The audience are invited onto the stage with the artists on Friday 12 January, as Sebastian Rochford (Polar Bear) and Kit Downes perform their ECM Records release A Short Diary acoustically ‘in the round’ at Turner Sims. A Short Diary is Seb’s exquisitely poignant musical response to his father’s death in 2019. All the tunes, except one, were composed by Seb on his grandfather’s piano in his childhood home in Aberdeen. He then recorded them with his friend, BBC Jazz Award winner and Mercury Music Award nominee Kit Downes on piano, adding his own drums as a kind of discreet conversational partner. The final track Even Now I Think Of Her was composed by Seb’s Dad, poet and psychotherapist Gerard Rochford. In Seb’s words: ‘It’s a tune my dad had sung into his phone and sent me. I forwarded this to Kit’s phone. He listened, and then we started.’
This is music as a lament but also as an act of remembrance, ‘a sonic memory, created with love, out of need for comfort.’ It is deeply beautiful, full of hymn-like simplicity and space, yet also human warmth.
Watch ‘Even Now I Think Of Her’
Find out more
This is music as a lament but also as an act of remembrance, ‘a sonic memory, created with love, out of need for comfort.’ It is deeply beautiful, full of hymn-like simplicity and space, yet also human warmth.
Watch ‘Even Now I Think Of Her’
Find out more
