Brecon Jazz Festival 2015

Neil Cowley presents “The Other Side of Dudley Moore”, Theatr Brycheiniog, 08/08/2015.

The British pianist and composer Neil Cowley has been delighting audiences for the best part of a decade with his distinctive brand of piano trio music, an infectious blend of his various jazz, classical and pop and rock influences. Cowley’s music blends memorable melodic hooks with infectious grooves and has become increasingly sophisticated over the course of five albums, each one subtly different to the last but all suffused with the trio’s trademark focus and energy. His colleagues in this musical adventure have been drummer Evan Jenkins and first Richard Sadler and later Rex Horan on double bass.

Humour has always been an important element in Cowley’s music making, not only with regard to tune titles but also as part of the trio’s exciting stage shows. Cowley’s witty banter with both his band mates and the audience has always been an essential part of his live performances. 

Cowley’s blend of music and humour has been much influenced by Dudley Moore (1935-2002), a true renaissance man who enjoyed a successful career as a comedian, pianist and film star. These days Moore is probably best known for his comedic and acting skills but it was music that was his first love and as well as his successful career as a jazz pianist he also composed the soundtracks for a number of the films in which he starred. 

Cowley first came to appreciate Moore’s musical talents when, aged nine, he acquired a vinyl copy of the polymath’s album “The Other Side of Dudley Moore” recorded with bassist Pete McGurk and drummer Chris Karan in 1965.  He has described Moore as “my idol” and in 2015, the 80th anniversary of Moore’s birth he has put together this acclaimed tribute that has already been performed with great success at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in London.

The show represents a chronicle of Moore’s life illustrated by a series of anecdotes, some humorous, others profoundly moving and plenty of music with Cowley being joined for this project by the experienced rhythm team of bassist Geoff Gascoyne and drummer Sebastiaan De Krom. The choice of sidemen not only distances this tribute project from Cowley’s own ongoing Trio but was probably also made because Gascoyne and De Krom, who have worked together many times before, are more experienced “straight ahead” jazz players than the more rock influenced Jenkins and Horan.

I have to confess that I missed the first fifteen minutes of this performance as a serious accident on the A470 just six miles from Brecon totally wrecked my well planned schedule and resulted in a lengthy detour via Builth Wells, a journey not helped by a woeful lack of sign posting in the latter town. I was very angry at the time (as my wife will attest) but have subsequently heard that the accident involved a fatality, something that puts my initial annoyance and the missing of a quarter of an hour of entertainment into perspective. 

This year at Brecon I have been working with an official photographer. Bob Meyrick is a South Walian who is now resident in Nottingham where he co-ordinates the Jazzsteps programme at the Bonington Theatre in Arnold. I’m indebted to Bob for letting me use his photographs for my coverage of this year’s Brecon Jazz Festival. Cheers, Bob!

Bob was able to inform me that I had missed Cowley re-constructing Moore’s famous parody featuring his playing of the “Colonel Bogie” theme in the style of a Beethoven sonata.  As I took my seat Cowley was playing snippets from familiar TV themes, among them “Steptoe and Son” and “Fawlty Towers”.

The trio were performing in front of a backdrop of a photograph of Dudley Moore surrounded by sheet music. I started to pick up the narrative as Cowley described how as a young, working class classical music student he had been influenced by Moore’s choice of chords, very different to the classical chording of Chopin and others that he was already familiar with. As Cowley described it Moore’s preference was for “chords with attitude”. Brandishing the sleeve of Moore’s 1965 album “The Other Side of Dudley Moore” Cowley revealed the back cover photograph of Moore ripping a book of Bach’s “Two Part Inventions” in half. It was an image that appealed to Cowley who was already tiring of the strictures of classical music education and who saw Moore as an appropriately rebellious role model. For his own part, Moore, an organ scholar at Oxford, and from a similarly under privileged social background experienced the same sort of issues with relationship to class and the classical music establishment. Moore’s own jazz epiphany was the music of the American pianist Errol Garner, also a significant influence on the young Neil Cowley. 

Cowley illustrated Moore’s understanding of the jazz idiom with a swinging instrumental that included solos for both piano and double bass. If there was one aspect of today’s show that I found disappointing it was that not every tune title was announced with Cowley perhaps assuming that everybody in the audience was already familiar with Moore’s work as a jazz pianist. I’ll admit that I know more about Moore as a comedian and actor than I do as a musician and I’m sure that must have applied to many others in the audience too.

As well as being influenced by Moore’s chord choices Cowley was also inspired by his use of harmony, a point illustrated by a trio number that featured the wordless vocalising of Cowley, Gascoyne and De Krom. I suspect that this was Moore’s composition “Poova Nova”, written at the height of the 1960s bossa nova boom.

