Bruce Hornsby review – intense and exhilarating

‘You won’t hear a song like that on the radio,” declares Bruce Hornsby. The veteran songwriter from Virginia has certainly got a point, having just finished an extended piano piece that began as a doom-laden murder ballad before morphing into a deft and possibly improvised jazz excursion. Yet, making supremely radio-friendly music is how Hornsby came to prominence in 1986, after Radio 1 first playlisted his chiming piano lament The Way It Is, paving the way for it to become a global hit.

Since then, the restless Hornsby – who will turn 65 this month – has made 21 albums, sold 11m records, become a de facto member of the Grateful Dead, been sampled by Tupac Shakur and collaborated with everyone from bluegrass legend Ricky Skaggs to Spike Lee. Most recently, he has enjoyed a fruitful creative love-in with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon. (In one of many gratifying asides, Hornsby reveals he and Vernon recently played a wedding together.) This brief European tour is nominally to mark the release of Hornsby’s latest solo album, Absolute Zero, a rich and gorgeously rendered collection of atmospheric songs, but the reality is more like a questing recital. Arched intently over the keys of his grand piano, Hornsby embarks on a virtuosic two-hour safari that takes in everything from swaggering boogie-woogie to the atonal assault of avant-garde classical. It is a dense mixture of fan service – he refers to a series of requests on cue cards – and unpredictable, impish detours.

Slowed and stripped of its 1980s production sheen, the yearning small-town tale Every Little Kiss is an early highlight, while The Way It Is comes with a comically discordant intro before unclenching into its familiar yearning groove. Cast-Off, a collaboration with Vernon, also sounds particularly lovely in piano form. He pays tribute to George Jones – “the best country singer who ever lived” – with a fragile cover of I’ll Be Over You before a climactic version of The End of the Innocence, the song he wrote for Eagles frontman Don Henley three decades ago. The overall effect is intense but exhilarating, more voyager than MOR.

• At Shepherd’s Bush Empire, London, on 3 November.