The story of Stanley Cowell - legendary jazz pianist

Stanley Cowell is an accomplished jazz pianist, educator, and co-founder of the pioneering jazz label Strata-East Records. At the age of 4, Cowell began playing the piano, and by the mid-60s he was already performing with the Detroit Artist's Workshop jazz ensemble... At the end of 2020, the legendary jazz musician passed away: Stanley Cowell died at the age of 79... However, the legacy that the musician left to all of us will live on forever!

Childhood, family...

An innovative and technically accomplished pianist whose influences ranged from the virtuoso Art Tatum to the avant-garde iconoclast Cecil Taylor, Cowell patented a distinctly percussive approach to the keys... It was this approach that propelled his music forward into new and uncharted territories... Cowell passed his musical apprenticeship playing in the late 60s with such icons of modern jazz as Max Roach, Miles Davis, Stan Getz. He would later transform himself quite quickly into a confident leader who chose an individualistic path in jazz and who always sought to expand the horizons of the music without ignoring its bluesy roots!

"Stanley has always been an inspiration because he's not a stagnant artist...," drummer Nashit Waits, who played live with Cowell in the 1990s, once said. "He's always exploring, coming up with new ways of expressing himself... His music is extraordinarily alive, just like himself..."

Stanley Cowell was born in 1941 in Toledo, Ohio, to a family truly devoted to music! Although his parents were not professional musicians, they were eager to sing and play instruments. Of course, their infectious enthusiasm was reflected in young Stanley, who took piano lessons from the age of four.

Familiarity with jazz...

The turning point in young Stanley's musical life was 1947, when he met a true jazz piano legend... As he recalled in an interview:

"Art Tatum came to our house one day when I was six years old. He was visiting family and friends and met my father, who invited my father to visit..."

Known for his superhuman virtuosity, Tatum eventually had a profound influence on Cowell! But as a teenager, the hopeful young musician was more drawn to blues and R&B music - motifs in the vein of Muddy Waters, whom he heard on the local radio station...

Jazz finally came onto Cowell's musical radar when he first heard bebop at the age of thirteen. Classical music was his main focus at the time, and after high school, Stanley studied music at Oberlin College. He later earned a master's degree in piano performance from the University of Michigan in 1965.

"I was immersed in studying piano: practising and studying classical music during the day and playing jazz at night," the musician recalled.

First steps

Cowell first played jazz professionally with the Ron Brooks Trio, whose previous pianist, incidentally, was future fusion pioneer Bob James. At this point Cowell, whose mind was blown after a performance with blind multi-instrumentalist Rahsaan Roland Kirk, gravitated towards avant-garde jazz: the genre beckoned him with its bold experimentalism and freedom of musical expression...

Upon graduation in 1966, Cowell left for New York City to establish himself as a jazz pianist. He was immediately hired by avant-garde alto saxophonist Marion Brown, with whom he recorded two consecutive albums. Cowell's ability to combine his honed technique with a keen emotional intelligence and a keen sense of tonal colour was well suited to Brown's exploratory musical adventures.

A year later Cowell successfully auditioned for drummer Max Roach's quintet, where he met trumpeter Charles Tolliver, who would become his closest friend and musical associate for many years to come... Being in Roach's band opened new doors for the pianist: Stanley not only played with Miles Davis and vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson in the late 60s, but also started his own recording career! While travelling with Roach's band to Europe in 1969, Cowell recorded his debut album in London called "Blues for the Viet Cong".

Your own band and... success!

After leaving Roach's band in 1970, Cowell and Tolliver started their own band, Music Inc. And when they couldn't get record labels interested in their music, they decided to release it independently through their own Strata-East! This label, which allowed artists to retain control of their master recordings, became a valuable platform for black musicians at a time when jazz was suffering financially and major record deals were hard to find...

"There were no contracts," Tolliver recalled. "The deal was that recording would be an agreement with us, and the artiste could record with anybody."

For example, Stanley Cowell recorded five albums for Strata-East, including "Handscapes", where he led an adventurous keyboard group called The Piano Choir. However, in the late 70s, the musician radically changed his musical direction by embracing jazz-funk! His synthesiser playing can be heard on a series of records for the Galaxy label. Cowell was also very much in demand as a sideman, playing on albums by saxophonist Johnny Griffin and drummer Roy Haynes. He subsequently left Tolliver to run Strata-East on his own....

"I was so busy with my career...," Stanley Cowell recalled in one of his interviews. "I thought Strata-East would work on its own..."

The pianist continued to record albums throughout the 1980s, but at the beginning of the new decade he sidelined performing and took a teaching position at New York's Lehman College. Although he spent the rest of his life pursuing a parallel career in music education (he later taught at Rutgers University), Cowell remained a prolific musician whose work continued to grow. His later projects trace his fascination with experimental electronic music. "Piano Concerto No 1" - a recording in which he paid tribute to a man he met as a child, Art Tatum.....

The last years of his life...

Sadly, the last album of the 2020s, Live at Keystone Korner Baltimore, recorded in October 2019, proved to be Cowell's musical epitaph: a brilliant display of piano playing that confidently walked an independent path between jazz tradition and modernism... Cowell's unique sound was eloquently described by renowned contemporary jazz pianist Jason Moran, who, reacting to the news of the pianist's passing in an Instagram post, wrote:

"Stanley invented piano tracks. Many times his two hands sounded like there were six of them..."

Stanley Cowell passed away in late 2020, in a Delaware hospital. The cause was hypovolaemic shock. At the time of his death, the jazz musician was 79 years old... Cowell left behind a daughter, Sonny, and great music that has and will continue to inspire his followers....