Ron Carter Esperanza Spalding - Downbeat

Riffs
Poncho Sánchez
Latin Love: Conguero Poncho Sánchez
received a Lifetime Achievement Award
from the Latin Recording Academy on
Nov. 14. Sánchez wil be honored at an
invitation-only ceremony at the Four
Seasons Las Vegas. Over the course of
his 30-year career, the percussionist—who
was a member of Cal Tjader’s famed
ensemble—has released more than 30
albums and won a Grammy in 1999 for
Best Latin Jazz Performance.
Stream On: Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola at
Jazz at Lincoln Center has begun streaming
its Thursday-evening performances at
9:30 p.m. EST on the Jazz at Lincon Center
website. The program of live-streamed
events will include the Jan. 14 awards
ceremony for the 2013 NEA Jazz Masters,
which will also be broadcast on Sirius XM
Satellite Radio.
Seeing Signs: Pianist Gerald Clayton
celebrated his recent signing with Concord
Records with a six-night residency at
the Jazz Standard in New York on Sept.
25–30. Clayton’s residency included performances
with artists such as vocalists
Sachal Vasandani and Gretchen Parlato,
trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and saxophonist
Dayna Stephens.
App-ro Blue: In September, Blue Note
Records launched its own Spotify application,
which will allow users to discover
music spanning the entire history of the
label. Features of the app include a filter
that lets users refine their track search
by performer, album, style, instrument or
year, as well as a place to purchase label
merchandise. The label has partnered with
website Who Sampled to include songs
that sample classic Blue Note tunes,
including tracks by the Beastie Boys,
Common, The Roots, A Tribe Called Quest
and the Wu-Tang Clan.
Ashley Stagg
Cowley Trio Embodies Brit-jazz
Brit-jazz has become a widely used term for
the young U.K. bands sweeping away old
clichés and embracing rock and dance-influenced
music. It stems from London jazz club
Ronnie Scott’s, which developed the Brit Jazz
Fest in 2009. Based around the London club
scene, Brit-jazz has come to include, most
recently, the Neil Cowley Trio.
This year, the Cowley trio released the
U.K.’s best-selling jazz record, The Face Of
Mount Molehill (Naim). The trio is known for
its strong hooky melodies and energy-laden
riffs, which appeal to rock and jazz fans alike.
At a festival in Finland, one excited fan even
mounted a one-man stage invasion.
“What we do live is perhaps a step up from
the record,” Cowley said. “We’re very much
about a collective output. We’re about melodies,
and the collective energy we produce.”
It’s a life force that Cowley also provides as
pianist on singer Adele’s smash hit “Rolling In
The Deep.” But just what is the Cowley sound?
“I grew up in the Thames estuary,”
Cowley said. “It’s funny, I was in Sligo in
Ireland, and this guy said what we play was an
Anglicised yearning for something that never
really existed.”
Cowley has a wit about him that, like his
music, draws you in. He’s a big fan of one of
England’s greatest socially conscious film
directors, Mike Leigh, who is well-known
for such bittersweet classics as Life Is Sweet.
“I would aspire to be a musical Mike Leigh,”
Cowley says. “I think the man’s a genius.”
The Neil Cowley Trio has been the target
of criticism from the old school of British jazz
for the group’s irksome ability to write catchy
tunes and for not improvising enough. As an
act of comic revenge on a newspaper journalist’s
grumble that all the band did was
play “loud, louder” and then “stop,” Cowley
took that very phrase for the title of their next
album—Loud ... Louder ... Stop! (Cake)—and
released it as the followup to their debut album,
Displaced (Hide Inside).
At the Montreux Jazz Festival, Cowley presented
newly arranged versions of songs from
that album, including a magisterial version
of the tune “How Do We Catch Up.” Radio
Silence (Naim), their last album with the original
bassist on board, came out two years ago. A
glance at the artwork will confirm they’re cast
as ill-fated polar explorers, all three deep-frozen
in the ice and their axes and showshoes forlornly
abandoned by their sides.
Frequently compared to the sound of late
pianist Esbjörn Svensson’s trio, Cowley shares
Svensson’s desire to crack America. It’s a fiveyear
effort on his part.
“If you can make it in the U.K., you can
make it anywhere,” Cowley said. “We’ve taken
the hard knocks, and maybe we’re geared up
for it.”
Neil Cowley
Setting up at the studio, drummer Evan
Jenkins, who is from Wellington, New
Zealand, but who has lived and worked in the
United Kingdom since 1994, quietly assembles
his beloved Rogers drum kit and takes
his Zildjian cymbals out of their bags, ready
to rehearse new material titled “Forrest The
Officer” and “Stop Frame 90s.”
The third member of the band, recently
recruited Australian bassist Rex Horan, has
been living in the United Kingdom since
1997. Horan met Jenkins four years earlier
in Western Australia, when they were both
students in Perth, and then hooked up with
various bands, particularly Scottish singer/
songwriter Phil Campbell. Jenkins was as
interested in rock as he was jazz, an unlikely
fan of both pomp rockers Kiss as well as
Buddy Rich, Louie Bellson, Roy Haynes and
Dave Garibaldi.
Horan, heavily bearded with copious tattoos
on his forearms and a certain steely look
about him, talks in disarmingly modulated
tones about the “strength of the melodies”
of the trio and Cowley’s knack for writing a
catchy tune.
“For me, with most good music, whether it
is rock or reggae, the tracks with the strong
tunes are always the ones that rise above eventually,”
Horan said.
Cowley brings melody to Brit-jazz, something
that used to be unfashionable, but he and
the trio are not alone. With a wind of change
blowing through the very diverse British scene,
Cowley’s estuary sound is one the jazz world is
getting used to. You might think it’s familiar,
but you won’t have heard it before.
—Stephen Graham
cOURTESY OF rIOT squad Publicity
14 DOWNBEAT DECEMBER 2012