Jon Cowherd via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other...
- Steps from Jon Cowherd:
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
- Steps forward by: The Matrix
Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Jon Cowherd
- City: New York City
- Country: United States
My Life & Work
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Bio:
Although Mercy is Jon Cowherd's first album under his own name, the esteemed pianist/composer/arranger/producer is already firmly established as one of the jazz world's most accomplished, expressive and in-demand young musicians.
The Kentucky-raised, New Orleans-schooled, New York-based Cowherd is best known for his long-running partnership with drummer/bandleader Brian Blade, with whom he co-founded the Brian Blade Fellowship, whose acclaimed, influential albums showcase Cowherd's stellar keyboard work and singular compositional skills. When not recording and touring with the Fellowship, Cowherd has worked extensively with a broad array of players and singers from the jazz, pop and rock worlds.
His impressive resume aside, Mercy is the most compelling example yet of Jon Cowherd's remarkable sensitivity, inventiveness and versatility. Recorded in an inspired three-day session at New York's Avatar Studios, the sterling set is comprised of ten new Cowherd originals, with his sublime keyboard work anchoring an all-star quartet that includes Bill Frisell on acoustic and electric guitars, John Patitucci on acoustic bass and longtime collaborator Brian Blade on drums. The resulting album is a creative landmark for Cowherd, with such ambitious numbers as "The Columns," "Postlude," the three-part "Mercy Suite" and the playful departure "Recital Hour (Timmy's Theme)" demonstrating his gifts as an instrumentalist and composer.
"It definitely feels like a personal milestone," Cowherd says of Mercy. "My collaboration with Brian Blade has given me the freedom to record my own pieces, but I still felt the need to make a statement under my own name. That notion was intimidating for a long time, and I never felt ready until the last couple of years. I felt that my playing had to get to another level before I released something as a leader. Studying classical piano with Jeff Goldstein from 2001-2009 really helped me gain that confidence."
A consistent dedication to honing his talents and broadening his musical horizons has been a lifelong mission for Cowherd. Growing up in Kentucky as the son of musician parents who doubled as music educators, he embraced music early in life, taking up piano, french horn and violin as well as singing. In 1988, he migrated to the musical mecca of New Orleans to attend Loyola University. There, he studied jazz piano and improvisation under Crescent City piano legend Ellis Marsalis and with noted players John Mahoney, Steve Masakowski and Michael Pellera. He also joined local bands led by Tony Dagradi and Delfeayo Marsalis, and played with the New Orleans Ballet and the New Orleans Symphony and Opera. In 1993, Cowherd moved to New York, where he earned a Masters Degree in Jazz Studies from the Manhattan School of Music.
It was in New Orleans' hotbed of musical inspiration that Cowherd met fellow Loyola student Brian Blade, with whom he would form the Brian Blade Fellowship. With Blade on drums and Cowherd on piano, and both sharing compositional duties, the Brian Blade Fellowship has proven to be an enduring and rewarding creative unit, releasing the albums Brian Blade Fellowship (Blue Note, 1998), Perceptual (Blue Note, 2000) and Season of Changes (Verve, 2008).
When not collaborating with Blade, Cowherd's keyboard work, as well as his producing and arranging skills, have kept him at work on a wide variety of projects with an equally varied assortment of artists. He's currently a member of Cassandra Wilson's band, the Alicia Olatuja band and Nate Smith & Kinfolk, and his instrumental work has graced albums by the likes of Norah Jones, Cassandra Wilson, Rosanne Cash, Lizz Wright, Iggy Pop, Alicia Olatuja, Marc Cohn, Mark Olson and Victoria Williams, and he's recorded alongside such world-class musicians as Joni Mitchell, Daniel Lanois, John Leventhal, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Nate Smith, Dave Easley, Jeff Parker, Marcus Strickland and Jack Wilkins. As a producer, Cowherd has overseen albums by Lizz Wright, Alyssa Graham, Maria Neckam and The Local NYC. He also recently served as keyboardist for and co-musical director for the all-star Joni Jazz concert at the Hollywood Bowl, in honor of Joni Mitchell, in which he performed with Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Chaka Khan, Kurt Elling, Aimee Mann, Glen Hansard and Cassandra Wilson.
