| Jazz moderne |
Danny Keane’s Kinesis Turns Restlessness Into a Modern Jazz Masterclass
There’s a particular kind of jazz record that only gets made once an artist has spent years inside other people’s music before finally being ready to build a world of their own. Kinesis, the long-awaited second album from London-based composer, multi-instrumentalist and producer Danny Keane, is exactly that record, and it’s a genuine triumph.
Six years after his debut Roamin’, Keane returns with an album that doesn’t just sound like the work of a well-travelled musician; it sounds like the work of someone who has finally stopped absorbing other people’s languages and started speaking fluently in his own. That’s the throughline of Kinesis, six tracks that treat movement, both literal and emotional, as the engine of the whole record.
What immediately sets Kinesis apart from a lot of “genre-blending” jazz records is how unforced the blending actually is. Keane plays piano, Fender Rhodes, analogue synths, cello and organ throughout, and handles all the arrangements himself, but he’s smart enough to know a record like this lives or dies by the ensemble around him. So he assembled one of the most interesting line-ups you’ll hear on a jazz release this year: drummer Sarathy Korwar, bassists Jon Thorne and Ruth Goller, trumpeter Byron Wallen, and reedsman James Arben sit alongside tabla player Aref Durvesh and multi-percussionist Pirashanna Thejaravah on mridangam, ghatam and morsing. A string section, violinists Tom Pigott-Smith and Oli Langford, violist Max Baillie and cellist Ian Burdge, adds a music density, while Palestinian oud virtuoso Adnan Joubran and tuba player Ed Ashby give the record two more distinct colours to draw on.
That’s a lot of instrumental vocabulary to reconcile, and on paper it could easily read as scattershot. In practice, it’s the opposite: every one of those textures earns its place because Keane writes for the personalities in the room rather than bolting exotic instrumentation onto a jazz-trio skeleton for effect.
Opener “Running” sets the tone immediately, built on a keyboard riff in 7/8 that keeps threatening to tip over before finding its footing again, a neat trick that mirrors the album’s whole preoccupation with motion and imbalance. “Passing Time” follows with a hypnotic three-over-four pulse borrowed from Indian classical rhythm, and the two keys it moves between give the piece a genuine sense of a journey rather than just a mood.
Then comes the record’s wildest turn: “Cathartic Chaos”, where Keane lays down a Moog arpeggiator foundation for Adnan Joubran’s oud to improvise across. It’s the moment where Kinesis stops sounding like jazz-adjacent world fusion and starts sounding like something with no obvious antecedent at all, two classically trained instrumentalists from very different traditions, both cut loose at the same time.
“Somnolent Stomp” is the album’s centre of gravity: an eight-and-a-half-minute slow-burn built on a 5/4 riff with an E bass pedal sitting under an F minor melody, unwinding into a genuinely free collective improvisation. You can hear the musicians listening to each other rather than performing at each other, which is rarer than it should be on records this ambitious. “A Major Minor Waltz” is the most harmonically playful piece here, constantly sliding between major and minor so you’re never quite sure whether you’re supposed to feel wistful or content, which, frankly, is the whole point.
The closer, “Time To Go”, strips everything back to a trio of piano, double bass and drums, and it lands harder for the restraint. After five tracks of dense, layered instrumentation, hearing Keane, Thorne and Korwar alone in a room feels like an exhale, and it’s the most quietly emotional piece of writing on the record.
Modern jazz has no shortage of records that borrow textures from other traditions without doing the work of actually understanding them. Kinesis isn’t one of those records. Keane’s years touring with Mulatu Astatke, Anoushka Shankar and Nitin Sawhney show up here not as name-checks but as genuine fluency, in the rhythmic logic of Indian classical percussion, in the phrasing of Ethio-jazz, in string writing that never falls back on cliché. That’s what separates a record like this from a pastiche: everything on Kinesis sounds earned.
It also helps that the album never mistakes complexity for coldness. For all its odd metres and unconventional instrumentation, this is a warm, deeply human record, one built by a musician processing real change in his life, not just showing off a passport full of stamps.
Kinesis is a rare thing: an album that rewards musicians dissecting its time signatures and casual listeners simply along for the ride in equal measure. It’s ambitious without being exhausting, technically dazzling without ever losing the emotional plot, and it confirms Danny Keane as one of the most quietly essential voices in UK jazz right now. Anyone who cares about where modern jazz is headed needs to hear this record.
Frankie Pfeiffer
Editor in chief – PARIS-MOVE
PARIS-MOVE, August 22nd, 2026
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Tracklisting:
- Running 06:50
- Passing Time 03:41
- Cathartic Chaos 06:29
- Somnolent Stomp 08:28
- A Major Minor Waltz 08:29
- Time To Go 05:30
Musicians:
Danny Keane – Piano, Fender Rhodes, Analogue Synths, Cello, Organ, Arrangements, String Arrangement, Programming
Sarathy Korwar – Drums
Jon Thorne – Double Bass
Ruth Goller – Electric Bass Guitar
Byron Wallen – Trumpet
James Arben – Tenor Saxophone, Baritone Saxophone, Bass Clarinet
Aref Durvesh – Tabla
Pirashanna Thejaravah – Mridangam, Ghatam, Morsing
Richard Olatunde Baker – Percussion
Adnan Joubran – Oud
Ed Ashby – Tuba
Tom Pigott-Smith – Violin
Oli Langford – Violin
Max Baillie – Viola
Ian Burdge – Cello
Producer: Danny Keane
Co-producer: Geoff Southall
Recorded at: Fish Factory Studios London, Ollywood Studios London, La Fôret Studios Whitstable
Engineer: Geoff Southall
Assistant Engineer: Simone Gallizio
All tracks mixed by: Alex Killpartrick
Mastered by: Guy Davie at Electric Mastering
Record Label: MVKA
Cover photo: Sam Rockman