Cowley didn’t shy away from the less fortunate aspects of Moore’s life. He was born with a club foot, a disability that so appalled his mother Ada that she granted the infant Moore precious little affection, something that was to influence his future adult relationships. Moore underwent a number of operations on his foot during his early years and always remembered the nurse that gave him a goodnight peck on the cheek when he was a child, something that his own mother would never have dreamt of doing. Moore unsuccessfully attempted to trace that nurse when at the height of his fame many years later .

The lack of parental affection shown to Moore during his childhood resulted in him absorbing himself ever more deeply in the world of music as the organist at his local church and as an increasingly talented pianist and composer. Moore described the process of composing as “something that sucks you dry, leaves you like a zombie”. He clearly had a love/hate relationship with the piano, something that Cowley clearly relates to. The impression one gets is that in researching this tribute Cowley came to regard Moore as even more of a kindred spirit.

The trio now illustrated the more sensitive side of Moore’s compositional out put with a rendition of the beautiful “Waltz For Suzy”, a tune written by Moore for his first wife, the actress Suzy Kendall.
Sad but lovely and imbued with a profound sense of yearning the piece was notable for Gascoyne’s melancholic but immaculate bowed bass solo and De Krom’s sympathetic brush work in addition to Cowley’s lightness of touch at the piano. The music of Dudley Moore, whether swinging joyously or expressing deeper emotions as here is very different to Cowley’s own music and as a long term Cowley fan it was fascinating to witness him playing in an entirely different context to the one that I’m familiar with.

That said, a second piece (possibly “Sooz Blues”) introduced a more humorous aspect of Moore’s composing, the elaborately exaggerated piano chording over a driving bass and drum groove suggesting a more obvious influence on Cowley’s own work.

As a comedian Moore came to public attention via his partnership with Peter Cook, another talented polymath who edited Private Eye and founded London’s Establishment Club as well as appearing with Moore in the still celebrated “Not Only, But Also” at the height of the 1960s satire boom.

Cook and Moore scripted the 1967 film “Bedazzled” directed by Stanley Donen, a then contemporary retelling of the Faust myth. Moore’s character, Stanley Moon, was tempted by Cook playing the role of the Devil aka George Spiggott. The name for Moore’s character was inadvertently supplied by Sir John Gielgud who mistakenly though that Moore was actually named Stanley Moon. Moore composed the soundtrack and from this the trio played “Cornfield”, a delightful piece with a melody like a summer breeze that incorporated a fine bass solo from Gascoyne and more immaculate brush work from De Krom.

From the sublime to the outrageously ridiculous. “Are there any children in?” enquired Cowley, almost certainly a rhetorical question, before returning to the piano to deliver with obvious relish “Jump” and “Little Flo” the two ‘songs’ from Cook and Moore’s notoriously filthy “Derek and Clive (Live)” album from 1976, a record released at the height of punk that also somehow managed to capture the zeitgeist of that period.

A return to more serious matters came with the trio’s performance of Moore’s theme tune for the film “Six Weeks” in which he co-starred with Mary Tyler Moore as the parents of a talented young ice skater who is struck down with leukaemia. An unabashed ‘tear jerker’ the film received decidedly mixed reviews. Moore put a lot of himself into the soundtrack and the theme itself is unashamedly romantic and genuinely moving. Played here with a lengthy solo piano introduction it had a kind of valedictory feeling to it, something that was either reinforced or undercut by the trio following this with “Goodbye”, the closing tune from the “Not Only, But Also Series”. Cowley and his colleagues hammed this up in the style of Pete and Dud with comedic singing in faux posh accents, the 20s style pastiche eventually giving way to some serious jazz with a sparkling solo from Cowley propelled by the swinging grooves of Gascoyne and De Krom.

The Brecon audience loved it and summoned the trio back for a well deserved encore, a Latin inflected version of “Autumn Leaves” with a terrific drum feature from De Krom that combined humour with a high degree of technical skill.

Although I missed the start I thoroughly enjoyed this possibly never to be repeated show which offered an entertaining and illuminating insight into the life and music of one of the UK’s best loved performers. Despite the breadth of his talent and his considerable commercial success Moore was in many ways a tragic figure but Cowley’s affectionate and heartfelt tribute to the man, and particularly his music, was far from maudlin and was a great reminder of just how good a musician and composer Moore was, an aspect of his work that is largely under appreciated these days. Indeed Moore tended to undersell his own talent, hence the musical parodies for which he became so well known. Moore didn’t always take his musical talent seriously, the lack of parental affection in his early years led to a lack of self esteem and a tendency to undervalue himself. 

Cowley is to be congratulated on this thoroughly entertaining but ultimately thought provoking tribute. The ratio of talking to music was spot on with Cowley regularly getting to his feet to address the audience. Meanwhile the musical ‘illustrations’ were brilliantly performed by a superlative trio with Gascoyne and De Krom also given the space to put their own stamp on the proceedings. Well done to all concerned.

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