It’s hard to believe: but there are places in the world where jazz hardly ever reaches. We’re not just talking remote islands known only to latterday Robinson Crusoes or the interior of the Gobi desert.
These places, rural smalltown places, rarely hear it but they’re not suffering clearly. Yet they are clearly missing out on lots and lots of great music. And it’s not just jazz, world music, too, hardly ever gets a look-in. The irony isn’t lost on savvy music fans kicking their heels at home with only the X Factor for company: all this music sitting there on Spotify but they can’t hear it live up close and personal unless they schlep it to the big city. In the parallel universe that is Northern Ireland this is especially the case, and one of the aims of Further into Jazz’s gigs Marlbank put on over the last few months on home ground was to help address that.
More broadly and with more resources enough to reach bigger audiences the Arts Council Northern Ireland is well into a touring initiative that has already involved genres including and adjacent to jazz under-represented on a local small town level.
The Neil Cowley trio touring as part of this programme are after Derry tomorrow (23 October), and Belfast (25 October), in a bunch of small towns: Downpatrick (26 October), Enniskillen (28 October), Omagh (29 October), and Portstewart (30 October).
The Cowley trio Ardhowen theatre show, their first in Fermanagh, followed the next night in Omagh, their first in Tyrone, introduces a hit trio to local audiences that otherwise they would not even be able to dream of hearing. Rock and big-time jazz promoters stick to the cities after all.
It’s a band that has popularised the collision between chill-out and dance music inspirations patched on to jazz without selling out, and their latest album released in June Touch and Flee (aka the one with Rex’s beard on the cover), no strings this time, is a more reflective Cowley to an extent in the early part of the album. Still very melodic and accessible but less about blood and guts, this from a pianist after all who can hammer out a monster riff on Adele’s ‘Rolling in the Deep’, and even Evan Jenkins is that bit more restrained, and the improvising reaches dry land it has never found before.
Cowley avoids jazz cliché and he improvises in his own way to the chagrin of the esteemed ranks of the Jazz Punditry particularly certain elderly Sunday newspaper scribes who disdain the use of electricity to loftily dismiss the NCT’s impertinent dynamism preferring to espouse oblique improvising strategies instead. He builds his tunes section by section, and the best track on the new album is the reverb-soaked opener ‘Kneel Down’ the pianist managing somehow to tap out a more chromatic crab-like direction on ‘Couch Slouch’ extending himself a little and allowing the trio more room.
Jazz. Not jazz. Garrulous. Lost for words. The contradictions as tangy as the interplay Cowley’s relatively new bassist Rex Horan, an intuitive presence on stage, and founder drummer Evan Jenkins riding the arc of the tune, thrive on.
Audiences hearing it for the first time are in for a rollercoaster: ‘Mission’, for instance, like an arcade game synthy commentary stocked with a powerful theme, the cheeky chappie banter at the shows from the pianist a contrast to the serious original artist when he hunkers down to play. Stephen Graham