Kit Downes interview: "Much in the same way John Coltrane did, Olivier Messiaen created a language for himself"

Creative artists, in whatever field they work, have to dig deep to come up with something that’s going to connect with their audiences and move them emotionally in some way. And, while most artists don’t lack motivation, harnessing the powerful forces of inspiration can often prove tantalisingly difficult. The challenge, of course, is recognising a potential source of stimulation and putting it to creative ends. So, when pianist Kit Downes read The Rings of Saturn: An English Pilgrimage by W.G. Sebald, a German novelist and academic who moved to Framingham Earl in East Anglia in 1970, something stirred. In the guise of describing a walking tour of East Anglia, Sebald’s nameless narrator encounters people and places that prompt a series of meditations that move through time and space to episodes in history and literature. “It’s not really about the places he is visiting, but how his wandering mind finds these tangental links between all the things he’s seen on this walk,” says Downes. “This idea was the inspiration for my Vyamanical record, a walking tour of churches and playing the organ inside each of these and just allowing imagination to flow and fly free and document it – just trusting that it all being part of this journey is enough of a binding force to feel like a coherent statement”.

Vyamanical (Slip) wasrecorded in 2015 with Downes’ frequent collaborator Tom Challenger on tenor saxophone. It was a result of a commission from the Open Space scheme run by the Aldeburgh Festival. “It’s almost like a field recording,” continues Downes. “Various organs, all in different shapes and sizes, different states, some in amazing working order, some barely functioning and me and Tom playing together. The Aldeburgh Festival did like an ‘organ crawl’ – they hired some vintage buses to take the audience between all the different churches and we played a short improvisation in each one. Off the back of that we made a film, a short documentary by a filmmaker called Ashley Peck. Around the same time, I was working with Thomas Strønen, for his ECM record Time Is a Blind Guide, and just through fortuitous chance that video ended up being played to Manfred Eicher [the ECM label owner and producer].” Eicher was immediately taken with the concept and the result was Obsidian, Downes’ first recording under his own name for ECM, released in January 2018. “The idea for Obsidian was to do something similar to Vyamanical using different organs in different churches, but playing on a different scale of organ, and to really craft pieces for each instrument. It was a solo record, though Tom [Challenger] is featured on one track,” says Downes.

Downes’ latest album, Dreamlife of Debris (ECM), released on 25 October, carries forward the Vyamanical/Obsidian storybygoing a stage further by placing the church organ in a broader context with other instruments – the piano, cello, drums, tenor sax and guitar all heard courtesy of multi-tracking. “For this new record I really wanted to go back to this collaboration with Tom that’s been central to a lot of my work,” continues Downes. “Because we were taking longer [to produce the album], a two-year production cycle, rather than doing it in a ‘live jazz way’ of two days recording and one day of mixing, I thought it would be nice to add some themes and double some notes and melodic moments to give a little bit more of an arc and structure to the whole thing, so the idea evolved – a guitar would be great there, or a cello would be lovely doubling that melody. One thing that’s interesting about the personnel on the record, apart from Stian [Westerhus on guitar], is that I have had a running duo with them all. So with cellist Lucy [Railton] I had a group called Tricho, we released a record a few years ago, and then I had a duo with drummer Seb Rochford that never recorded but did quite a few gigs a few years ago, and then, of course, I had the duo with Tom.” The talented Norwegian guitarist Stian Westerhus came in on the final session, providing a haunting electronic ambience to one track, ‘Bodes’.

Dreamlife of Debris is often powerful, frequently moving and while it is inevitable that the organ is centre-stage there are moments of delicate interior detail that yield unexpected riches on repeated hearing. Though perhaps less than on the solo Obsidian, Dreamlife has moments that bring to mind the towering presence of Olivier Messiaen, the French organist and one of the major composers of the 20th century. “I’m a big fan!” laughs Downes. “I mean, he was an early influence and he had such a unique language. He built all the motivic ideas that explicitly represented religious imagery and symbols – he could have stain-glass chords and retrograde rhythm and all these things meant something. I love how he created his own toolbox, his own set of sounds, his own language, much in the same way John Coltrane did, he created a language for himself and expressed himself through that new language. It feels the same with Messiaen, like the opening of the ‘Quartet for the End of Time’, for example. Every instrument has a role and it all fits together by association in a way. I love that way of thinking about composition, it feels like painting or something like that, it’s very colourful”.

It is perhaps unsurprising that the influence of Messiaen should hover over Downes’ playing since there is no end of studies that tell us how our previous listening experiences, and more particularly our prior listening experiences between the ages of eight to 16, are key determinants in the formation of musical taste. So is it possible Downes’ formative influences could have helped shape Dreamlife of Debris? “The first time I started playing music was when I joined the cathedral choir in Norwich,” he recalls. “We’d sing all sorts of different choral music, from Palestrina to Arvo Pärt and everything between and that was every night, except for Saturdays, but two services on Sundays. So it was really quite an intense burst of music for me when I was eight. From there we learnt sight reading, and ensemble skills, to read music in different clefs, and exposure to a whole range of different classical composers, and all through that I discovered the organ through listening to Neil Taylor and David Dunnett and all the great organists that were at Norwich Cathedral at the time. That got me fascinated in the organ and the repertoire, like Vien, Widor, all that stuff, as well as Messiaen, Digadit and Bach, obviously, so that was my early listening experiences. Then, after that, getting into improvisation on organ, I started getting into improvisation in different types of music. The first one that cropped up was jazz and my mum gave me an Oscar Peterson CD. It was Night Train, and from then on I just disappeared into that rabbit hole – and people like Keith Jarrett started cropping up.”

From Keith Jarrett, Downes began to explore the enormously varied output of the ECM label. So, how does it feel to become an ECM artist in his own right? “As you can probably imagine, I have been listening to records on ECM since I first got into jazz really. The Köln Concert was probably one of my first, so to be able to realise the idea that began with Vyamanical and see it become Obsidian and then lead to Dreamlife of Debris, I’m very lucky in that regard. In terms of resources and input from the label it’s amazing to think that those pairs of ears are checking your work, Manfred and Steve Lake and my producer Sun Chung and all these people at ECM who have made these really amazing records are listening to me. Sun Chung had an abstract idea of how he wanted the music to be structured. He wanted this overall arc of a journey that also has moments where it self-references itself. So it’s almost like you have returning characters in terms of melodic motifs that come back, so everything sounds somehow familiar and coherent as a whole, rather than a collection of live tracks. That idea was important to him at the start, and the kind of framework he imagined helped me to organise some of my ideas as I went. To have that input is pretty amazing. Also, to feel invested in as an artist, I’m very lucky.”

This article originally appeared in the December 2019 / January 2020 issue of Jazzwise. Never miss an issue – subscribe today!