Contact Information
- Email: info@joncowherd.com
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Management/Booking:
Management
DOG AND PONY INDUSTRIES
Gille Amaral
Tel: 603-379-6602
Email: gille@dogandponyindustries.com
Web: www.dogandponyindustries.com
My Media & Markets
- ▶ Twitter: MadCowherd
- ▶ Instagram: joncowherdmusic
- ▶ Website: http://www.joncowherd.com
- ▶ YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/CowherdJon
- ▶ YouTube Music: http://music.youtube.com/channel/UCaRNvDy2rFjoLua5yTywv1Q
- ▶ Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/album/6euSZXjHeTC7WsZJa5P7zn
More
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Quotes, Notes & Etc.
Jazz Review
Pianist Jon Cowherd has raised eyebrows in his work with the Brian Blade Fellowship. Cowherd's playing shows an artful touch to the keys in ways Thelonious Monk used to; emphasis on just the right dynamic at just the right time and a sense of harmonic imagination that is tied to the music of the moment and not some preconceived music-school taught voicing concept. Cowherd's playing on the mid-tempo ballad Five Nights, with his use of occasionally non-traditionally voiced single line juxtapositions to trumpeter's Michael Rodriguez's incredible solo, is worth the price of the disc alone.
- Thomas R. Erdmann
Lament For A Straight Line - Top Five Micro Moments at the Newport Festival - 8/11/2009
The harmonium solo that Jon Cowherd offered the throng who came to see Brian Blade's Fellowship Band. It was both fleeting and entrancing, and its arrival and departure illustrated the kind of fluidity the ensemble is striving for. Saxophonist Myron Walden was soloing in a very gospelish manner, and his boss was egging him on from the Amen Corner, which just happened to be located behind his drums. As the music sighed, Cowherd's keybs bubbled up. It harked to the buoyant Ravi Shankar piece Rudresh Mahanthappa and his Indo-Pak Coalition floated through on that stage to start the day.
- Jim Macnie
Alder Music Blog
Until now I failed to grasp the genius of the final three minutes of "Return of the Prodigal Son," by Fellowship pianist Jon Cowherd. Something happened when the group reached this section at the gig. A perfect melody, a paradisiacal set of chords in flowing waltz time, an accumulation of sound and texture as the theme grew out of Cowherd's piano intro - it was everything music should be, and the beauty of it was almost hard to stand. A band of the year nomination for BBF, please. And a long overdue nod to Jon Cowherd as a top composer.
The world's artistry via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other ...
... a project conceived and built in the fertile, fecund and atavistic ground zero of Bahia, Brazil initially for the discoverability of this singular region's dispossessed genius.
All explained in the window immediately below. Followed — beneath this window — by scores of magnificent artists, each leading to myriads more artists/categories. Inside this window also may be found our Brazilian record store radio, named by British journal The Guardian as one of 10 of the Best Radio Stations Around the World!
IF YOU CAN'T STAND THE HEAT
Brazil is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles -- jungle and desert and dense urban centers -- both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. It absorbed over ten times the number of African slaves taken to the United States of America, and much of its aboriginal population was absorbed into the general population-at-large. Its people have lived under oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorships and massive corruption, with elements of these still strongly entrenched today.
But!
Brazil has buzz...not the shallow buzz of a fashionable moment...but the deep buzz of a population which in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- the tough slog through life they've been allotted by humanity's dregs-in-fine-linen, have chosen not to simply pull themselves along but to lift their voices in song and their bodies in dance...to eat well and converse well and much and to wring the joy out of the day-to-day happenings and small pleasures of life which are so often set aside or ignored in the European, North American, and East Asian nations.
For this Brazil has a genius perhaps unparalleled in all other countries and societies, a genius which thrives alongside peeling paint and holes in the streets and roads, under bad organization by the powers-that-be, both civil and governmental, under a constant rain of societal indignities...
Which is all to say that if you don't know Brazil and you're expecting any semblance of order, progress and light, you will certainly find the light! And the buzz of a people who for generations have responded to privation at many different levels by somehow rising above it all.
Raimundo Sodré, in a conversation ranging through New Orleans and Harlem and the South Side of Chicago ... and Appalachia and Irish villages and Russian shtetls and the unofficial symbol of Brazil's Bahian-born national music (the pandeiro) almost certainly having arrived in Brazil in the hands of Sephardic Jews (including conversos) fleeing the Inquisition, once remarked: "Where there's misery, there's music!"
A pandeirista on the roof. And it's not just music. And it's not just Brazil.
