing covers - it was originals. They were such Steely Dan fanatics that they actually got Elliot Randall in on guitar and the whole exercise was to write stuff that sounded Steely Dan pretty much, if I'm honest about it and that was my first writing experience, what an ordeal that was – that album - I left after a year because it was taking so long, the drummer was so passionate about his drum sound, so pernickity about his drum sound he'd take two weeks sometimes to get a drum sound and we were in studios that were costing £500 a day, it was driving me nuts. So I left after a year and two years after that they managed actually to finish the album - it had sort of all been written but to actually finish producing the album.

And that kind of sparked it really, I went and did a project called Diamond Wookie which was just me, which I wrote, with a couple of other guys and yeah, one thing led to another. I started to write jazz house records with people. It's kind of the whole writing thing, you mentioned the Brand New Heavies (about writing or not writing) and I just switched my psychology about it; I just decided that when I dealt with people, instead of saying to them "Okay I'm going to come in for a session" I said to them "Okay, I'm going to come in, I'm going to contribute, it's going to be writing and I'm not going to take the session fee" and it really was just a change of tack because I realised that publishing was the way forward for me and I also realised that I was writing a lot of stuff and not getting credit for it so I decided to forsake session fees and take writing instead. And it kind of just grew and grew from there, I got involved with so many different writing things, so many different genres and I was just interested to find out what was out there.

And that's now a major part of what you do?

Yeah, it's all of what I do really, not only is it my income - totally, it's all I dedicate myself to, I haven't done session work in a good few years, I love to write and I think I've become a really good writer over the years, I've spent so much time working on it. Yeah, it's what I do now.

And you write for other people?

No, I don't. I don't find much time for it because to write for other people really I think you have to be song writing. I wrote a few songs with Seidah Garrett who's Michael Jackson's co-writer – she wrote Man in the Mirror – I wrote some songs with her where I came up with all the chords and she came up with the vocals and lyrics - someone's releasing one of those tracks soon actually- I wrote those about five of six years ago but no, I'm not interested in writing songs. Songs get you covered by other people so no I don't because I write instrumental music, you know, and unless you're writing something that Kenny Gee can pick up and play, I don't think that you're going to get covered really, and I don't do that many.

So when did you leave the Brand New Heavies?

'98 I left, I decided it was time to move on. They'd just parted company with Seidah Garrett, you know, got involved with Carleen Anderson I think for one album or something, and I was dedicated to something else, I can't remember what it was now but I decided it was time to move on so no I wasn't involved at that point.

And then you got involved with Zero Seven?

Zero Seven, yeah. Same connection actually: Henry (Binns) used to music programme for the Brand New Heavies so I knew him years ago and he produced this album, he and Sam (Hardaker) produced Zero Seven's first album and he'd been looking for me and found me when they’d pretty much recorded it and he said "Will you come and play live on it?" So I did and recorded a couple of B sides with them and recorded the second album with them, lovely couple of guys, they really are great guys. I did that for about a year and then I think I got some kind of phobia with touring at that point because they suggested that we all get on a bus and go around America for a month and I'd done that with the Brand New Heavies and singers are a nightmare – as we all know – and with the backing group there were about six singers and six singers on a bus I couldn't cope with so I backed out! I think that upset them a bit, understandably, but it was too much for me and again I was working on something else, I was working on Fragile State and really engrossed in that. Again, I've always put my writing first, certainly for the last seven or eight years I've always put my writing projects first.

I'm going to touch on genre categorisation – it's something that people are interested in – how would you categorise your writing, would you put it into any particular genre?

Hmm, no I wouldn't, I mean the fact that it's been picked up by the jazz press as being a jazz record – I can see why that is and maybe it's ludicrous that I even question it, maybe it is just pure out and out jazz, it probably is but it's easily categorised as jazz because it's got a piano, a double bass and drums in it but I hear everything that I've truly loved in it such as, I’ve said this in the biog, such as Shostakovich, Ahmad Jamal, I do see it as a cross between those two. I hear Eastern Bloc classical music really coming through.

So you didn't set out to write a jazz album?

Well the truth is I did set out to write a jazz album. What I produced doesn't necessarily sound like what I set out to do but I did because that's what we decided to do, me and Richard (Sadler) and Evan (Jenkins) – the bass player and drummer – decided that's what we were going to do and it was a distinct attempt to get away from microchip music, working on computers. I wanted to get away from that and really felt it was getting away from what I do best –

The acoustic?

