CD Review: John Donaldson, We Were Together, I Forget the Rest

I’ve been awear of John Donaldson’s as a pianist for the better part of two decades, mostly at a distance, catching him in sideman credits and the occasional trio date, so I wasn’t quite prepared for how exposed he sounds on We Were Together, I Forget the Rest. This is an album written in the aftermath of his wife Agatha Coffey’s death, and it would have been easy for that fact to sit over the record like a caption, explaining every phrase before you’ve had the chance to feel it. Donaldson doesn’t let that happen. The grief is here, but it’s worked into the compositions rather than announced by them, and the result is the most fully realised thing I’ve heard from him.

Part of what makes this record work is who he chose not to lean on. This albums line-Up is more than capable of dominating a session and on paper it reads like the kind of UK all-star date where the personalities often crowd out the material. Donaldson avoids that trap almost entirely. Ballard’s drumming, in particular, is a study in restraint; he colours rather than drives, and on “Evening Song” his cymbal work is so far back in the mix it’s almost a texture rather than a rhythm. Whatever the reasoning behind it, the effect is consistent across the record: nobody here is playing to be heard, it all just works as it should.

The real discovery here is the vocal writing. Rather than splitting the album between his two singers, Donaldson has Norma Winstone and Rebecka Edlund sing together throughout, and the pairing is genuinely unusual. Winstone’s wordless phrasing has always functioned more like a horn line than a lyric, and against it Edlund’s more grounded, idiosyncratic delivery gives the blend an odd, slightly unresolved quality – two very different instruments occupying the same register without ever quite merging into one voice. On “Agatha’s Song” that tension becomes the emotional centre of the record: the harmony keeps almost resolving and then doesn’t, verse after verse, in a way that mirrors the subject matter far more effectively than a straight elegy would have. It’s the album’s high point, and I’d be surprised if it isn’t cited as such elsewhere.

Elsewhere the writing takes different shapes without losing that same discipline. “Prayer for Tomorrow” opens the record on an odd-meter piano vamp, a knottier rhythmic proposition than anything that follows, and it’s worth noting how unhurried Rob Luft’s solo is over it – he lets the metre do the work rather than fighting it. “Chanterelle” pulls right back, built on a swelling guitar comp under the piano that never resolves into a hook, which suits the song’s more conversational vocal line. “They Danced” is the one full-throttle piece on the record, Tom Mason and Ballard finally allowed to push, and even there the unison between voice and piano keeps the track from tipping into showcase territory. “Into The Night,” the one track carrying Winstone’s own lyrics, is the most straightforwardly beautiful thing here, carried almost entirely on Donaldson’s piano writing. “New Dawn” closes the record on exactly the note its title promises – not resolution so much as permission to move forward, which feels like the right way to end an album like this one.

Recorded over two days at Real World Studios and mixed by John Nicholls, the album sounds as considered as it plays. There’s real depth to the low end without Mason’s bass ever crowding the piano, and Ballamy’s saxophone and Graeme Flowers’ trumpet are used sparingly enough that their entrances actually register as events rather than filler. Several of the players arrived with little rehearsal, and you can hear that immediacy in the frontline playing – nothing here sounds worked over.

This is a record that earns every one of its comparisons to the great narrative albums in the piano-trio-plus-voices tradition, and it does so without once reaching for melodrama. Stream it if you must, but this is an album to own. We Were Together, I Forget the Rest is released on August 28th, 2026, and it will be among the finest things to come out of the UK jazz scene this year.

Release Date: 28 August 2026
Format: LP | CD | Streaming
Label: Self Release

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