The rise of Europe's hip new jazz cats

Young fans are flocking to see the Jef Neve Trio, but don't tell them it's jazz, writes Stuart Nicholson

Attending a concert by the young pianist Jef Neve and his trio can be a moving experience. At the album launch of his major-label debut, Nobody Is Illegal, in his home town of Brussels recently, he made believers out of a young audience who if you had told them beforehand they were queuing up to see a jazz concert would probably have run a mile.

Neve is not one to bandy the word jazz around. Many of his fans come to his concerts because they've heard on the grapevine (often MySpace) that the trio is a band to check out. "Just come in and see what we do," says Neve. "If you like what you hear then we can worry about what to call it afterwards." It's an approach that's paying off, and the young fans are fascinated by the power and creativity of his playing. "I never knew the piano could be so interesting," says Sybille Kornisky, a student who has become a fan.

Neve delights in the physical properties of music but never loses sight of music's story-telling privilege, with compositions that start off here and end up half a mile away over there. This ability to take his music in unexpected directions suggests that here is a young trio that has the potential to move into the same musical space opened up by the Esbjörn Svensson Trio. Together with bassist Piet Verbist and drummer Teun Verbruggen, Neve creates music that is sharply focused yet broad in its appeal. While the music often has powerful backbeats and shouting climaxes, the key is Neve's lyricism. Often beginning with a deceptively simple melody, he takes a melodic idea and develops it thematically through increasing force fields of energy, provided by Verbist and Verbruggen, until it reverberates with orchestral grandeur.

Original compositions such as Second Love or Together at Last, not only reveal the group's musical maturity, through the manipulation of the rising line and their use of tension and release, but also a youthful sense of adventure, with improvisations that seem to grow organically from the thematic material at hand. "Sometimes I start with one idea," says Neve. "I take a figure or a motif and I try and develop that idea as long as the music needs, by giving it a second melody, for example, in the left hand, or by just developing the motif. From that idea I try to develop a story but I always follow a logical path."

Proud of his Flemish heritage and of the European culture that forms the backdrop to his daily life, Neve is at the forefront of a new breed of young musicians who are unafraid to show in their music where they come from. While Neve's mastery of jazz improvisation is clear, so too is his mastery of classical music that saw him graduate with Masters of Music degrees in both disciplines from the Lemmensinstituut in Louvain in 2000. Neve sees it as perfectly natural to draw on both as a means of broadening jazz expressionism. "I don't see any reason why we can't use classical music in jazz," says Neve. "European musicians don't mind that maybe some of our music doesn't swing. It's not a rule, we don't have that pressure you can have in America, so I think we are more free to experiment with different ideas." Equally importantly, European audiences are turning away from straight ahead, driving American styles of jazz, which are now seen as old fashioned, in favour of a more fluid approach.

SUDDENLY, EUROPEAN jazz is hip and the Jef Neve Trio are a very hip group indeed. "Europe is the new jazz area," Neve says. "Because of our cultural diversity I think we have an open mind on how you can create music. We don't really fight the rules - we don't have rules that jazz should sound like this or that, like they do in America."

When Neve formed his trio in 2003, he used up all his savings and begged and borrowed enough to record an album on his own label, Contour. When Blue Saga was released later in the year, he was amazed when it sold 5,000 copies at his concerts around Brussels. In 2004 he recorded It's Gone and this time sales exceeded 5,000. He puts his success down to the basics: "Ultimately it always comes down to the essentials. I believe there is only one way to make music, and this is to be honest. Don't play 15 notes if you can tell it with three notes - the good ones."

Neve's style includes elements that are more commonly encountered in classical music - a greater use of dynamics, rubato, rhythmic diversity, ad hoc songforms and accelerando - that contribute to the overall richness of his performances. Add to this the group empathy developed by the trio since their formation in 2003 and the questing imagination of their leader, and it seems only a matter of time before Jef Neve's trio will become familiar faces outside Belgium. Yet, in an age where the quick musical fix has become the norm, Neve's set to be around for the long haul.

Nobody Is Illegal is out on Universal