My Mother, Music and Mortality

(My mother with her beloved Bobby)

Professional musicians are generally pragmatic. We get on with things, we do what we do because, well....that's what we do. In the creative music world you often have to deal with two conflicting requirements - being creative and 'doing the gig'. Sometimes the circumstances of the gig, (poor sound, long travel, less than ideal playing conditions etc.), makes being creative a challenge. But the mantra of 'the show must go on', is still strongly embedded in the psyche of musicians and we generally get on with it, and, in the creative music world, try and keep the creativity alive in all circumstances.

Recently I came face to face with a challenge which was related to the one I've described above, but which was at the same time very different, more fundamental, and one that brought the whole question of the meaning of music, and its place in our lives into sharp relief.

A series of circumstances arose in which myself, and my son Chris, had to make a decision whether to play a concert or not, knowing that my mother, (and of course, his grandmother), was slipping away from this world, and may well have left it by the time we finished.

My Mother

My mother May Guilfoyle (née Mullarkey), passed away in April of this year. She was a great age, in her early 90s, and up to the very last years of her life had been in generally good health. She had managed to live in her own home up to her late 80s, and had then moved to a retirement home, close to her own home, where she was relatively happy.

Her life had been very challenging in many ways, especially in the first half of it. At age twelve, at the beginning of the WWII, her mother had died, leaving her in loco parentis to her three younger brothers, forcing her to grow up very quickly and take on responsibilities that no twelve year old should have to. She met my father in the mid-1950s and settled down and raised a large family, (eight children!), as was quite common in that Irish catholic era.

My father became ill in his mid-forties, couldn't work for a couple of years, and passed away, leaving my mother with eight children, ranging from university to primary school age, to look after. This she did with the toughness, pragmatism, and stoicism which was such a feature of her personality, and doubtless forged through her childhood experience of adversity. Having found herself bereft of her mother at a young age, and then bereft of her husband in middle-age, my mother just got on with it and did what needed to be done. She was an extraordinary woman in so many ways.

(My mother in her garden, which was her pride and joy)

After this second hammer blow, things slowly got better for her for various reasons  - she had more income coming in, her children gradually starting leaving home and getting jobs etc. So she found herself, for the first time in her life, being able to do what she wanted to do rather than what she had to do. The things she loved were gardening, travelling, and going to classical music concerts, (and latterly, the love of a rescue dog called Bobby), and the second half of her life featured these pursuits, as well as being closely involved in the family lives of her children.

The Concert

(The Hugh Lane Gallery)

The concert came up at relatively short notice, in the lovely Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. They've run a great series of free 'Sundays at Noon' concerts there for over twenty five years, and I've played them often. Usually I will write a new piece to be performed there to mark the occasion. In this instance I was asked in March would I like to perform there in April, as a previously scheduled performer had cancelled. I love to play there so I agreed, and decided, despite the short notice, to write a new piece. The room lends itself to small chamber-like music, so I decided to use a trio of myself on bass, my son Chris on guitar and the improvising contemporary pianist Izumi Kimura. I planned on having the new piece performed, and have the rest of the concert feature improvisations by all three of us. I managed to find some time free at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre and went there in early March for five days and started on the piece.

The Piece - Modus Operandi/Modus Vivendi

As I drove to the Centre, I admit I had no idea of what I was going to write, other than that I would write it for electric guitar and piano. But on the car radio I heard someone use the phrase 'Modus Operandi', and it's always been a phrase I've liked - something about the sound of it. And I began to think about whether there were other Latin phrases along the same lines and the only one I could think of was 'Modus Vivendi'. And it struck me that these two phrases, which can roughly be translated as ways of working, and ways of living, could provide fertile ground for a piece.

So often our lives are divided into doing the work we have to do, and, when we can, doing the things we want to do. I set out to try and represent that dichotomy in the piece with a very busy, active, minimalistic theme which represented the Modus Operandi aspects of life, and richer more traditionally melodic Brazilian-influenced passages which represented the happier Modus Vivendi moments. I juggled these over the course of what became a twenty minute piece, and was relatively happy with how it turned out.

The piece went into rehearsal, and I looked forward to the concert, however the circumstances under which the concert would take place were to change very suddenly and we were confronted with a choice which asked many questions regarding music and its ultimate meaning in our lives.

End of Life....

In the week preceding the Sunday concert, my mother had become unwell, and on the Thursday of that week we were told that the doctor had said she was at the 'end of life' stage. It was quite shocking how quickly this had arrived, but it became clear that the doctor was right, and by Friday it was evident that it would be a very short time before she left us. The doctor had said it was impossible to predict how long this last phase would take, it could be hours or days.

Any family who has gone through this will probably be familiar with combination of shock and grief, and yet the thinking about the practicalities of the funeral etc. are also present. With my mother hovering on the edge of life, a decision had to be made regarding the concert which was to take place on Sunday.

Mortality, Music and Its Meaning For Us

The obvious thing to do with the concert was to get someone else to do it. I certainly know enough musicians in Dublin, some of whom could have stepped into the breach at short notice, to cover the concert. 'The show must go on' mentality was never a consideration in the thought processes that ultimately led to our decision. The show could have gone on without us.

