READ THE ARTICLE ABOUT KIT AT LONDON JAZZ NEWS |
News March 2013 After spending a long time mixing and mastering, we are finally ready for our new record Light from Old Stars to be released - on the 22nd April! It will be coming out on the great Basho Records (as have our last two albums) and will feature my Quintet. You can hear the first track of the album here It will be available through Jazz Cds,, Amazon, ITunes, all the usual routes - record shops? (if they still exist..) I am particularly excited about this record, it's the best thing I think I've done so far and I'm very excited about touring with it and for people to start hearing it. Needless to say I am also very excited for people to hear the amazing playing of James Allsopp, James Maddren, Calum Gourlay and Lucy Railton featured all over it! Here is some of the press release for the album - "Having met astrobiologist Daniella Scalice at the Cheltenham Science Festival, Mercury nominated pianist Kit Downes became intrigued by the notion that the stars we see are often dead, and that stargazing is 'a form of time travel without moving'. Already inspired by ideas of scale, these thoughts provided a strong conceptual framework for Downes and for the music on Light From Old Stars; the pieces explore the realms of the magical and fantastic through grounded and earthy ideas". |
 |
News from April/May 2012 - We have just finished recording our third album, which is going to be with the Quintet (Kit Downes on Piano, James Maddren on Drums, Lucy Railton on Cello, Calum Gourlay on Double Bass and James Allsopp on Bass Clarinet) and will be released April/May 2013 under the working title (!) - Light from Old Stars, on the excellent Basho Label. We had great fun recording it with Robert Harder and Ben Lamdin at Fishmarket Studios, and I had a particularly good time as we were lucky enough to hire one of Andrew Giller's fantastic Steinways (all the way from Beccles!). Before this we had a lovely run of gigs that took us all over, from Sheffield to Tel Aviv to Newcastle to Torino to London's Vortex - thanks everyone who came to these, we had a great time. All of them especially nice as we played totally acoustically in all of them which is lots of fun. We had a nice review from the Tel Aviv shows in the Jeruslam Post here - www.jpost.com/ArtsAndCulture/Music/Article.aspx?id=260299 We also had a special gig with Animator/Illustrator Lesley Barnes (who made our cover art for 'Quiet Tiger') at the Flatpack Film Festival in Birmingham. We have some live footage which we will put up soon, and it was lots of fun to play along to Lesley's magic animations.. (see here - http://www.lesleybarnes.co.uk) There will be more things with Lesley to come (Cheltenham Science Festival on the 15th June and the Forge in Camden on the 21st September) as well as some nice festivals in Trondheim and around the UK in the next few months. We played at Jazzahead last week in Bremen which was great and was recorded for Radio Bremen, and we had a WDR feature last month as well as a BBC Late Junction commission (to arrange Schubert!). We are looking ahead to mixing and mastering the new album (which I am very excited about) and gigging some more. You can hear some bits of the live gigs (where we are playing the new music) on the 'Audio' page above and in the 'Video' page. May - Thanks to everyone at Trondheim Festival who made the evening such a fun one. The jam with Django Bates was excellent fun and we enjoyed our gig a lot. They even got Calum some birthday snuss! Kit" SHOWCASE AT JAZZAHEAD SATURDAY 21ST APRIL 2012 Many thanks to the PRS Foundation for Music who helped to make this happen QUIET TIGER
AVAILABLE AT ALL GOOD RECORD STORES AND AT JAZZCDS
tunes by kitdownesmusic |
