Robin Fincker - Ombres (2024)

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.