Chris and I discussed what we should do, and by Saturday had decided that we would play the concert, come what may. This wasn't an easy decision to make and involved thinking about many different aspects of the situation, and ultimately of life and death, and what being a creative musician actually means and why we are involved with it.

(Chris performing at the concert)

Principally our discussions centred around the reasons why we should play the concert or why we should not. My mother at this point was sleeping constantly and there being eight of us, plus extended family, several of us were always with her. So we knew she would never be alone, and we lived close by and could get to her bedside in minutes. The reasons why we felt we should play the concert revolved around the nature of creative music itself and why we are involved with it. But there was another aspect to it - the piece itself.

In writing the piece I had not necessarily associated the Modus Operandi/Modus Vivendi idea with my mother's life, but on thinking about it in these new circumstances, I realised that it could have been expressly written with her life in mind. The first half of her life, the first 45 years or so, contained huge amounts of Modus Operandi as she met the challenges of looking after her brothers, and then her children in very adverse circumstances. The second half, the second 45 years or so, was much better for her and she was able to do so much of the stuff she loved to do, for herself - the Modus Vivendi era if you like.

The realisation that the piece could have been designed to represent her life so well, combined with the fact that, for us, playing creative music is not only a profession, but is how we represent a lot of the things we intrinsically believe in, decided us on playing the concert. By playing this music for my mother, we felt we would get closer to honouring her in that moment than by any other means at our disposal.

(Chris and Izumi playing the piece)

We decided that if she passed before the concert we would dedicate the music to her memory, and if she was still with us when we played, we knew we would be playing for her. I decided that I would tell the audience the background to the concert, but only after we had finished playing. I wanted to publicly acknowledge her life and what playing the music had meant to us, but I wanted the audience to experience the music without me planting any specific interpretation regarding its context.

We began the concert with three solo improvisations, and then Modus Operandi/Modus Vivendi. The performance of the piece was really outstanding. It's a technically difficult piece for the players, and it would have been a very fine performance even under far less weighted circumstances. When it was finished, I stood up and told the audience the background to the performance and we got a very touching and warm response from them, several of whom spoke to me afterwards about how moved they'd been once made aware of the background.

(Giving the audience the background to the performance)

During the concert we did not know whether my mother was still with us, and when we finished we found she was still there. We drove to the retirement home and she had passed on a couple of minutes before we got there, surrounded by all my siblings and extended family.

Six months on from these events, I'm happy that we did the right thing by my mother and by ourselves. By being able to share this momentous occasion with the audience via music and then verbally, I feel we honoured my mother's life through the medium with which we have chosen to express ourselves. This a very powerful feeling. Playing creative music in today's society is not easy, a lot of the time you're really up against it in terms of recognition of what you do and the difficulty of making a living from it. But it's at times like these that the true power of music, and of what we do becomes evident

Modus Operandi/Modus Vivendi - The Performance

After all that background and description, here then is the piece itself - a good recording of the actual performance on the day in question. Although it wasn't originally written for my mother, I know I'll always think of her every time I hear it. I hope you enjoy it, and it has some meaning for you, in whatever way that manifests itself.

In The Cracks

Over the years I've written a lot of music that straddles classical and jazz music, and that uses elements from both traditions. I've written  orchestral, chamber and solo pieces, some of which have improvisation and some not. This is music that is truly 'in the cracks',  mostly using instrumentation and ensemble formats from the classical tradition, but using rhythmic and harmonic devices that come from other areas, particularly jazz.

Recently I created an album on Bandcamp called 'In The Cracks', comprised of a collection of these pieces, and downloadable for free. In this post I've written short descriptions of each piece on the album, with a link to the tracks themselves. There are some great musicians on here, both classical (National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, Ioana Petcu-Colan, Conor Linehan etc.), and from the world of jazz, (Dave Liebman, John Abercrombie, John Ruocco etc.), and I hope you find something to enjoy. If anyone is interested in the compositions themselves, and would like the scores of any of these pieces, just drop me a line 

Synapsis (Concertino for Orchestra)

This is a sort of mini concerto for orchestra. Written in 2008, it features, at various stages, every section of the orchestra and really gives them something to play. It's a technically difficult piece, and the RTE NSO play it really well. The title came from a word a friend mentioned in an email, and I liked the fact that it sounded like a cross between synapse and synopsis. I imagined the idea of the orchestra being a large brain, and its synapses firing ideas from one side of the orchestra to the other. It has a lot of jazz influences, particularly in the rhythmic language, but also in the fact that the opening, fast 16th note phrase, (and much of the subsequent material), was taken from something Brad Mehldau played in a solo on a Michael Brecker album. Thanks Brad!

Music for String Quartet

A piece for probably the most classic of classical ensembles, the string quartet. When you're writing music for string quartet you've got one of the most outrageously accomplished musical traditions looking over your shoulder. But intimidating though it can be, it's also so satisfying to write for - so perfectly balanced and capable of so many different kind of expression. This continuous piece is in three sections - a spiky rhythmic motif, a lyrical slow section that moves between dark and light atmospheres, and a groove finale that descends into some chromatic madness.