Yes, and creating spontaneously, I mean, that's what I do best and it's really difficult to do that on record.

I was going to say is there a lot of spontaneous improvisation in that – I mean I've heard the record do it a couple of times…it seems very together?

It's all one take stuff, there's a bit of jiggery pokery on one track but we did two or three takes on each track and chose the best. Some stuff happened, not like we planned, but it sounded good and I think that's what we wanted to do, we were all in the same room, no over-dubs.

Do you sit at your piano and your partners at their instruments and say "Right, we're going to do this, and see where it goes"

Well yeah, I think we do.

Do you mean "I'm going to start playing anything, I'm going to start a tune and I'm now actually just going to play, I'm going to start inventing something here and now" or do you mean you take a tune and you say "We're going to start off with a tune and then see where it goes".. which do you mean?

Well I suppose I mean the latter really that "I don't know where it's going" obviously you'll keep to the timing "but I don't know where we're going to end up". We do do that.

That takes an awful lot of confidence

Yeah, we know each other very well. And also, I think they'd hate me to say this but also I think it takes a lot of leadership. I think we'll develop, I think it's interesting to see how we develop really but at this stage they are kind of seeing where I'm going. Occasionally it will happen in reverse and Richard will start something and I'll play off that. At the last gig we did something which we just though would be fun, we played the Reggie Perrin theme tune and we started off on that and we really hadn't got a clue where we were going – and we don't play the whole tune, we start off with the melody and just see where it goes and just feel it and we are about that, we're about peaks and troughs and we do just understand each another. I think a lot of the great bands do that.

You guys got together in 2001?

Yes we did, I was living in a house with a bass player – and I told him that my dad always had a jazz piano trio and I said I'd always wanted to have one like Dudley Moore had one and he said, "Well let's do it" and he introduced me to a lot of artists I hadn't seen before such as Ahmad Jamal – I actually hadn't come across Ahmad Jamal before and I was delighted, there’s so much in those records. I went to Montreux that year - I'd always wanted to play Montreux since I watched it on TV as a kid - and the following year I managed to blag a gig by saying, "I was here last year, any chance I could bring my trio?" and we went over and played a bunch of covers on this funny little side stage and Lee Konitz came up and had a blow with us. It was bizarre because they suddenly decided that we might be good for the saxophone competition which involved needing a hell of a lot of repertoire – repertoire wasn't our forte at that point – they were shocked to find that we were using kind of scratch sheets and playing around with this idea of being a jazz trio and we didn't really have the repertoire, which is why we hadn't gone down that road, of just learning everything in a million different keys, so we busked it at Montreux and Claude himself – you know Claude Montego came himself and listened and I think they recorded a bit of it, it was a digital grand piano so I think they recorded a bit of it on disc and it's in an archive somewhere. So we did that and that was really the beginning of the trio, an actual gig scenario with the trio. Quite an achievement to do Montreux as your first gig. It was great, really good time, loved it.

Would you say that that this is a kind of conclusion or are you on the way through to something else? Do you think you have arrived in the kind of area where you want to be?

No I think I've arrived because I've been trying to get back to my piano for fifteen years and this is a fantastic vehicle in which to play the piano, I don't need anything else really and it's got to develop, there are so many ways it can develop and I really do feel I've arrived. Absolutely feel like I've arrived. I mean this is the first thing I've actually stood up and put my name on, I think that says quite a lot really. I've always gone under a pseudonym or within a band name but with this one I've really stood up and said "This is me".

This is your first album?

As Neil Cowley Trio, yes.

And the label is?

Hideinside Records.

Your label?

Yes it is. I've got a co-financier, a lovely guy called Tim Garity who actually produced the album and when we went to Real World he stood in the back there and looked over the whole thing. He's helped finance it, he's a backer as such but my last experience of being signed by a record label, the record label went bust and we lost all our money and I didn't want that to happen again and also I'm not very good with putting my stuff out there and waiting to hear the critique. I find it very traumatic and I find the silence you get from record companies when you send them CDs too much to bear and I thought, "No, I'm going to put it out myself and if a record company, a big one, comes along and says, "Yes, we'll have it", great, I'm going to let them come to me, I didn't want to go to them.

Including the major multinationals?

Sure, but I wonder what the likelihood of them coming to me is. I think I'd want to send it to a personal contact who genuinely might show an interest. I don't know. I just can't be bothered to be sat in a pile of envelopes for the next six months. I mean I've got a friend who runs a record label, he literally just listened to all the demos he received last year and put them into a yes pile and a no pile. I mean what good’s that for an artist, you know, waiting six months for a reply, it's heart breaking and you could just go back into your shell and think that there's nothing you can offer to music. I just didn't want to go down that road this time. If a major came along, fabulous.

