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Paul Cornish Trio
Jazz Coterie live music concert series presents Los Angeles-based pianist Paul Cornish at Gerold Opera House in Weyauwega, Wisconsin. With Jermaine Paul on bass and Jonathan Pinson on drums.
Blue Note Records debut album tour — You’re Exaggerating! releases August 22 and features a 9-song set of Paul Cornish originals.
Paul hails from Houston, Texas, where he was a student at the prestigious High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, whose alum also include jazz luminaries such as Jason Moran, Robert Glasper, Eric Harland, and Kendrick Scott, among others. Cornish was one of seven jazz prodigies worldwide selected to be awarded a full fellowship to attend the esteemed Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz at UCLA where he completed his master’s degree. He was a finalist in the 2023 American Pianists Awards and the Herbie Hancock International Jazz Piano Competition. Cornish has performed extensively across the globe with such notable artists as Joshua Redman, Louis Cole, Mark Guiliana, HAIM, Snoh Aalegra, Terrace Martin, Kanye West, and many more.
“In many ways, Cornish is the most profound embodiment yet of Blue Note’s regenerative influence.”
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.
“Paul just goes for it, playing so free and so expansively — his sense of melody and rhythm is untethered. He is so in the moment, flexible and pure. ”
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.”
“Fans of genre-busting jazz will have their ears tweaked and minds quietly blown. ”
Every artist who records for Blue Note is part of a grand legacy. But Paul Cornish is a torchbearer for several remarkable Blue Note legacies, all at once. Which makes his powerfully lyrical trio debut, You’re Exaggerating!, a mission statement for Blue Note’s next generation. 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 a seismic impact on jazz’s ever-evolving sound.