Dave Liebman

Macrocosmos III

This is genuinely in the cracks, since it uses a symphony orchestra, a big band, and an improvising soloist - the great Dave Liebman. This is the 3rd movement of a large-scale piece for the Manhattan School of Music Jazz Philharmonic Orchestra (their combined symphony and jazz orchestras), and is in effect a concerto for soprano sax and orchestra. This is the largest group I've ever written for (more than 130 musicians), and it was both a pleasure to have such forces at my disposal, and a challenge to use them effectively.

Michael Buckley


Pipe Dreams

3rd section of a concerto for jazz flute and chamber orchestra, written for the great flautist and saxophonist Michael Buckley and the Irish Chamber Orchestra- it features both written and improvised passages for the flute. I added a drum set to the string orchestra for this piece, and also use bass guitar in this movement.

Concerto for Piano and Orchestra

Another daunting task for me - to write a piano concerto! In the classical tradition, as far as orchestra with soloist is concerned, there's probably no greater body of work than the piano concerto, and the greatest of the great - Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Bartok, Ravel, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff etc. - have written extraordinary and famous works in this idiom. So to take this on was a particularly challenging assignment for me. Although very familiar with many great piano concerti, I tried to use that tradition while at the same time bringing in elements from my own world, and influences from great pianists in that world, such as McCoy Tyner and Herbie Hancock. Conor Linehan is the wonderful soloist here with the RTE NSO, recorded live in Dublin

Sonata for Solo Violin

Writing for a solo string instrument is a completely different challenge to writing for a full orchestra. You have to balance and contrast the generally linear nature of the instrument, with chorded passages to fill out the texture. This is the finale of what is actually a very big work in five movements that takes almost thirty minutes to play. This movement features some serious fireworks for the violin and the great technical challenges are brilliantly surmounted by the violinist who commissioned this work, Ioana Petcu-Colan

Ensemble Avalon

A Little Blues

This piece is, as the name suggests, a 12-bar blues. It's completely written, but there are some very jazz elements in it, particularly in the violin and piano writing. Performed here by the great young Irish chamber group the Ensemble Avalon, I later went on to write some music for the pianist in this group, the very talented Michael McHale, and had already worked extensively with the violinist Iona Petcu-Colan (see the solo violin sonata above).

Groove Merchants

A funk piece for Wind Quintet? Why not! Commissioned and recorded by the outstanding UK wind quintet the Aurora Ensemble

Sonata for Solo Viola

Another piece for solo strings, this time the very underrated viola. This a four-movement piece which features a lot of rhythmic music and although the soloist for whom this was written - the notable and very accomplished Canadian violist Tanya Kalmanovitch - is a very fine improviser, and the music has many improvisatory flourishes, all of the the material is fully notated. This is the fourth movement, a groove piece.

John Ruocco

Music for Clarinet and String Trio

One of my earliest 'in the cracks' pieces, this time for string trio (the Hibernia String Trio), and clarinet, (on this performance the extraordinary virtuoso clarinettist John Ruocco who is equally at home in jazz or classical). This is the slow movement built on a kind of eastern modal melody that's later reharmonised. The clarinet is required to play both written passages and improvisation. John's improvisation on this is amazing

ARC - for 12 Saxophones

This is definitely the most unusual ensemble I've ever written for! This was commissioned by the European Saxophone Ensemble and they performed it all over Europe and recorded it. The challenge with this piece was not to make the ensemble sound like a giant accordion. The piece featured both written and improvised passages, and the instruments ranged from bass saxophone to sopranino, and rehearsals took place in a lovely small village in France - such a memorable experience for me for all kinds of reasons. I used the sound of the all the saxophonists fingering their instruments for the opening - a unique sonority.

John Abercrombie

Stillness/Movement (from Renaissance Man)

Music for string quartet and electric guitar - the first movement of 'Renaissance Man', a suite I wrote for jazz guitar trio and string quartet. This was written in memory of my father who had passed away thirty years earlier, and this movement was written based around a memory I had from my boyhood, walking in the forest at dawn with him, and the birds beginning to sing, quietly at first and then building to a cacophony of beautiful sound. In having this suite played I was privileged to have the guitar legend John Abercrombie play the guitar part - in this section he improvises in between the written passages for the strings

Bystanders (for solo piano) - dedicated to civilians caught up in war

(Michael McHale)

I've recently written a new piece for solo piano called 'Bystanders' that was premiered in the National Concert Hall in Dublin, performed by the great young classical pianist Michael McHale. The genesis of the piece came when I was was doing research about my Grandfather Joe Guilfoyle, and his part in the 1916 Rising, for the 'Shy-Going Boy' project. In reading more about that extraordinary event in Irish history, I was struck by the fact that so many civilians were killed in the rising, and that this fact is mentioned so little in the retelling of that week. More civilians were killed than Volunteers, or Policemen or British army members. And this lead me to think about how civilians always suffer the greatest casualties in war. Caught up in catastrophic situations not of their own making, they suffer horribly and if they survive they are traumatised and their lives are never the same again. The current disaster in Syria is a contemporary example of the tragedy for these innocent civilians. And so the piece became more than just being about 1916 specifically, and more encompassing of this situation wherever it occurs.