So as far as you're concerned whatever genre it gets slotted into is fine – you're not a purist in that respect?

I'm not a purist in the least. I think Richie the bass player is. No, he's not a purist, he's a firm believer that there is jazz and there is non jazz and he's got quite an interesting philosophy on it really, jazz for him should be a progression of something, it should always be progressing, it should always be introducing itself to new things. I find such a hand in dance music, so many different genres, there's no way it can't reflect those things, if that turns up the nose of jazz purists, then that's just unfortunate, that's what I am. You see I didn't learn the repertoire, I have not gone to the jazz clubs, I didn't play with any of the great jazz artists, I've just ploughed my own furrow. That could have made me an outcast though.

Well, but an outcast from what? I did notice that – whether this is reported accurately or not – that said that you were quite scared of the jazz 'community, does that mean that you think that there is some kind of club, or some kind of dues that have to be paid before you can accept yourself in this community?

I don't know. I mean I know some of the guys, I like Mornington Lockett, such a great guy, such a jazz person, I mean, you know he's a night owl, he drinks, I shouldn't say this really, like a fish you know, he's great, as my wife says he's the kind of bloke you'd move away from on the train until he gets his saxophone out and then it's just "Wow!" and also he's such a little guy and when he's on stage he's huge. So in truth there probably is no club, it's just the impression it gives and I'm dead scared of that whole scenario, after Montreux, I'm dead scared of someone finding out that I don't know On Green Dolphin Street in all the different keys. I could do, I play so much by ear I could do but it's just that I'm not so familiar with all those great classics, I've not done that thorough jazz education which it seems – the jazz community give the impression – is vital, it's so important that you go through that jazz education and I haven't given myself that jazz education. And the cynicism as well, there's such a huge level of cynicism within the jazz fraternity which I can't be dragged into.

It's the cynicism which is ultimately is the reason for the self defeat of the genre in this country. It's one of those things that turns in on itself. How do you feel about contemporary European music?

I think it's fabulous stuff. There's a couple that just send me to sleep but generally speaking I love the whole – there is such a refreshing breeze coming from Scandinavia – it's youthful, it's young and it's got that Eastern Bloc sound to it as well, it's got that kind of bleakness which I really like and it is saying something very, very new. I can't listen to the new jazz American artists, I just don't anymore, who would you listen to? I mean they're playing smooth jazz and oh my God, why bother really. I think the cynicism we've talked about, if it stays there, then it will all die and I think, if there was a rush of new blood and there was something just even in this country that we could get excited about that actually involved people, younger people, ex-club heads, you know like people in their twenties and thirties that were just looking for something more… People who were involved in the dance culture, felt connected with each other, within venues that connected with something that was big that they could all collectively jump up and down to (unfortunately the DJ got the kudos for that), if jazz could, if they are looking to connect with something else and it happens to be some guys on stage that are producing something soulful that they can connect with, I think maybe that's where they've drifted apart, there's no connection and we need more venues, you know, we need venues that have the shared success of this – there’s so many chill out bars, dance cafes, DJ cafes, you know, if that could become the currency of jazz as well – or just music, it just needs to connect more and it really isn't as simple as playing your granddad's music – that isn't really going to connect is it?

Well, it's more difficult now in terms of the new licensing laws for live performances?

Well this is true, we get gigs as a trio, it's just a nightmare. Personally we need a grand piano but that scrubs out 75% to 80% of the venues and that's of the jazz venues as well – so there's about twelve gigs you can do and you're battling against a load of other people so it's really difficult which is why we end up doing classic jazz venues such as the Pizza Express and maybe the Jazz Café would be more reflective of our sounds.

So you are where you want to be at the moment but there is obviously a lot more to come. Do you have a plan for the future?

I think there’s the main plan and then there is the side ambition. And there is personal ambition – my personal ambition is to look after my family, give my wife and child everything they need. My musical ambition is to make this trio work, I want the trio playing live and I don’t want to worry about any other gigs other than for this band, and I want to do all the great festivals and to be constantly expressing myself live. And in the near future get another album on the go, possibly around the end of this year.

And then there is my side ambition which is…I’ve always wanted to be John Barry, yeah, I think all my music has a cinematic touch to it and I desperately want to do a film. That’s my secret side ambition, my little thing for me.

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