Paul Cornish Trio at BOP STOP

Paul Cornish Trio
BOP STOP at the Music Settlement
Cleveland, OH
September 5, 2025

Paul Cornish began his concert with a recording of a 1966 John Coltrane interview in Japan. Musicians invoke him all the time these days, but the great saxophonist/saint who ecstatically called the spirits makes an odd match with a pianist whose debut recording You're Exaggerating! (Blue Note, 2025) was measured, thoughtful and maybe a little cool.

The first music continued in that vibe with the slow, dirgelike melody of "Lift Every Voice and Sing" played in the minor. But when this exploded into the maelstrom of sound that was Cornish's "Queen Geri," taken at a considerably hotter temperature than the recorded version, the link with Coltrane became clear, biographically (both came up in the church) and musically.

The latter could be heard in the way that the form could be discerned at any time no matter how turbulent the music became, but also in Cornish's precise, classicaly-trained articulation at any tempo. His ideas are right there to hear.

Cornish has a lot of ideas and he strings them in songs or medleys that move through varying moods, tempos and dynamics. In this way his music resembles that of Jason Moran, an avowed influence and fellow product of the musical finishing school that is Houston's Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts.

"A Star Is Born" opened with a pastoral melody over a passacaglia-like descending bass line (the classical influence again) before putting on dancing shoes for "Dinosaur Song." "Dinosaurs dance in 9/8," Cornish joked in his charmingly self-deprecating stage patter (he is the kind of guy who, when you take him to meet your parents, ends up talking to your mother—and charming her—the entire time).

That song, as elsewhere, revealed the four-hands, one-mind hookup Cornish has with drummer Jonathan Pinson who many times emerged from a thicket of rhythm to land a rhythmic figure signaling a cadence in unison with the pianist. Bassist Jermaine Paul was not on You're Exaggerating!, but you would not know it from his sure foundation and probing rhythmic and melodic interjections. Even when the trio seemed to be playing in three different time signatures at once, the thread was sturdily maintained.

Cornish's music can be discursive. He tells long stories that can be short on plot but teeming with character and detail. He is an eye-opening talent and is only 28 years old. In the Coltrane interview that began the concert, he made a statement that Cornish himself has used when he is interviewed: "I'm supposed to go to the best good that I can get to."

At BOP STOP, before a sellout audience of more than 100, Paul Cornish came thrillingly close to that ideal.