I rarely write programmatic music, and when I do I don't tend to be very specific in my thoughts, as in, 'this represents this, and this passage represents that'. I tend to to try and find an overall vibe or feeling that I want to represent and then write with that in mind. In this piece I'd say turbulence is the predominant characteristic. It has both quiet and loud passages, some slow moving parts and some frenetic activity. But even the slower, quieter passages have an uneasy feel to them. I felt this was apposite for such a subject which really has no bright side to it.....

The piece itself is very technically demanding and I was lucky to have such a brilliant pianist as Michael to play it. I first heard Michael play my music in a trio setting (classical trio, not jazz!) and was struck by how idiomatically he dealt with the rhythmic aspects of the music. Specifically by how good his time was - in a jazz musician sense. A lot of the music I write really loses power and meaning unless it's played absolutely in time, and the rubato approach taken by many classical musicians to any given piece of music doesn't really work with a lot of what I write. This piece is no exception, it demands a strong sense of pulse in most of the piece and all the technical fireworks only make sense if the rhythm is really secure. Michael demonstrates here again what great time he has, and I was delighted to have him agree to learn and premiere the piece.

As usual with my composed music, I'm accepting of any and all influences and I don't differentiate between jazz approaches and classical ones depending on what I'm writing. A classical influence can just as readily appear in a piece I'm writing for jazz musicians as a jazz influence can in a piece I'm writing for classical people. I just write what I hear at any given moment. In this piece there are lots of contemporary jazz piano traits used in the writing, as well as colours and textures from more typically contemporary classical language.

So this is the background to the piece,  but as always, music is better listened to than spoken about. So here it is.

Creative Artistic Tribute or Greatest Hits?

'A Tribute to.......', 'A Celebration of....', 'The Music of.....'

If you're a jazz listener you'll definitely have been at a concert dedicated to the work of a musician or composer, and if you're a jazz player you'll definitely have taken part in one. These kinds of projects are very popular both with performers and audiences, for various reasons. When you do a concert of the music associated with a well known figure, you're dealing with a known quantity - it's music that has usually already been acclaimed in the public arena.  So for an audience, to see a concert labeled as, (for example), 'The Music of Miles Davis', they already have an idea, at least in their own minds, of what to expect. If they are fans of Miles they'll possibly be more interested in going to see that concert than they might be if the concert was one comprised of original compositions by the leader or band members. By evoking the name of Miles, the leader is to some extent using the popularity and name recognition of Miles to encourage people to attend. And therein lies the problem - at least as far as the aesthetics of the music go.

If you are a creative musician, in the true spirit of what that means, in my opinion it's not really good enough to present an evening of the music of someone else, or music associated with someone else, and present it in such a way that a) you don't do anything other than try and copy the original, and b) imply in your publicity that you had something to do with the creation of that music. To use the artistic credentials of someone else to get gigs or present yourself as having some connection to the artist in question, simply by playing their music, is artistically bereft of merit. I don't mean to say that you shouldn't play anyone's music other than your own, but I do think on an artistic level, that if you're going to play someone's music, and evoke their name, the very least you can do is to create some personalisation of that music, in such a way that the audience coming to the concert will hear this music in a very different way to that of the original.

Jazz is a music in which the work done by musicians of previous generations laid the foundations for future musicians to create their music. By taking the music of somebody and slavishly trying to reproduce what's on the recordings, you are flying in the face of that tradition. Not that there's anything wrong with playing music that people love, for people, in a way they will recognise. But it must be seen for what it is - if you've put together a 'project' that tries to reproduce known music in the style in which it was recorded, then you are essentially leading a covers band, no different in its own way to 'Abba-esque', or 'Iron Maidens' or any one of a multitude of similar covers bands. You are, in a way, creating a live jukebox. Very often I've seen musicians refer to their 'Miles Tribute', or 'Miles Project' in a way that implies that they have some ownership of the music. Yet when they perform, it becomes clear that they're simply trying to reproduce what Miles did (impossible in itself), and there is not one iota of originality in the project at all.

I'm also wary of using a photograph of the musician who is the subject of the tribute as part of the publicity. Again, by using his or her photo, there is the suspicion of the leader of the project using this imagery to draw the crowds, almost as if the famous artist themselves were going to have some part in the performance. Of course if you play the music of someone else, it's impossible not to mention that fact in the publicity, but if your publicity comprises a large image of the composer/performer whose music you are playing, and contains no photo of you, then from my point of view this very problematic - at least as far as presenting the show as being something in which you have had a creative input. Using a photo of yourself alongside the dedicatee of the evening can also be problematic, as it can imply a certain collegiality between you and the artist that doesn't exist. There was a particularly shameless and notorious incident of this nature here in Ireland some years ago when a saxophonist who was touring a John Coltrane project, Photoshopped an image of himself and Trane so that it looked like they were on stage side by side. Toe-curlingly awful and an extreme example of the exploitation of an iconic image for personal gain and under a cloak of a 'tribute'

Of course learning repertoire is part of the process of learning to play this music, and all jazz musicians do it and need to do it. But there's a difference between learning a canon of work in order to develop as an artist, and presenting it by-rote as if you have some part in the creation of it. If you're serious about creating a body of work that both reflects the music of a great musician and contains some creative input from yourself you need to do something other than simply try and copy the music from the recordings.

