Golden

Nominated for a Mercury Music Prize in 2010. 2010 album from the British Jazz pianist. Kit Downes, in perhaps the trickiest musical situation of all the debut album as leader/composer has produced the goods. The album's opener, 'Jump Minzi Jump' sets the tone perfectly: spun out from an infectiously catchy hook is an increasingly intense, pleasingly convoluted, piano solo propelled by a fiercely interactive but subtly sensitive rhythm section: fellow Royal Academy of Music students (class of 2005) bassist Calum Gourlay and drummer James Maddren. Subsequent tracks deftly repeat this formula, their apparently fragmentary melodies giving rise to consistently powerful, muscular trio explorations that demonstrate the value and effectiveness of the mutual understanding that springs from longstanding musical partnerships.