Neil Cowley powers up for Warwick Arts Centre

Acclaimed pianist and composer Neil Cowley is heading to Warwick Arts Centre on 26 April 2023 to perform tracks from his new album.

The former leader of the JazzFM Jazz Award-winning Neil Cowley Trio, Neil dissolved the trio and has just released his second solo collection, Battery Life.

Battery Life sees Neil build on techniques he employed on his critically acclaimed solo debut album, Hall of Mirrors, which saw him incorporate elements from electronic, ambient and neo-classical music.

"There's this underpinning of acoustic piano at the centre, because that always represents the human in everything I do" he says. "But for each track I try to create an orchestral cloud around me, an electronic pallet of emotions that the piano longs to express."

The inspiration for the album is 'memory.'

"Memories are bittersweet," says the pianist, who has also played with such artists as Adele and Brand New Heavies. "Like a battery, they come with a positive and a negative.

""A happy memory is a positive moment of warm recollection, followed closely by the negative of an insatiable yearning for something you can never experience in person again.

"A bad memory, while in itself a negative feeling, at least comes with the positive advantage of being some distance from the present.

"Battery Life is an album of abstract memories and stolen excerpts. It is my perception of the past before the detail is filled in. Blurred pictures, strange details, a feeling, a smell and above all the freedom to redefine the past at my whim. In an age where we are able to archive virtually any amount of life experience at the press of a button, it calls into question the value of a memory."

FFO: Nils Frahm, Olafur Arnalds

• Neil Cowley appears at Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry, on Wednesday 26 April 2023. Tickets available now.