(Dave Douglas)


The trumpeter Dave Douglas has always been very imaginative in this regard, producing homages to Wayne Shorter, Booker Little and Mary Lou Williams, while at the same time creating a body of work that is clearly his own. As an example of this approach, have a listen to the original recording of 'Mary's Idea'




And now listen to Douglas' interpretation of that - it both clearly shows the source material yet makes the a piece, that was written by somebody else in 1930, sound both personal and contemporary





When I was starting out as a player I began putting on concerts of the music of particular composers - Monk, Bill Evans, Wayne Shorter, at the wonderful Focus Theatre, and I admit that they were not the most original things I've ever done, and would be guilty of many of the sins outlined above. I was in my early 20s then, and hadn't really thought this stuff through. As I matured and became more experienced both in music and in life, I changed my approach to these kinds of projects completely. One of the first projects I did as a mature musician was a recording (and tour) of a project called 'Bird', dedicated to the music of Charlie Parker. My criteria for choosing the music was that it would be comprised of music either written by, dedicated to (by other composers), or made famous by Parker. Once I'd chosen the music I set about personalising the pieces in my own way. I looked at each piece and examined them structurally, rhythmically and harmonically to see if I could find new approaches to what was extremely familiar material. Here's an example - the Dizzy Gillespie classic 'Blue N' Boogie', played here by Miles Davis.






The re-arrangement I did of this classic blues pieces was very simple, I changed the groove from swing to a quasi-reggae feel, thereby preserving the triplet vibe of the piece while having a different groove. I wrote a bass line, slowed the tempo, added an intro, and changed the rhythm of the melody, stretching some of the phrases. The blues form, and key were preserved, but the atmosphere is very different to the original.

 

After one of the performances of this project an audience member approached me and said he was very disappointed by the concert because he was hoping to hear the music played the way it was on the records. While sympathising with him, I did make the point that nothing could better the way the music was played on the original recordings, and to try and reproduce it live would just produce something vastly inferior to the original. Nobody can play like Charlie Parker better than Charlie Parker....

Here's a live recording of another of the 'Bird' project tunes, (with Julian Arguelles, Rick Peckham and Tom Rainey), this time Parker's 'Ah-Leu-Cha', where I've used canonic devices in the melody, added a bass line and used a New Orleans groove. Again I was trying to be respectful to the source material while being personal.





I think ultimately the point is this - from an artistic point of view, are you using whatever great music you've chosen as a springboard to creativity of your own, or are you being a 'greatest hits' artist? We definitely need more of the former than the latter.

Interview - Then and Now

Just came across an interview that I did about 10 years ago. Sometimes on reading things you've said or written in the past, you wince because your views have changed so much. But this interview still holds together as far as a lot of what I think about composition and improvisation is concerned. Michael Dungan interviewed me for the Contemporary Music Centre - a resource for Irish contemporary music composition that houses a lot of my compositions - and did a very good job. Would that all interviewers were as thorough………

If you you're interested in reading my ramblings on various subjects, you can read it HERE

Working with James Joyce

This Saturday, (March 2nd - details below), I'll be premiering a new piece based on the writing of James Joyce. In doing it I'm very fortunate to have three of France's finest jazz musicians - Dominique Pifarely (violin), Stéphane Payen (alto), and Christophe Lavergne (drums), and the great Irish saxophonist Michael Buckley, playing with me. The mix of irish and French musicians isn't accidental, since the piece is called 'Counterparts - Joyce in Paris and Dublin', and is based around work he did when living in those two cities.

Music was very important to Joyce and his works are filled with descriptions of music, songs and singers. He himself was reputedly a fine singer, and he even competed in the Feis Ceol, (a venerable Irish amateur music competition, which is over a hundred years old and still going), entering the competition as a tenor. Joyce’s language is also very musical both in terms of rhythm and alliteration. The cities of Dublin and Paris are similarly very important to Joyce’s work – born and raised in Dublin but spending over twenty years of his adult life in Paris, both cities played crucial roles in his life and work.

The first impetus for writing the piece was my rereading of ‘Dubliners’, and being made aware again of Joyce’s musicality. The idea of Dublin and Paris came from my passing ‘Shakespeare and Company’  - the famous Parisian bookshop which had such an association with Joyce – on a recent trip to Paris. Since I’ve also had a close association with several French musicians in recent years, it was a short jump from the reading of Dubliners and thinking about Joyce’s life in the artistic hotbed that was Paris of the 1920s, to coming up with the idea of writing a piece for French and Irish musicians, based on writing undertaken by Joyce in both cities.

