Paul Cornish remembers being twelve years old, up the back of the bus after a summer jazz workshop at middle school in southwest Houston, jostling with his mates for a turn of the headphones connected to someone’s single black iPod. None of them could believe what they were hearing.

“I was just blown away,” says the rising star pianist, composer and bandleader, 28. “I felt completely liberated, and I wanted to recapture that feeling. I wanted people to feel the same way when I played music for them. I’ve been chasing that vibe ever since.”

The album they’d found was “Double Booked” by the Robert Glasper Trio, a heady mix of piano trio swing and sharp hip-hop edge, as funky and complex as it was lyrical and free-thinking. Recorded live – complete with an innovative reading of Thelonious Monk’s “Think of One” – it was a sound that opened doors and here, in the case of the adolescent Cornish, changed creative lives.

Born into a musical family (his older brother is Grammy-winning keyboardist Phil Cornish, previously music director of Kanye West’s Sunday Service Choir), Paul started learning drums and percussion as a toddler and took up classical piano at the age of five. He was a fixture of the school jazz band and leading genre-hopping gospel sessions at his local church when he hit on the music of Glasper, a graduate of Houston’s prestigious Kinder High School for the Performing Arts, where Cornish would go on to study as well. “Those early Robert Glasper records on Blue Note were my first window into this legacy I’m part of,” he’s said.

Indeed, Glasper’s signing to Blue Note continued a jazz piano lineage that began with the likes of Monk, Bud Powell and McCoy Tyner and feeds through greats from Geri Allen to Jason Moran; the current ever-evolving crop of piano talent finds form in artists including L.A.-based Gerald Clayton and now, quietly but brilliantly, with his stunning debut release “You’re Exaggerating!”, Paul Cornish.

“I knew I had to keep putting in the work, making sure I could play everything in general,” says Cornish, progressively animated on a 7 am Zoom call from Los Angeles, where he has lived since relocating to study Jazz Music Performance at the University of Southern California over a decade ago, working with names such as John Legend, Kamasi Washington and Joshua Redman – he’s there on the latter’s current masterwork “Words Fall Short” – along the way.

“Being in L.A., you never know what situation you’ll might be called into,” he continues. “I’ve done stuff with classical music, soundtracks [for the CNN documentary “Black Wall Street”], pop, hip-hop, gospel… All the endless hours of practicing, learning theory, listening to different styles, is to equip you to make the best decision in the moment and be open so that you can express yourself freely.”

Delivered in trio format with longtime friends and collaborators, bassist Josh Crumbly and drummer Jonathan Pinson, “You’re Exaggerating” is testament to a life lived in the service of music, and by default, in the service of God.

“My whole life’s mission is to be aligned with God’s will and everything else falls in line with that,” says Cornish, whose father was a preacher. “Musically, my earliest memories are in the church.”

A rich seam of spirituality, of unwavering authenticity, imbues all nine of the album’s original tracks. Among them, the rollicking “Dinosaur Song”, written to its theme (“A girlfriend’s young nephew wrote her what he said was a dinosaur song, and I thought I’d imagine my own version”); and “Queen Geri”, a paean to Geri Allen, a longtime influence: “She struck the rare balance of someone who could fit into a traditional jazz setting and also into the more avant-garde, creative, improvised setting. She didn’t have to switch up to try and fit into either. She was who she was. When I first heard her music I heard influences from Detroit, Motown, West African drumming, the whole history of the piano.” Cornish flashes a smile. “Nobody could put Geri in a box. That became my inspiration.”

Cornish’s aesthetic is similarly informed: “I try to be honest in the moment, just having intention and meaning and letting the cards fall where they may.” It’s the artist as conduit, as a vessel for the message, a vibe famously flexed by two other jazz heroes – Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter – both of whom he’s hung out with. 

“Yes, Ma’am,” he says, his humility belying the fact that he was chosen, one of seven international jazz prodigies, for the elite fellowship at the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz. “Mr Hancock and Mr Shorter were the judges who selected the students; both of them blessed with honesty and integrity, both still stretching. When I visited Mr Shorter at his house he had these stacks of manuscripts everywhere; his wife said he wrote music for 14, 15 hours a day.”

Music isn’t who we are, Hancock told Cornish, it’s what we do. Cornish keeps things real with a diet of visual art, classical music (he’s a particular fan of Bach, Stravinsky and 20th century Black composers including Florence Price and George Walker) and literary fiction (he’s recently been enjoying the work of sci-fi author Octavia Butler). The title of his shining debut dovetails with his values: “Society sets these standards and says this is how things have to be,” he says. “But as you get older, the more you realise you can do things your own way, and the more you see reality for what it is.”

“We’re living in interesting times,” he continues. “We have more access to information than ever but we’re getting further away from the truth.” He flashes another smile. “And the truth is everything, whatever it is you do.”

Jane Cornwell is an Australian-born, London-based writer on arts, travel and music for publications and platforms in the UK and Australia, including Songlines and Jazzwise. She’s the former jazz critic of the London Evening Standard.

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_{Header image: Paul Cornish. Photo: Piper Ferguson.}