Join Seb and Kit on the Turner Sims stage, as they play A Short Diary acoustically ‘in the round’.

A Short Diary was released on the ECM Records label this year. It was Sebastian Rochford’s (Polar Bear) 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.

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.

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.’

Experience the poignancy and beauty of A Short Diary up close on stage with the musicians.

…sorrow is replaced with consolation, and, in responding to death, the duo also creates a parable of grief. Pitchfork

Pure music of luminous quality [which is] bound to be in quite a few year-end lists. The Arts Desk

This concert is approximately 75 minutes straight through, without an interval