($25-$35 Tickets + DICE fees | 6:30pm & 8:30pm Shows) Blue Note recording artist Paul Cornish brings his LA based trio to the Century Room for his much anticipated return!
Every artist who records for Blue Note is part of a grand legacy, now in its 86th year. But pianist Paul Cornish is a torchbearer for several remarkable Blue Note legacies, all at once. Which makes You’re Exaggerating!, his powerfully lyrical trio debut for the label, a mission statement for Blue Note’s next generation.
To begin, Cornish is part of a great heritage of jazz piano that has unfolded at the label, from Blue Note’s first 78-rpm releases by Meade Lux Lewis and Albert Ammons through Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Horace Silver, Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner, Andrew Hill, Don Pullen, Geri Allen, Jacky Terrasson, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Renee Rosnes, Aaron Parks, Gerald Clayton and beyond.
Then, he’s part of a lineage of Blue Note artists, past and present, who hail from Houston, Texas, and developed at the city’s Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, a.k.a. HSPVA. That more recent hall of fame includes Jason Moran, Robert Glasper, Walter Smith III, Kendrick Scott, Chris Dave and James Francies. Of course, within that list there’s yet another bloodline, of musicians who’ve come to define jazz pianism in the 21st century: Moran, Glasper, Francies and, now, Cornish, who was born and raised in Houston and has been based in Los Angeles for over a decade.
In many ways, Cornish is the most profound embodiment yet of Blue Note’s regenerative influence — the idea that, like the label’s landmark midcentury recordings, Blue Note LPs of recent vintage have had a seismic impact on jazz’s ever-evolving sound. “Those early Robert Glasper records on Blue Note, like Canvas and In My Element, were my first window into this legacy I’m part of,” says Cornish, whose profile has elevated of late through his work with fellow Blue Note artist Joshua Redman. “I look at Jason Moran as the catalyst. And Glasper took some of that and added a whole other thing to it, and then James took it even further. With each one of us, it evolves and expands.”
Cornish shares with those players a rare duality, having cultivated a unique identity while also evoking radiant bits and pieces of jazz’s past. You’re Exaggerating! features Cornish with the rhythm tandem of bassist Joshua Crumbly and drummer Jonathan Pinson, performing nine original compositions, most of them inspired by personalmemories, reflections and idols.
“Quienxiety” is an expression of how Cornish’s calm exterior obscures inner-turmoil. “I’m a chronic overthinker,” he reveals. “I’m a people-pleaser.” “5AM,” with its open-ended, dreamlike arpeggios, meditates on the varyingimplications a twilit hour can have for a young man at different points in his life. “There have been times where I was up at 5 a.m. to work out or shed and be an ambitious college student,” he says. “And there were other times where I was up at 5 a.m. on a different vibe.” Cornish pays tribute to one of his most important influences, the late, great Geri Allen, with the kinetic “Queen Geri,” which was inspired by the revered pianist’s piece “Drummer’s Song.” “She would bring a more avant-garde and adventurous spirit to more traditional settings, and vice versa,” Cornish says. His homage is also an investigation of gender issues within jazz. “I do think that some of the most brilliant yet unfortunately overlooked minds in this music have been women,” he says.
Other album highlights tend toward a catalyst that is more purely musical. A recorded rhythm from drum titan Ben Riley provided the launch pad for “Palindrome,” featuring a guest appearance by guitarist Jeff Parker, whose impeccable taste complements the tune’s inquisitive contours, which are Monkian yet sleeker. “Modus Operandi” finds its spark in Moran’s Bandwagon and Baroque counterpoint. The edgy “DB Song” is named for drum and bass, though its more apparent muse is the visual experimentation of artist David Hammons.
In fact, Cornish explains, the entirety of You’re Exaggerating! is a kind of exercise in additive abstraction — a mystery in which the feeling of beguilement, rather than the resolution, is the point. Helmed by a generous, uplifting bandleader, the trio chops up and reinvents the groove at will, and embarks on unforeseen detours. Cornish’s approach, in its even-keeled texture and shrewd harmony, is a sort of mastery that entices rather than merely impresses. Under the sonic direction of L.A. musician-producer Henry Solomon, the trio was recorded in a way to allow for Cornish’s dynamics and touch to shine through. “Me and Henry talked about the frustrations we feel with how a lot of jazz records sound,” says Cornish, adding that “he understands the nuances and complexities that arein my music, and in me as a person.”
Who Paul Cornish is as a person has everything to do with Houston — a place where progressiveness and tradition exist in equilibrium, producing a culture and institutions that foster generation-defining talent. He showed interest in the drums as a toddler and studied percussion during grade school. Classical piano lessons began at age 5, and Cornish discovered jazz performance in his middle-school jazz band. His passion deepened at Houston’s long-running Summer Jazz Workshop, where he met Francies, a couple of years Cornish’s senior.
In Houston fashion, the church also played a pivotal role in his evolution. By middle school he was a paid working musician, leading programs of genre-blurring contemporary gospel at a youth church. He graduated to adult congregations, and to a three-service, full-day grind that taught him invaluable lessons in commitment and purpose he’d use later as a touring musician. “I still play in church to this day,” Cornish says, “and it instills this idea that you’re in service to something that’s larger than yourself. You’re a vessel for a message.”
“Continuing the legendary lineage of Houston pianists while still carving out your own lane is not an easy feat,” says Glasper. “Paul is doing just that, giving us a few pages from his personal story. Understanding the history but not being held back by the history is the ongoing struggle of the modern jazz musician. But there is no history without the now.”
Cornish relocated to the West Coast to attend the USC Thornton School of Music, and was chosen for the elite fellowship at UCLA’s Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz. There, he developed a personal and creative relationship with Hancock and artist-in-residence Wayne Shorter — two of his lodestars, and epochal figures in Blue Note history. From Hancock, Cornish learned the necessity of being a good person — the icon’s favorite dictum that music is what you do, not who you are. At the institute, he absorbed the realization that he was going to have to make his own way. “It was really an education in who are you gonna be?” Cornish says.
He’s spent his years in L.A. sketching out an answer, with thrilling results. He’s collaborated with pop visionaries including Kanye West, Louis Cole, HAIM and Snoh Aalegra, and made his way into one of the finest working groups in all of jazz. On Words Fall Short, the most recent Blue Note album from saxophonist Joshua Redman, Cornish matches the leader’s mix of poise and emotional openness with his own contemplative language. Cornish has strived to internalize Redman’s “devotion to excellence,” he says. “He might be the most consistent person I’ve ever met in my life, in how he takes care of himself and the music.”
All of these experiences and mentors track throughout You’re Exaggerating!, a thoroughly compelling listen that ranks among Blue Note’s most auspicious debuts. Not that Paul Cornish, whose conversation is defined by its humility, would make such pronouncements himself. “Watching those players before me in Houston, it just gave me motivation to keep working hard,” he says. “I’m really just grateful to be a part of this story.”
