Sebastian Rochford, Kit Downes

A Short Diary is a duo record of grief and memory by Scottish drummer Sebastian Rochford and pianist Kit Downes, and Rochford's first album as a leader for ECM. He wrote the music shortly after the death of his father, the Aberdeen poet Gerard Rochford (1932-2019). Rochford calls it a "short diary (of loss)", offered as "a sonic memory, created with love, out of need for comfort." Eight brief pieces of hymn-like clarity, most of them carried by the piano, add up to about 36 minutes.

Rochford is best known for leading Polar Bear, and he had played on Andy Sheppard's ECM albums Trio Libero, Surrounded by Sea and Romaria. Downes came to the session with his own ECM records behind him, among them Obsidian and the trio album Vermillion. The two recorded in February 2020 at Waverley, the Rochford family home in Aberdeen, on the piano that had belonged to the drummer's grandfather. Alex Bonney engineered the session. The album was mixed in Munich by Manfred Eicher with Michael Hinreiner, and produced by Eicher and Rochford. Two of Gerard Rochford's poems are printed in the booklet.

The opening This Tune Your Ears Will Never Hear is a hymn for piano with soft drum colour, described in Rochford's manuscript as "like a child calling out alone into an empty void." Several pieces, Night Of Quiet and Our Time Is Still among them, are piano solos, with the drummer silent. Ten Of Us, the longest track and a nod to the ten Rochford siblings, builds towards something close to an anthem. The closing Even Now I Think Of Her is Gerard Rochford's own tune, which he had sung into his phone and sent to his son. Sebastian forwarded it to Downes, and they played it from there.

Reviewers heard warmth as well as sorrow. In The Guardian, John Lewis described "eight delicate, hymn-like meditations on the death of his father", with Rochford's sensitive percussion added only now and then. Hugh Morris wrote in Pitchfork that it is "as honest a depiction of grieving as you might hope to hear." In Jazz Journal, Simon Adams found it a quiet celebration of a family rather than a mournful record.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2749, released in January 2023.