Neil Cowley
Album Review: Neil Cowley – ‘Battery Life’: music with momentum and magic for piano and electronics.
Neil Cowley has never been a musician to tread water unnecessarily. Filling the prime keyboard seat in the Brand New Heavies and Zero 7 he was there at the centre of that soul dance/acid jazz nineties prime time. Then came the jazz informed Neil Cowley Trio, a band that fore-fronted the first wave of UK …
Track/Video : Revered pianist/composer Neil Cowley previews ‘Ticker Tape’, a spirit raising burst from incoming album ‘Battery Life’.
From banging out hymns at his school assembly to playing Shostakovich (with Orchestra) on a South Bank Centre stage as a 10 year old to filling the keys’ seat through the nineties and noughties for the Brand New Heavies, Zero 7 and a bit later someone called Adele, Londoner Neil Cowley’s piano skills have taken …
100 albums of 2021 you shouldn’t miss, plus playlist
In a moment a folly, I (not me and my editorial team, or my writers, or indeed anyone) decided to make a playlist of the year. Not one of those in order ones, just a playlist of good records, written by the esteemed writers here at Backseat Mafia. I don’t know what possessed me to …
Track: Jacana People – ‘And The Lake Was …’: a masterful lope of electronica atmospheres with Neil Cowley at the keys
IF YOU’RE a fan of the leftfield musics, ambient and textural and nuanced, whatever its provenance, be it modern compositional or electronic or anywhere through the ultraviolets and infrareds along the spectrum between them both, then one of the artists involved in this new single you’ll likely be au fait with; the other, perhaps less …
Album review: Neil Cowley – ‘Hall Of Mirrors (Reflected)’: ambient piano is tripped further into leftfield on this excellent remixes set
THE REMIX album is a really interesting thing, a gathering of the tribes in a meeting place that’s arisen from the sphere of dance music, in which like minds bring their aesthetics and splice it with another’s; a trading, the one overlaying, informing the other, creating a new offspring. When it comes off in the …
See: Neil Cowley – ‘I Choose The Mountain’: solo compositional delicacy with love to Wim Wenders
BRITISH pianist Neil Cowley, who released a septet of albums sitting astride the point where jazz begins to shade into modern composition and ‘tronica over a period of ten years from 2006, has been on something of a musical journey. Having dissolved his previous combo, the Neil Cowley Trio, he’d seemingly fallen out of love …
News: Neil Cowley presents a live-streamed recital live from London upon the release of ‘Hall Of Mirrors’
IN CELEBRATION of the release of his rather excellent longform essay into piano and electronica, Hall Of Mirrors, Neil Cowley is presenting a live-streamed performance from London’s Lafayette. The performance, live-streamed for the first time last night, will be available to watch in full until March 18th. The contemporary composer who has moved from jazz …
Album review: Neil Cowley – ‘Hall Of Mirrors’: A love letter to a city and an instrument
Neil Cowley has been on a journey away from, and returning to, the piano; Hall Of Mirrors is a striking love letter to the instrument, and also to his adopted city of Berlin. But all these conceptual asides fade away beneath the main thrust: it’s a truly bloody great record. Buy.
NEWS: Neil Cowley announces solo album for February; hear ‘She Lives In Golden Sands’
BRITISH pianist Neil Cowley, who released a septet of albums sitting astride the point where jazz begins to shade into modern composition and tronica over a period of ten years from 2006, has been on something of a musical journey. His previous combo, the Neil Cowley Trio, climaxed in the piano and tronica-led excellence of …
SEE: Neil Cowley’s ‘Eureka Pulse’: solo piano grace from new triptych of EPs
NEIL COWLEY is someone who has lived and breathed music his whole life. He took on a Shostakovich piano concerto at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall at the age of 10; not so many years later he developed a reputation as a go-to pianist and keyboardist in British funk, working with Zero 7, Gabrielle and The …