We also rehearsed the music in Paris and in Ireland  - before Christmas Michael and I went to Paris and rehearsed with Dominique, Stéphane and Christophe, and now we're at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, a beautiful artist's retreat here in Ireland, working on the piece and putting the finishing touches to the shape of it.

‘Counterparts’ is partly written and partly improvised, and uses audio taken from street sounds recorded in markets in Dublin and Paris - it's always fun and a different kind of challenge to work with audio. The piece also uses text from various works both as a generator for the music, and in spoken word format as an integral part of the piece. Sometimes I’ve used direct material from the music in Joyce’s work, including ‘Say Goodbye To Girlish Days’, Joyce’s only known musical composition. In other parts of the piece I’ve used ideas from the works he wrote in Paris or in Dublin as generators of musical ideas. 

In Counterparts I’ve tried to create a unique environment for improvising musicians to explore the work of Joyce through musical means, and through that to reveal to the listener the sheer musicality of Joyce’s prose.

For  anyone in Dublin this Saturday March 2nd is interested in seeing the finished result of this work, you can come to the National Concert Hall at 1.05pm where the piece will be premiered as part of the New Music Dublin festival. Full details here

And here is a video clip of some of the rehearsals from Paris last year.

The Boys In The Band

On the face of it the history of jazz seems to be a history of individualists and soloists. When people speak of the history of jazz they name names – Miles, Monk, Trane, Ellington, Armstrong etc On the other hand when people speak of the history of pop music or rock music they name bands –Rolling Stones, The Beatles, U2, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Nirvana etc But if you look a little deeper into rock music history, you can see that there are a lot of important individuals as well – Hendrix, Clapton, Bowie etc. And similarly, if you look at the history of jazz, you can not only see that it is a music that featured a lot of out-and-out bands, but also that a lot of the innovations of the great individualists would not have been possible if they hadn't created those innovations within the vehicle of a great band, specifically designed to support those same innovations.

Of course the concept of a band is one that is well recognised in jazz, but I'm not sure if it's given its due in terms of its importance in the development of the music. And, for musicians, I'm not sure that the possibilities for developing your music that having a real band affords you is fully appreciated.

At various points in its history, without the input of great bands, the history of the music would have been much different. Take two of the icons of jazz - Miles and Coltrane. Both Miles and Coltrane did influential work outside the ambit of their regular bands - Miles with Gil Evans for example, and Coltrane recording Giant Steps etc. But the vast majority of their most influential music was created from within vehicles that they consciously created in order to best express their overarching musical ideas - their bands.



The importance of bands can be seen if we compare another great trumpeter with Miles - Freddie Hubbard. Hubbard was undoubtedly one of the greatest trumpet players in the history of jazz - brilliantly virtuosic, swinging, a great improviser who played on many great and historical recordings. And at various times he fronted bands that also consisted of great players. But with Hubbard you never really get a sense of a concept that requires more than the virtuosity of the individual players to bring the music into being. You never get the feeling that Hubbard absolutely needed this drummer and that pianist and this saxophonist to achieve the vision of the overall music.

Hubbard's bands were vehicles for the playing of Freddie Hubbard. Yes his phenomenal playing required collaborators who were strong enough to stay the course with him, but his sidemen could easily be thought of as being interchangeable. Herbie, McCoy or Billy Childs - Elvin, Tony Williams, Al Foster - Hubbard played great with all of them, but you never get the sense that he absolutely needed any particular one of those pianists or drummers to realise his overall musical vision, he played great with all of them - but not differently. There is a monumental Hubbard trumpet legacy, but not a Hubbard band legacy. There is no concept of a Hubbard band approach to a piece of music in the way that there would be a Miles band approach.

And to compare Miles to Hubbard in this regard, while Miles was technically not the trumpeter that Hubbard was (although he was stronger technically than he's usually given credit for - such as his playing here which is killing!), he had a band concept that was second to none. The members of his bands, (at least up to the very latest years), were chosen not only for their great individual playing, but for their ability to realize the overall vision of the music that Miles had. As a result, it wasn't just the playing of Miles that was influential, in fact the music of Miles' bands, and the way they played that music was probably even more influential than his playing. It is impossible to imagine the current development of modern mainstream jazz without the input of the classic Miles bands of the 50s, 60s and 70s.


The same is true for Coltrane - his Classic Quartet was both a vehicle for his saxophone playing and a vehicle for the transmission of his overall musical concept. Again, like Miles, it is impossible to imagine the current development of mainstream contemporary jazz without the input of the Coltrane Quartet. Elvin and McCoy were themselves innovators and huge influences on players of their respective instruments, but the sound that the Coltrane Quartet made, and their approach to playing the music was at least as influential as the playing of the individuals within that quartet.

The same could be said for the Bill Evans Trio and the Ornette Coleman Quartet - both revealed a new way of playing in a group, of interacting, of creating music that was greater than the sum of its parts. Each group had a clear identity that was more than the identity of any one individual player. The same could be said for groups from both before this period (The Basie and Ellington bands) and after (Weather Report, Jarrett's American quartet, Dave Holland's quintet, Steve Coleman's Five Elements) and the band tradition continues into the present day with groups such as Jason Moran's Bandwagon, The Bad Plus, Tim Berne's Big Satan etc. All of these groups have a sound that is unique to the band, rather than being a showcase for any one member of the band.


