Kit Downes is a BBC Jazz Award winning, Mercury Music Award-nominated solo recording artist for ECM Records. He has toured the world playing piano, church organ, and harmonium with his own bands (ENEMY, Troyka, and Elt) as well as with artists such as Squarepusher, Bill Frisell, Empirical, Andrew Cyrille, Sofia Jernberg, Benny Greb, Mica Levi, and Sam Amidon.

Downes performs solo pipe organ and solo piano concerts—and collaborates with with saxophonist Tom Challenger, cellist Lucy Railton, composer Shiva Feshareki, saxophonist Ben van Gelder, and with the band ENEMY (with Petter Eldh and James Maddren).

He is also currently working with violinist Aidan O’Rourke, drummer Seb Rochford, composer Max de Wardener, and in the organ trio Deadeye with Reinier Baas and Jonas Burgwinkel.

He has written commissions for Cheltenham Music Festival, London Contemporary Orchestra, Biel Organ Festival, Ensemble Klang at ReWire Festival, the Scottish Ensemble, Cologne Philharmonie, and the Wellcome Trust. He also performed as part of the National Theatre production of Network from 2017-2018, featuring actor Bryan Cranston.

He has performed solo organ concerts at the ElbPhilharmonie in Hamburg, Lausanne Cathedral, Flagey in Brussels, the Royal Albert Hall and the Southbank Royal Festival Hall in London, Rochester Jazz Festival (U.S.), Saint Olaf Minneapolis (U.S.), Stavanger Konserthus, Aarhus Philharmonic Musikhuset, Darmstadt Organ Festival, Stuttgart Organ Festival, Laurenskerk in Rotterdam, Orgelpark in Amsterdam, Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church at Berlin Jazz Festival, and the BBC Proms, amongst many others.

He holds a fellowship at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where he studied and now teaches. He has twice been awarded first place in Downbeat’s Critics Poll Rising Star for Organ and Keyboard categories respectively, and his ECM records Obsidian, Dreamlife of Debris, and Vermillion have been released to much critical acclaim.