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- Written by: Daniel Rorke
- Parent Category: Jazz Ireland Blog
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Read more: Album Review: Nils Kavanagh – No Expectations
Nils Kavanagh – Piano
Marcus Baber – Bass
Sam Green – Drums
It is perhaps unsurprising that Sligo is now producing musicians of note, given the educational focus of the annual Jazz Project there. At a mere 21 years old Nils Kavanagh, an alumnus of the festival and summer school, and student of the exceptional-playing and always well-dressed Belfast pianist Scott Flanigan, has released a recording of introspective yet dynamic piano trio music that projects a sense of self-awareness and assuredness uncommon in a musician of his age.
Kavanagh is an Irish and Danish duel national, and here on his debut recording entitled No Expectations he presents seven of his own compositions that thematically reference notion of place and being. In his own words, he asserts that the overarching theme, which fuelled the creative drive for this release, was the question of what it means to “dwell”. Indeed, the music itself carries a quality of some sort of suspension in place. No doubt a good deal of this has come by way of the Jazz and adjacent improvised music he has absorbed through his associations in Scandinavia. Congruent with much of the Scandinavian Fjord-Jazz, the pianist describes his music in heavily narrative terms, citing a mix of mythology and geography, such as the cairn at Knocknarea, and personal touchstones such as his relationship to his Danish grandmother’s clock.
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- Written by: Daniel Rorke
- Parent Category: Jazz Ireland Blog
- Category: Album Reviews
Read more: Album Review: Organ Freeman - Busywork
Charlie Moon: Guitar & Voice
Darragh Hennessy: Organ
Dominic Mullan: Drums
Michael Buckley: Tenor Saxophone
A residency is a great thing for a jazz ensemble. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it is a vital thing, not only for the musicians involved, but also for the scene writ large. Organ Freeman’s weekly hit at The Big Romance every Sunday in Parnell Street has evolved into a hang for many musicians that strengthens the community and brings everyone together to exchange witticisms and merriment. I have always considered jazz to be an oral tradition, or perhaps more realistically have aspects analogous to oral traditions insofar that it requires exchange in person and on the bandstand. You can’t learn it from a book, you have to be in the same room as the music.
I once read an interview with Spike Wilner, the piano player from New York and the manager of Smalls Jazz Club, where he was talking about young musicians who sometimes ask him about how to “break into the scene”. His advice was simple: be on the scene. If you don’t hang, you won’t be called. It is indeed simple. Therefore, for the healthy development of the Dublin scene places like The Big Romance and Frankie Ryans, gigs that are less concerts and more sessions with lots of musicians lurking around, are vital. Don’t look to the universities, least of all this one, because they can’t and don’t replace this. If I ever inherit lots of money from a lost aunty in Leitrim, this sort of place is what I would buy.
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- Written by: Daniel Rorke
- Parent Category: Jazz Ireland Blog
- Category: Album Reviews
Read more: Album Review: Tom Caraher - Ninety Degrees
Tom Caraher - Tenor Saxophone
Paul Dunlea - Trombone
Darragh O'Kelly - Fender Rhodes
Barry Donohue - Electric Bass
Shane O'Donovan - Drums
Saxophonist Tom Caraher should be counted with note among the many Irish Jazz musicians who deserve far wider recognition. A childhood partly spent in The United States, and then subsequent study with seriously-heavy Jazz musicians such George Garzone and Hal Crook at Berklee School of Music, makes Caraher a valuable asset to the Irish Jazz milieu. One might well envisage him as some form of oddly-hatted Jazz monk, via his new album Ninety Degrees, delivering the dhama of contemporary fusion saxophone playing to us, the pleading folk of far away lands.
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- Written by: Daniel Rorke
- Parent Category: Jazz Ireland Blog
- Category: Album Reviews
Read more: Album Review: Blast From The Past - David Redmond - Roots
Personnel: David Redmond (b), Jason Rigby (ts), Bill Carrothers (p), Kevin Brady (d) Recorded in Munich, Germany, 2012
Ah 2012… it was a very good year… at least for blue-blooded girls of independent means. Unlike what the Frank Sinatra classic suggests I personally didn’t get to ride in many limousines that year, however bassist Dave Redmond did release a record that thirteen years later has found its way onto high rotation on my CD player this month. That’s right, CDs. From my cold dead hands Daniel Ek, cold dead hands. They are coming back I tells ya. Trust me on this.
