Obsidian is a solo pipe organ album by Kit Downes, the British pianist known mostly from jazz, and his first record as a leader for ECM Records. It has little to do with jazz in any narrow sense, yet only an improviser could have made it. Played on three church organs of very different size and character, it treats the instrument as a palette of colours and textures rather than a vehicle for liturgical grandeur.
Downes sang in a church choir and played the organ in Norwich as a boy, before jazz drew him to the piano. His earlier ECM appearance was as pianist on the 2015 debut of Time Is A Blind Guide. In November 2016 producer Sun Chung followed him to Union Chapel in Islington, London, home of a three-manual Henry Willis organ from 1877. They then moved to two Suffolk churches, St John the Baptist in Snape and St Edmund in Bromeswell, whose organs have two manuals and one. Alex Bonney engineered, and Tom Challenger, a regular partner in organ and saxophone duets, adds tenor saxophone to one piece.
Kings, on the large Union Chapel instrument, opens the album with a slow procession of low pulse notes under higher, fanfare-like lines. On Rings Of Saturn Downes works the stops and the air supply to draw eerie, almost electronic whistles from the pipes. In Modern Gods saxophone and organ begin in unison before the two voices separate and build to dense chords. The closing The Gift, written with his father Paul Downes, is a simple, hymn-like tune on the small Bromeswell organ, with birds audible in the background. The traditional Black Is The Colour is the only other piece not entirely his own.
Downes has named Olivier Messiaen as a key influence, admiring how an organist can be "both an improviser and an orchestrator in the moment", as All About Jazz quoted him. In the Financial Times Mike Hobart heard "serene moods and stately counterpoints" mixed with "the jump and scatter of improv and an underlying sense of unease". Patrick Hadfield of London Jazz News called it a powerful record and observed that, for all the ecclesiastical settings, the music is secular. The album is dedicated to the English pianist John Taylor, who died in 2015. Steve Lake wrote the liner notes.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2559, first released on 19 January 2018.
