Kit Downes: Southern Bodies
with Bill Frisell and musicians of The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra
Copresented by Northrop and Liquid Music
Fri, Oct 4, 7 pm
Carlson Family Stage, Northrop
Kit Downes, BBC Jazz Award winner and Mercury Music Award nominee, is a master keyboardist whose boundless musical curiosity has led to genre-defying collaborations with performers and composers around the world. Legendary jazz guitarist Bill Frisell joins him for the world premiere of Southern Bodies featuring Northrop's historic Aeolian-Skinner pipe organ. Rounding out the group is a small ensemble of virtuoso string players from The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra for a one-night only performance that tests what the organ can and should be.
"One of the UK jazz scene's foremost talents on multiple keyboard instruments... [Downes] straddles the line between gestural jazz improvisation and the gravitas of a classical orchestration."–Downbeat
"[Frisell] is one of the most important and pioneering musicians at work today"–Irish Times
about the artistS
Kit Downes is a BBC Jazz Award winning, Mercury Music Award nominated solo recording artist for ECM Records. He has toured the world playing piano, church organ and harmonium with his own bands (‘ENEMY’, ‘Troyka’ and ‘Elt’) as well as with artists such as Squarepusher, Bill Frisell, ‘Empirical‘, Andrew Cyrille, Sofia Jernberg, Benny Greb, Mica Levi and Sam Amidon.
Kit performs solo pipe organ and solo piano concerts – as well as playing in collaborations with saxophonist Tom Challenger, cellist Lucy Railton, composer Shiva Feshareki, saxophonist Ben van Gelder and with the band ‘ENEMY’ (with Petter Eldh and James Maddren).
He is also currently working with violinist Aidan O’Rourke, drummer Seb Rochford, composer Max de Wardener and in the organ trio ‘Deadeye’ with Reinier Baas and Jonas Burgwinkel.
He has written commissions for Cheltenham Music Festival, London Contemporary Orchestra, Biel Organ Festival, Ensemble Klang at ReWire Festival, the Scottish Ensemble, Cologne Philharmonie and the Wellcome Trust. He also performed as part of the National Theatre production of ‘Network’ from 2017-2018, featuring actor Bryan Cranston.
He has performed solo organ concerts at the Elb Philharmonie in Hamburg, Lausanne Cathedral, Flagey in Brussels, the Royal Albert Hall in London as well as the Southbank Royal Festival Hall, Rochester Jazz Festival (US), St Olafs Minneapolis (US), Stavanger Konserthus, Aarhus Philharmonic Musikhuset, Darmstadt Organ Festival, Stuttgart Organ Festival, Laurenskerke in Rotterdam, Orgelpark in Amsterdam, Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church at Berlin Jazz Festival, and the BBC Proms amongst many others.
He holds a fellowship at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where he himself studied and now teaches. He has twice been awarded 1st place in Downbeat’s Critics Poll Rising Star for Organ and Keyboard categories respectively, and his ECM records ‘Obsidian‘, ‘Dreamlife of Debris‘ and ‘Vermillion‘ have been released to much critical acclaim.
Bill Frisell’s career as a guitarist and composer has spanned more than 40 years and many celebrated recordings, whose catalog has been cited by Downbeat as "the best recorded output of the decade."
In recent years, Frisell has forged a distinctive and fruitful collaboration with the Blue Note label, releasing HARMONY, Valentine and FOUR to great acclaim.
"Frisell has had a lot of practice putting high concept into a humble package. Long hailed as one of the most distinctive and original improvising guitarists of our time, he has also earned a reputation for teasing out thematic connections with his music... There’s a reason that Jazz at Lincoln Center had him program a series called Roots of Americana." —New York Times
Recognized as one of America’s 21 most vital and productive performing artists, Frisell was named an inaugural Doris Duke Artist in 2012. He is also a recipient of grants from United States Artists, Meet the Composer among others. In 2016, he was a beneficiary of the first FreshGrass Composition commission to preserve and support innovative grassroots music. Upon San Francisco Jazz opening their doors in 2013, he served as one of their Resident Artistic Directors. Bill is the subject of a documentary film by director Emma Franz, entitled Bill Frisell: A Portrait, which examines his creative process in depth, as well as an extensive biography by Philip Watson, Beautiful Dreamer: The Guitarist Who Changed The Sound of American Music.