Neil Cowley interview: “It was dangerous getting back together. I didn’t want to break up the band again”

The Neil Cowley Trio are back. It’s seven years since Cowley broke up the band for a ‘solo’ career. But now they’re in our faces again, as brazen, ballsy and ecstatic as ever with the gloriously melancholic Entity.

The sounds are big, the beards bigger and future plans bigger still. Yet Cowley, in his English way, still swims in doubt.

“I’ve questioned every step of the way, this re-uniting of the trio. Is it a step back? A step forward? A comeback?” he asks.

When Cowley went into the solo side of his life in 2017, he was hardly to know that it would presage the pandemic lockdowns of 2020, which was also the year his solo debut Hall of Mirrors dropped. But with lockdown, Cowley had no choice whether he was ‘solo’ or not.

“I didn’t enjoy a single moment of that solitude,” he says. “I lived opposite a headmaster. He’d sit in the garden saying, ‘I could do this for the rest of my life!’ I was thinking ‘Well I couldn’t!’”

Over time, Cowley asked. “‘What is the socially most active thing I can do? The socially most cohesive group that I know? And it had to be the Trio.”

But returning to ‘social discourse’, Cowley’s description, didn’t have to be alongside Rex Horan’s bass and Evan Jenkins drums? Cowley had long been a serial collaborator across many genres before the trio hit the scene in 2006. Yet he never had a moment’s doubt about bringing his Antipodean brothers in rhythm back to the fold.

“It was dangerous getting back together. I didn’t want to break up the band again,” he explains. “It was all the cause and effect of my own neurosis. But Evan and Rex support me in beautiful ways. Evan is like Tigger, bouncing up and down ‘Yeah, mate, I can do that.’ Which I need. Rex has a musical brain the size of a planet. If I get his approval, I know it’s for real.”

But with the complex Cowley rivers run deep. There’s a reason he calls Horan and Jenkins ‘brothers’.

“When I made that decision (to go solo), a lot of people cut me off; media wise, general contact wise it was a severe cut off.

“There was a certain amount of hubris on my part. A management team came along who had big ambitions that I could be even ‘bigger’. I look back at it as an ugly instinct.

“I’m more at ease with who I am now. I’m enjoying the essence of just doing it (making music) and not going off in different directions.”

Yet Cowley has no regrets about his explorations into electronics and contemporary classical music.

“I’d guess you’d call what I was doing neo-classical…” he says. “I wanted to explore sonically what I could do on my own. ‘Grace’ the solo piano tune was such a massive thing for me.”

Cowley’s connection to classical music goes back to when, “the borough’s music adviser (Eric Stephenson) campaigned to find talent in places you didn’t expect to find it. Like Hillingdon! When he found me and couple of others, he proved the talent was there.

“But when I went to the Royal Academy, I didn’t feel one of them. Partly ‘cause of this accent. I didn’t like the culture; I didn’t like the people surrounding me. I was always on the outside.”

Stephenson taught Cowley for free, and during his brief teenage stay at the Academy, he also had teachers like Jean Anderson, “whom I’ve adored ever since. But I was still a fish out of water.”

Stephenson “taught me a lot of Russian and Eastern music. A schizophrenic element of me was that when I went out, I put on this hat that said I was a ‘classical prodigy’. But I never really wanted to be that.

“At home [with his mother] we’d be listening to James Brown, Errol Garner, who’s still a huge hero, Dudley Moore and what he thought about Garner and Oscar Peterson. All this while me mum was playing Fats Waller and we’d be dancing in the front room to him.

“And all this while loving and learning Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 2 (which he performed at the Royal Festival Hall aged 10.) So, both things were going on. And when you look at how I compose, the syncopation, the clusters of 5ths down at the bottom end, the nasty little 10ths chords that Errol Garner played ‘cause he didn’t know what he was doing, bless him…then there’s the delayed right hand he always played against the metronomic left which I analysed and analysed just like Dudley Moore.

“Whether you want it or not you’ll always hear that in me, always that duplicity!” smiles Cowley, “the heart-felt jazz-soul-blues stuff: and then the head, the classical.”

It would be easy, lazy even, to lay this duality (Cowley uses ‘duplicity’ and ‘schizophrenia’ to describe himself, but he’s tough about his own emotions) at the door of Cowley’s upbringing.

Neil Cowley was born to a caring, nurturing mum after she had a brief affair with Max Miller’s musical director. His father, who led a trio, never told his own family of their half-brother’s existence. So, there were secrets within secrets for Cowley.

“Every fortnight he would call from a phone box, tell me a joke and the pips would go before he got to the punch line. And every coupla years we’d go to Brighton (to meet him).”

That sense of being apart, yet a part of a wider family, seems vital to Cowley’s musical trajectory.

“I met Dad’s children when I was about 32. They are 25 years older than me. And I realised that my Dad, being the ego-centric that he was, they never got a look in at the piano! He was always on it! Whereas I was left to prosper on my own at the piano.

“So, I think I’m quite an experiment genetically. I got so much genetically from Dad. I don’t want to disparage him: he was a magnificent fellah. But in a way there was a bit of fire in me that I was going to be better than him.”

“Sub-consciously I used the angst as a driving force in my twenties. So, when I did announce myself (to his half-siblings) I worried I might lose my edge. But it didn’t soften me that much!”

But Cowley now has his own family, with adult creative children, and he lives in what he calls “a quintessentially English Village. One thing I won’t do is live on the coast. When I visited Dad in Brighton, it always rained.” He laughs. But ruefully.

Indeed, most of Entity was written at home, another novelty for Cowley.

“I have a little room at the end of the garden,” so he’s close to domestic delights but slightly separated.

“My grandfather lived in a chicken coop at the end of the garden.He had 9 children. Everyone needs their chicken coop!

“I sat down for two months, honing this and that, not sharing with anyone. I always need to do that: deal with my own doubts otherwise I get waylaid by the opinion of others. I’m a control freak. It’s not great to admit. But I know that now.”

The music that bloomed for Entity is epic, yet intimate, hopeful, yet laced with yearning, high energy yet at times diaphanous. It’s all those ‘dualities’ that make Cowley so listenable and the Trio so loved.

And of course, Entity busts any sense of ‘genre’. Cowley may say, “I’ve always had trouble fitting into a ‘genre’. I’ve always felt that any genre I’ve dipped into people have said, ‘Are you really one of us?’ And I may think, ‘Do I want to be one of you?’”

But that’s Cowley’s gift: to yoke together different styles and traditions, from Shostakovich to Errol Garner. And from that he’s created his own music. He is his own genre now, bordering on the transcendent.

“That’s good to hear! I want to point people to the universal rather than what is on the ground. We are utterly ludicrous as a species to think we are any more important than that mote of dust over there. We are ridiculous and laughable, and I love that! It gives you a sense of wonder!”

There was a reason Ray Brown nicknamed Garner ‘The Happy Man’. And it may just be Cowley has found his happy place. Perhaps. Possibly. It’s the swimming in doubt that keeps us going. And a sense of duty to the Jean Andersons and Eric Stephensons of the world.

We all need our feet on the ground – and our head in the stars.

The Neil Cowley Trio play EartH, Hackney on 19 November as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival: efglondonjazzfestival.org.uk

This article originally appeared in the November 2024 issue of Jazzwise. Never miss an issue – subscribe today