HOUSTON, Texas, has produced a succession of the finest contemporary jazz pianists: Jason Moran, Robert Glasper and now the prodigious Paul Cornish. I interview him the morning after his resonant performance at Ronnie Scott’s, a launch for his new Blue Note album You’re Exaggerating.

Born in 1996, Cornish grew up in a Christian home and, despite his childhood love for the drums, his mother steered him towards the piano, starting lessons at five. His older brothers became professional musicians while Paul attended Houston’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts whose director, Dr Henry Morgan, had tutored both Moran and Glasper and created an enduring musical ambiance.

Moving to Los Angeles, he met and formed lasting musical unions with bassist and drummer on his album, Joshua Crumbly and Jonathan Pinson — “My ying and yang. I just feed off their artistry” — and his bassist at Ronnie’s, Logan Kane, a fellow freshman at college and “an incredible creative genius; there's nothing he can’t play.”

Hearing Cornish play a stirring version of Coltrane’s Giant Steps at Ronnie’s, his loving attachment to the jazz tradition was soon obvious, but his own composition Queen Geri showed what a huge exemplar the late Detroit pianist Geri Allen is to him. 

“She had an unlimited imagination and I wish I could tell her now: ‘Everything I’m trying to do, you’re already doing it!’ Listening to her has given me the courage to be the best that I can be and never to be scared of going forward.”

On the album he plays the tune with a galloping speed and gusto, as if he were trying to catch up with Allen’s genius, but at Ronnie’s his version was much closer to elegy with Californian drummer Savannah Harris playing with a hushed quietude on her cymbals, as if the trio were playing a mellow folk song. Then suddenly the melody of Misty emerges, beautifully, almost mysteriously.

“Geri was researching the music of Misty’s composer, the great Erroll Garner, shortly before she died, and Savannah would play it with her.” As the melody develops, there is a seemingly subconscious, deeply moving union between Harris and Cornish, almost as if they are sharing Allen’s soulfulness.

I ask him how the murder of George Floyd, another Houston man, had affected him and his musical colleagues. 

“It was very heavy,” he says thoughtfully. “It’s continuous and has been for a long time: black men the victims of police brutality. Each generation has their own set of challenges and they have to decide how they’re going to rise up. It’s a privilege to be an artist and find a way to combat the obstacles that confront us — to add to the empowerment and encourage our generation like the musicians that came before us: Nina Simone, Max Roach, Charles Mingus.”

I ask him what it was like to perform at Ronnie Scott’s, where so many of the great US musicians of the jazz century had performed. “These were people who gave their lives to the music. The venue itself speaks to the music’s power.”

His album has many engaging and original compositions, all written by Cornish. In the very percussive Queinxiety it is as if within the trio there are three drummers drumming, while in Star is Born the mutual anticipation of each trio member makes it seem as if one whole, unified musician is playing three instruments in one. The heavy-stepping Dinosaur Song portrays some being even weightier and more dire and desperate than even the notes can take — is it Trump, or Vance, or Musk?

As for the album title, Cornish describes it as, “A quote from myself to myself. It’s an invitation to question so much of what is in front of us and to ask myself: ‘What is real? Where is the truth? Where is the humanity?’”

His music, like the form of every fine artist, asks these questions. I hope he’s back in England again soon, so we can listen to him asking them again.

You’re Exaggerating is released by Blue Note Records.