When expat keyboard player/producer and remixer Mark De Clive-Lowe made a 36-hour visit to Auckland 10 days ago he was aware - after 10 years in London and five in LA where he lives with his wife, singer Nia Andrews, and two children - that he was seen as a former Kiwi by some, although he was insistent ours was the flag he flew, and how he was known internationally.
The visit home was to talk up this album, the firs time he's done such promotion for a decade, but Church is so important to him that he came from two dates in Japan before returning to LA for an album launch.
Later this month he'll be launching it in New York.
That makes sense because the album emerged from his Church nights in both US cities, and it sounds like a definitive statement of where's at right now, which is at the junction of jazz, hip-hop, house and clubland dance.
Playing acoustic piano again for the first time in a decade, De Clive-Lowe also shows confident reach in his arrangements for the US horn players (who includes top-flight NYC trombonist Robin Eubanks and his trumpeter brother Duane), hooks in some voodoo rhythms (Nova Roda) and delivers a mathematically complex dancefloor piece (Brukstep)
He also drops a lovely piano ballad, Sketch for Miguel, alongside a lively, full-bodied treatment of South African Abdullah Ibrahim's bouncy and percussive Imam (with sonic manipulations).
