Kit Downes, born in Norwich, England in 1986, is actually a jazz pianist. He formed his first piano trio in his first year at the renowned Rocal Academy Of Music in London. He quickly made a name for himself as a musician with a wide range of interests who curiously developed the vocabulary for his own jazz language. He became known for his trio ENEMY with Petter Eldh (bass) and James Maddren (drums), with whom he brought contemporary jazz to the stage, sometimes lyrically introspective, sometimes loudly eruptive. In 2018, he released ‘Obsidian’ on ECM, on which he can be heard exclusively on the church organ – a throwback to his own biography when he sat at this instrument as a teenager. As an improvisation artist of today, Downes now experiments with the different timbres of a church organ and often plays with them as if they were frequencies from analogue synthesizers. It will be interesting to see what the Briton does on the organ in Cologne Cathedral, which is one of the largest in Germany with its 143 stops.
