Neil Cowley Trio

London-born pianist Neil Cowley started young, performing a Shostakovich concerto at Queen Elizabeth Hall at ten, then spent his teens and twenties touring with soul and funk acts before deciding that extracting music from a computer chip was, as he put it, lonely and depressing. He formed the Neil Cowley Trio in 2006, and their debut album won the BBC Jazz Award for Best Album the following year. The trio's sound sits at the intersection of jazz and rock: hook-driven piano riffs and galloping rhythms that can pivot, without warning, into passages of startling delicacy. Their 2008 album was called a modern classic by Mojo; their sixth, Spacebound Apes, a post-rock jazz masterpiece. After a seven-year solo detour that took Cowley into ambient and electronic territory, the trio reconvened in 2024 with Entity, completing the lineup with bassist Rex Horan and longtime drummer Evan Jenkins.