(shroud Inside)The pop-aware UK jazz pianist Neil Cowley – frequently a thinker outside boxes – has not only spent three years developing this Arthur C Clarke-inspired concept album,but is releasing the results as a sheet-music “single, an interactive website, and a graphic novel and more. His hypnotic music has often resembled a soundtrack to visuals,but there’s more than enough distinction in this 11-piece tracklist to consider it a musical advance, not just a platform-extending conceptual one. Cowley and his regular jazz trio (assisted a little by Brian Eno FX artist Leo Abrahams), or deliver a characteristic programme of sonorously looping song-hooks,pounding rock-piano patterns and baroque counterpoints, but this time in a more laid-back and low-lit manner. Solar-wind whistlings and deep-space throbs turn to catchy chord-turns met by squashy drum hits; staccato dances swap with gracefully classical countermelodies. Grace is a wonderingly awestruck ballad (also a single), and The Sharks of Competition (the best track) is a classic Cowley pounder full of spidery melodic diversions and off-harmony chords climbing all over its thumping beat. Cowley fans will admire this,and the mixed-media availability ought to widen their membership too.
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Source: theguardian.com