Roots, released by the Spanish Fresh Sound label where Ireland’s own Redmond and drummer Kevin Brady share the roster with names like Avashai Cohen, Ethan Iverson and Brad Mehldau, showcases ten original tunes which betray a maturity and compositional prowess that does their leader proud. Joined by New York based saxophonist Jason Rigby and Michigan pianist Bill Carrothers, with whom the lads have quite an extensive playing history now, the record certainly holds its own more than a decade later.
Read more: Album Review: Blast From The Past - David Redmond - Roots
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- Written by: Daniel Rorke
- Parent Category: Jazz Ireland Blog
- Category: Album Reviews
Read more: Album Review: Shane Latimer – Residuum
Shane Latimer is one of the most truly unique musicians I know. Not merely a prodigious talent when playing straight-ahead Jazz, he is also a singularly arresting practitioner of Free Jazz and “Improvised Music” (whatever that is). In recent years he has turned his death-ray-like musical stare in the direction of electronica, using synthesisers and other occult means of interacting technologically with sound to produce consistently surprising results. The result of his years of experimentation is Residuum available through Diatribe Records, the title of which is allegedly not a commentary upon the government’s housing policy.
It would serve you well to cast aside any assumptions you may have about both Jazz musicians and electronic music before you enter Latimer’s world. This is not your father’s Jazz-musician-makes-electronic-stuff album. I could not possibly begin to assign any sense of genre to this music. It is surely a record filtered through the guitarist’s exceptional knowledge of aesthetic, form, harmony, and structure, however the result reveals itself like a fractal landscape of sonic shapes and events that sprout new lands and new topography at every turn. Expectation and supposition are the enemy of experience here. Comparisons or congruencies don’t apply. This music is its own thing and I advise clean ears when approaching it.
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- Written by: Daniel Rorke
- Parent Category: Jazz Ireland Blog
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Read more: Album Review - Niwel Tsumbu "Milimo"
My immediate response, when listening to this record for the first time, was “oh, this is fun stuff!”. There are many tributaries in confluence here, with influences as varied as Rhumba, various forms of Classical music, Jazz, a certain ECM Records/Third Stream aesthetic, and of course Congolese music combining into an organic and many-sided whole. While Niwel Tsumbu’s music can sparkle with impressive intellectual and technical prowess, it is at once music with much honestly and at times raw emotional content, moving seamlessly though moments of joy and introspection.
Born in the Congo and long-time asset of the Irish music community, Tsumbu will be familiar to many listeners of Jazz and Jazz-adjacent music. For many decades he has been performing with some of the best musicians on the island and abroad; Sinead O’Connor in Ireland for one, and Buena Vista Social Club abroad for another. Not content with triumph in the real world, he has also mastered the not-so-real world of the internet, becoming quite a success on Instagram with hundreds of thousands of people viewing his educational content. Currently, he can be caught in the act performing with Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi, touring pretty much everywhere on Earth.
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- Written by: Daniel Rorke
- Parent Category: Jazz Ireland Blog
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Read more: Album Review - Pizza Jazz, "Home Delivery"
Steve Welsh - saxophones, flute, clarinet
Darragh O'Kelly - keys
Sean Maynard Smith - bass
Brendan Doherty - drums and percussion
Bassist Sean Maynard-Smith is following up the 2021 recording Eh, No and his more confidence-inducing title Actually, Yeah in 2023, with a release by the Pizza Jazz group aptly named Home Delivery. Born by way of the lactic workshopping of Luckys’ Pizza Jazz evenings at their regular residency in Dublin, Maynard-Smith and his fellows Darragh O’Kelly on keyboards and drummer Brendan Doherty are joined on Home Delivery by American saxophone expat Steve Welsh. What follows is a record that is eccentric in all the right ways.
It isn’t easy music to provide an overview of. Some moments seem to channel the lighter shades of 70s Stanley Clarke in Venusian mode, especially so when O’Kelly’s vintage synth meets Welsh’s flute, such as on the third track Languidity. Other times we are lured more towards firmer Jazz territory, for example with their rendition of the Ornette Coleman classic Ramblin’, which is now for all intents and purposes in the standard repertoire. The enduring fascination lies in the way the ensemble is emphasising some of the more introspective sides of 60s Free Jazz and 70s Fusion, yet at the same time there is a fingerprint of individuality that means drawing too many comparisons to past styles deny Home Delivery’s unconventionality it’s due acknowledgement..