Hitting London and the Barbican tomorrow, Southampton, Cardiff, Brighton, Oxford, and on, Cowley, Horan, and Jenkins – the Neil Cowley trio – return to their home-from-home in Derry for a gig on 23 October, then Belfast (25 October), and play places most touring jazz bands never reach, gigging for the first time in Downpatrick (26 October), Enniskillen (28 October), Omagh (29 October), and Portstewart (30 October), before the caravan moves on to Germany. The trio’s latest album Touch and Flee was released earlier in the year, a pared-down beardily introspective affair very different to the with-strings bravura of The Face of Mount Molehill but no less effective. A band that has popularised the collision between chill-out and dance music-inspirations and a post-EST sense of improvising with its own particular language, the trio know what it means to explore the possibilities of the piano trio when there is, audaciously enough, no obligation at all to swing. 

On tour... Rex Horan above left, Neil Cowley, and Evan Jenkins