The fruitful collaboration of French-born
saxophonist-clarinetist Robin Fincker and British
pianist Kit Downes goes back decades. Their
life paths have taken them from London to two
different countries in Europe, and they met again
three years ago when they teamed up with Irish
singer Lauren Kinsella to set traditional songs and
contemporary poetry to music.
The trio was formed three years ago on the occasion of
the Jazzdor festival, and shortly afterwards they were
selected to perform at the Jazz Migration program’s
thematic concert. The musicians, currently living in three
different countries, combine folk and contemporary music
in the spirit of European jazz, resulting in a musical
world that is sometimes magically beautiful, sometimes
surprisingly rough. Fincker, Downes and Kinsella are in
constant dialogue, in duo, in trio, with themselves, the
music, and the lyrics.
The tracks include traditional songs from 5-6
centuries ago, such as Death and the Lady,
arranged countless times, or Georgie, handed
down to us from the gypsies of England. Aunt
Molly Jackson leads us into the world of 20thcentury
protest songs, while Molly Drake’s works
represent the poetic world of the past decades.
The album’s title is inspired by Jackie Berridge’s
painting Shadowlands Too, which uses abstraction
to suggest the sensation of the sea – just as the
trio evoke the content and mood of the songs in the
form of moving, shape-shifting shadows, while not
actually playing them note-for-note.
Robin Fincker is also known to BMC Records
audiences as a member of Deep Ford or Vincent
Courtois’ Tosca project, and his most famous band
is the trio with Courtois and Daniel Erdmann, whose
album Nothing else was released last year. A BBC
Jazz Award winner, Kit Downes currently tours the
world with the trio ENEMY and the band Deadeye,
and his solo albums are released on the prestigious
ECM label. Although Lauren Kinsella’s work spans
a wide range of musical styles between pop jazz
(Snowpoet) and contemporary vocal technique, she
has never appeared yet in a similar project rooted
so deeply in folk.