The Neil Cowley Trio, Entity (Hide Inside Records)

Ten years ago (gulp), I had a brief stint as an album reviewer for The Quietus.  The first record I reviewed for them was Touch and Flee, the then-new album by British jazz pianist Neil Cowley and his eponymous Trio.  I’d never heard a note of Cowley’s music before, but I enjoyed the album very much (“fluid, uncluttered tunes, warm humour and passages of tense, spiky abstraction”).  So much so, in fact, that when the Trio landed at my favourite venue in the world, Porgy & Bess in Vienna, a year later I wasted no time in attending (and reviewed that gig for my old blog).

I’ve kept an eye on Cowley ever since, starting off with 2016’s Spacebound Apes, the science fiction-influenced follow-up to Touch and Flee.  After that ambitious outing Cowley clearly felt the need to rethink his direction somewhat, and re-emerged in 2021 with the first of two solo albums, Hall of Mirrors.  Both that and 2023’s Battery Life were brave, defiantly uncommercial records that mostly turned away from the addictive hooks and melodies of the Trio into the realms of pure abstraction and introspection.  Cowley’s piano playing was as sublime as ever, but something had changed: a weathered tone streaked with downbeat electronica.  It was an unexpected turn, for sure, but one that amply rewarded repeated listens.

And now there’s Entity, the first Neil Cowley Trio album in eight years.  Right from the off, it’s clear that Cowley has folded the wintry atmospherics of his solo work into the group dynamics of the Trio.  On opening track “Marble”, dreamlike clusters of piano settle among restrained washes of bass and percussion, until at the halfway mark the piece pulls you into something darker and more jagged than what has gone before.  Bassist Rex Horan and drummer Evan Jenkins are unobtrusive presences throughout, Horan’s sinuous bass and Jenkins’ slinky tom-toms forming the elegant basis for Cowley’s glistening piano runs.

Cowley, Horan and Jenkins are immensely talented musicians, their reunion after years apart marked by a depth of understanding and a new maturity of tone.  “V&A” sees Cowley conjure gorgeous note patterns that don’t quite resolve, melting instead into prickly arpeggios that surround the bass and drums.  “Adam Alphabet” is more upbeat and groovy but no less bold, its burrowing refrain an exuberant highlight of the album.

Meanwhile, trace elements of the electronics that Cowley introduced into his solo work recur at key moments here.  The frosty timbre of what sounds like a Mellotron graces the title track, while there’s discreet synth in “Father Daughter”, weaving in and out of an unutterably lovely rising and falling melody.  In an article for his Substack, Cowley writes that the piece is dedicated to his daughter, who was born prematurely at only 25 weeks.  At the Vienna concert I saw in 2015, Cowley had mentioned that an earlier song, “Box Lily” from 2010’s Radio Silence, was also dedicated to her, the box of the title referring to the incubator in which she had spent the first three months of her life.

In contrast to the ECM-ish clarity that characterised earlier Trio outings, producer Ethan Johns (son of Beatles engineer Glyn Johns, fact fans) brings a sober, lived-in quality to the record.  It’s a sound that feels appropriate to Entity’s moment, a coming together of old friends in the name of something new.