There are different kinds of bands in jazz, (leaving aside the soloist with pick-up rhythm section genre, which is not really a band at all– it’s more like a marriage of convenience), but usually they fall into one of three categories

A collective

An out-and-out dictatorship

A benevolent dictatorship















The Collective

In the first example – the collective - there is no leader. Each member of the band has, (in theory anyway), an equal input into the material and the approach. A contemporary example of this would be the Bad Plus or James Farm. The advantage of this way of working is that, assuming everyone has a broadly similar aesthetic regarding the music, a group of people can shape the music collectively and through discussion and teamwork develop music that is unique to that collective.

The disadvantage can be that it becomes music by committee, with everything ending up in the middle because nobody wants to make a decision, or every decision becomes a tortuous thing with endless discussions over tempos, tune order, solo order and everyone having an opinion on everything. In my experience this is by far the most common format for young bands coming out of jazz schools – there is no leader per se, and the music often lacks a unifying identity or directional thrust. In order for a collective to work you need people who a) believe in each other completely, and b) are prepared to lead if necessary and be lead if necessary.


The Out-and-Out Dictator

The out-and-out dictatorship model is well known in jazz and harks back to the ‘bandleader as star’ idea. In this model the band is principally formed around the leader and it’s clear that the leader of the band is supposed to be the cynosure of all eyes. These bands are primarily a vehicle for the playing of the leader and even though others may have opportunities to solo and play extensively, their input is required primarily to support the leader and not to detract attention away from him or her. There are so many examples of this in the music, it’s hard to know where to start in giving examples. But I think a good example would be Oscar Peterson’s various trios. Even the greatest of them, the trio that featured Ray Brown and Ed Thigpen, is formed around Oscar’s playing and though Brown and Thigpen get lots of solo space the music clearly revolves around Oscar and inevitably everything leads back to him. I would think of Keith Jarrett’s Standards Trio as being in the same mold – great as his sidemen are, and they make such a contribution to the group sound, ultimately the trio is all about Keith. I think he went from the benevolent dictatorship (see below) of his 1970s quartets, to the out-and-out dictatorship model of his current trio.

These bands can be great or terrible, everything depends on the leader, his or her leadership abilities and how good the sidemen are. Believe it or not, some leaders were known for deliberately hiring sidemen who were not very strong in order to make themselves look even better. That kind of thinking is all about the star system and not about the music. Having said that, much great music was played by bands in which the music was really all about one guy – Errol Garner for example, and the aforementioned Jarrett trio would be another.


The Benevolent Dictatorship

In this model the bandleader doesn’t just hire people to make him or her sound good, the sidemen are hired to do justice to the overall musical vision of the bandleader and are hired for their ability to be able to understand and enhance the bandleader’s vision. In this type of group the bandleader encourages the sidemen to be themselves and allows them the freedom within the music to do what they do.

The ultimate model of this type of bandleader is of course Miles. His ability to pick the right guys for his music over a period of more than 30 years was extraordinary. Although he was a guy who was very conscious of his image and his status in the jazz community, he was never happy to simply feature himself in his bands, he always wanted to play the MUSIC he thought should be presented to the listeners. And that meant getting the right saxophonist, the right pianist, bassist and drummer. He would choose the guys he wanted and then he would give them the freedom to develop the music – he would hire them for what they could do and then let them do it. He famously gave almost no verbal instructions, he would just allow the players to do what they felt was right in the moment.

It wasn’t a democracy – Miles chose the tune order on a gig, nearly always took the first solo and would think nothing of cutting off a player if he felt the music should finish or didn’t like what he was hearing. In all his bands it was very clear who was the leader, but at the same time the players in the band really got to express themselves because of Miles’ overarching concern about his music rather than merely his trumpet playing.

Coltrane’s Quartet was similar – Trane hired McCoy, Elvin and Jimmy Garrison and then gave them the freedom to do what they do. Again he was concerned about the music rather than just his own playing. He was clearly the leader, but the sidemen were hired because of what they could contribute to Coltrane’s musical vision, not because they simply made Trane sound good as a player, or were bit part players to his featuring act. Again, Coltrane was clearly the leader and they played only his compositions but he hired these guys for their ability to realize his musical concept, not just to make him sound good. A modern version of this type of band would be Wayne Shorter’s great quartet of recent years – they definitely play with a band concept, but Wayne is also clearly the leader. Here they are playing a phenomenal version of Wayne’s ‘Joy Rider’




Of the various models I’m probably fondest of the benevolent dictator mode, since it gives such a great scope to create ensemble music as a single entity, but at the same time it can accommodate the vision of one person. When I’m in bandleader mode myself, this is definitely the route I take – I get the guys who can best realize the ideas I have for the music, and then I let them get on with it, with minimum interference from myself. If you pick your guys well you can usually get results that are even beyond your expectations and the music can go places that you didn’t anticipate – true serendipity.

