Recording of the Week, Kit Downes, Petter Eldh & James Maddren, 'Vermillion'

Left to right: James Maddren, Kit Downes, Petter Eldh (Photo by Caterina Di Perri)

It always feels like every time I hear a modern piano trio that manages to bring something novel to the age-old formula of piano, bass, and drums, I find myself thinking “yes, this is how you make it sound fresh”. Perhaps there’s still plenty of ground to plunder with the classic trio arrangement – or maybe I’m just not giving it enough credit – but it’s in this familiar territory that we find pianist Kit Downes, bassist Petter Eldh, and drummer James Maddren on Vermillion. While it’s the first time this trio have appeared together for an ECM session, Downes, Eldh and Maddren have all worked together in some capacity over the years. Maddren was the drummer for Downes’ trio back when the pianist was releasing music on Basho Records in the late 2000s (Downes and Maddren were also university flatmates and played together regularly), and you can also hear Maddren drumming in a very different context on Eldh’s Projekt Drums Vol. 1 from last year – the more traditionally ‘ECM’ sounds of Vermillion are a world away from the nu-jazz and hip-hop flavours of Eldh’s own work. Then there’s the ENEMY trio, the one other recorded instance of Downes, Eldh and Maddren together, on their self-titled record released on Edition in 2018 that explores heavily swung polyrhythms and lightning-fast melodies.

Downes’ own work for ECM has been equally varied; his 2018 label debut Obsidian comprised mostly solo organ recordings – in a past life Downes was an organ scholar at St Peter Mancroft, before he began his studies at the Royal Academy of Music. His follow-up Dreamlife of Debris featured a quintet of longtime collaborators – drummer Seb Rochford, saxophonist Tom Challenger and cellist Lucy Railton, as well as guitarist Stian Westerhus – for one of the pianist’s more instrumentally dense records, the music likened to chamber music by some reviewers. As well as a reunion of sorts for Downes and Maddren in the pianist’s trio, in many ways Vermillion is the trio’s most orthodox recording of recent times, a considerably more stripped-back and intimate effort with some unexpected turns to make it stand on its own amongst an ocean of piano trio recordings thanks to each member’s eclectic musical backgrounds.

Photo by Caterina Di Perri

The trio dances around several rhythmically ambiguous moments throughout the record; right from the opener ‘Minus Monks’ it feels like Eldh and Maddren are right in lock-step behind Downes. With his background in popular styles like funk and hip-hop, Eldh in particular brings plenty of groove to the record, with his tunes ‘Plus Puls’ and ‘Waders’ toying with the rhythm in a similar way, the latter switching-up tempos in quick succession. Even zig-zagging in and out of different metres and tempos the pieces manage to keep their composure – this is certainly not easy music to nod along to at times, but a nice mental exercise to try and piece it together.

Downes’ original tunes bring an equal amount of harmonic variety to Vermillion, stepping quickly between gentle moments and just as dizzying outbursts. Downes brings quite the painterly touch on the melodic side, like the pastoral tones of ‘Seceda’ centred around a warm chordal passage, or ‘Rolling Thunder’ that acts as an atmospheric interlude – sparse piano framed carefully by Maddren’s china hits and Eldh’s subtle bass counterpoint. Downes has been rightly praised in the past for his ability to “make difficult music sound natural”, and for sure there’s an unassuming complexity to the music on Vermillion that manages to stay firmly in listenable territory without feeling like the trio are simply flexing their performance chops. The record closes out with a cover of Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Castles Made of Sand’, a pretty liberal interpretation of the song that, like the rest of the record, which sees the trio picking apart this music with apparent ease.