Jazz breaking news: Kit Downes Trio Completes High Profile Week With Kings Place Festival Show

Downes’ newly bathetic stage patter matched the understated tone of the article he wrote in The Guardian, ‘The Night I Didn’t Win The Mercury’. Let’s say it belongs to the school of indiedom and Seb Rochford stage announcements. “We like cats. We like David Attenborough, too,” he said to the quietly amused audience.

The feline in question celebrated in ‘Jump Minzi Jump’ could have been there, by the piano, purring away, as the set showed how Downes can move with recent innovations in the piano trio form; tackling ballad-like numbers along the lines of how Brad Mehldau might without slavishly adhering to them. Double bassist Calum Gourlay plays slightly more in the vein of Mehldau’s occasional playing partner Darek ‘Oles’ Oleszkiewicz rather than Larry Grenadier, while James Maddren sounds nothing like Jeff Ballard, he tends not to lean into his cymbals so much and his swung rhythms have a different feel. Downes, meanwhile, looked comfortable, with his hair pinned back in a bun, and let rip towards the end of the set, but the quiet sections really showed what this fine trio can do.

Earlier Tom Arthurs, joined by Phronesis’ Jasper Høiby and the Tony Oxley-like Stu Ritchie plus the string quartet Elysian, impressed with some deliciously long Bartókian passages lit up by the spectral grooves of Høiby and the crepuscular, improv-inclined drumming of Ritchie. Høiby combined brightly with Elysian cellist Laura Moody in some of the best passages allowing the more obvious grooves to slide gently into the long meta dirge-like sections of strings, a foil to the muted trumpet. Arthurs came alive when he switched to trumpet from flugel on this series of improvised pieces first premièred in Manchester earlier in the year. His writing for Elysian and his own trio mine a new seam of possibilities, deep within this fast flickering, highly promising collaboration.

– Stephen Graham