(Picture: Garry Corbett)

Foyer Bar, Symphony Hall, Birmingham UK
19-02-10
I call it “being in the zone”. It’s that place where the musicians achieve that heightened sense of creativity, where they are all hearing each other with a kind of super-sensitivity, and finding that somehow the technique they have worked for years and years to acquire suddenly, somehow becomes transparent, leaving them to fly in the music and in the moment.

It’s not an easy thing to achieve, and I have been at gigs by extremely accomplished musicians who have never quite got into that zone the whole evening; I have heard some very good musicians who have never, to my ears, or when I have been present, reached it.

But the really intuitive, the ones who dig deep every time they play, grow to find the zone more easily (though that is a relative word in this context), and get into it more often. Kit Downes is one of these.

But even for such gifted musicians, it rarely happens straight away – they need to work towards it as the gig progresses. It takes patience, and perseverance, and a certain confidence, the confidence to throw oneself out of the “plane” of safe improvisation within the chords and harmonic structure and spread your arms in a joyous, yet controlled, freefall. And it provides for the step change where the listeners don’t just have a nice time but in some subtle but crucial way have their lives changed.

The Kit Downes Trio reached it, for me as they moved from Tambourine, a tune inspired by Keith Jarrett and containing a lot of his almost rocking, groove-driven forward movement, to the pretty standard ballad which closed the first set. Downes hit one of his virtuoso right hand passages, his left hovering unused above the keys as he wove ever more glorious patterns up and down, in and out of the tune, the delight of creation driving the ideas.

The band – Downes on piano, Calum Gourlay on double bass, and Dave Smith on drums – stayed at that level for the whole of the second half. They opened it with the title track of the yet to be recorded second trio disc, The View, followed with a great, extended Thelonious Monk tune (into which, at one point, Downes managed to throw in a quote of Dizzy Gillespie’s Salt Peanuts), and then moved onto the opener from the trio’s Golden disc, Jump Minzi Jump, before ending with another tune from the album, the exquisite and strangely timeless Homely.

I had been looking forward to hearing the trio from the recording, and was about to be disappointed when James Maddren was not behind the drums, a disappointment immediately dispelled by the fact that Smith was in his place. While Gourlay played the trusty bass fulcrum in the centre, Downes and Smith had a whale of a time speeding and slowing in tight formation in Jump… and constantly swapping accent ideas. Smith plays with such subtlety, even making sure to damp the resonance of his snare at just the right time while in the middle of a complex pattern around the whole kit.

Free and in a foyer, this was a gig of the year so far, and one that will not easily be bettered, whether in concert hall or club, whether for £10 or £50… A good crowd was there to reap the benefit – a lot of hearts were lifted and minds stimulated; a lot of faces were smiling.

Go here for more of Garry Corbett’s pics of the gig.