Having said that, I’ve also had fun in a few collective situations, including recently in a band called Métier, where we had the good fortune to be funded by our local town council as Ensemble in Residence and could devote time to rehearse and develop the music. This band was really fun to work with and we played many good concerts, and made one album that I’m very fond of. Here’s a track from that – a piece I wrote called ‘Cascade’



And while I wouldn’t recommend going the route of complete dictator to anyone contemplating putting a band together, it can be educational for a young musician to get into the band of one of these older dictator types - providing they’re really good musicians of course – and be told what to do by a more experienced musician for a while. You can learn a lot this way, so sometimes even these out-and-out dictator type bands can be good.

But whatever mode you choose, I do think it’s very important for people to think in terms of bands rather than of just being interested in being an individual soloist. By developing a band you’re not just developing yourself, you’re also developing something that goes beyond your individual playing and gets into the whole area of developing a musical concept. Think collective identity rather than individual showcasing, think music rather than instrument. See the big picture – develop a band!

Noel Kelehan

(Left to right - Jim Doherty, Martin Walsh, John Wadham, Louis Stewart, Noel Kelehan - late 1960s)

It's been a grim few months for jazz recently, with the departure of such giants as Bob Brookmeyer, Paul Motian, and Sam Rivers. Here in Ireland, we've just had a serious loss of our own with the passing of the pianist, arranger, conductor and composer Noel Kelehan.

Any non-Irish readers of this blog, and indeed possibly even some Irish readers, may not know who Noel Kelehan was. That's because, outside Ireland he was only well-known in the commercial music world, having the distinction of conducting more Eurovision Song Contest winners than anybody else in the history of the competition. He was also well-known as an arranger, and wrote orchestral arrangements for many commercial recordings, including U2's “Unforgettable Fire” album. In Ireland, he was very well-known, but again in the world of television and radio - as an arranger and MD of some of Ireland's best known TV shows. But though I knew Noel's work as an arranger and conductor, my relationship with him and admiration of him was related to his position as one of the finest jazz musicians this country has ever produced.

Noel was the staff arranger for RTE, the national radio and television company in Ireland, and having to produce arrangements to order for anyone, (mostly singers, both good and terrible), who might come within the orbit of RTE, kept him predictably busy. His busyness with his arranging day job, and his success and fame in the commercial music world, kept him from working as much as he should have, and would love to have done, in the jazz world. And it's been interesting reading all the tributes that have been paid to him recently here in Ireland, and how his jazz work usually just gets an honourable mention.

But jazz was his first love, and he was one of the first jazz musicians in Ireland to reach the kind of playing standard that would allow him to comfortably perform with people of the calibre of of Zoot Sims, Kenny Wheeler, and Art Farmer. To those of us on the Irish jazz scene, Noel was much more than solely a TV arranger, he was a great hard bop swinging pianist, an important bandleader, and someone from whom everyone of my generation learned a huge amount.

When I started playing on the Irish jazz scene over 30 years ago, there were very few players on the scene, and certainly very few really good players. But at least there were some players around the scene to look up to and learn from. And Noel was one of these. But when he and a few others began playing in Dublin at the end of the 1950s, they really had to invent the entire scene for themselves. Without pioneers such as Noel - who somehow in the conservative Ireland of the time, recognised the value of, and fell in love with jazz - the great strides that have been made in the music in this country over the past three decades would never have happened. I can't imagine what it must have been like to try and learn to play this difficult and virtually unknown music in the Ireland of those days, with no access to material, no access to a scene, no possibilities of hearing great players on regular basis, and probably no appreciation by the public of the music that they were practising like maniacs to be able to play.

















(The Jazz Heralds, 1960)

But somehow they managed to figure stuff out by listening and copying as best they could, by organising sessions, and by doing all the things that players in a small, and at that time, isolated city, far from the jazz mainstream, had to do in order to learn the music. Most were never able to align their abilities with their aspirations, but Noel was one the exceptions that prove the rule. He was classically trained as a pianist, but self-taught as a composer, arranger and jazz pianist. I remember him telling me about hearing a George Shearing recording in the 50s when he was a teenager, and being blown away by it and trying to transcribe Shearing's solo from an EP - a process that involved much leaping up and down from the piano, and much replacing the needle, something that was wearing for the recording which evenutally got completely worn out. Noel told me he destroyed three copies of the recording before he was able to get what he wanted!

In 1963 he went to New York for a year but, thankfully for us, he returned a year later bringing with him even more knowledge about how the music should be played and the standard that needed to be aspired to, and he also became immediately involved in the commercial music world, writing for TV and radio. Jazz and commercial music were much more closely entwined in those days – jazz training would prepare you for work in the commercial world in a way that would be impossible now, so far have the two worlds diverged. Noel played jazz at every opportunity, organising big bands for which he wrote adventurous charts, writing pieces that involved string quartets and chamber groups playing alongside jazz musicians, playing in the bands of others and accompanying visiting international artists.

























(left to right - Keith Donald, Noel, Mike Nolan, John Wadham, Johnny Griffin, Ronnie Matthews, Frank Hess)

He also lead several small groups, one of which, The Noel Kelehan Quintet, became hugely influential on me around the time I got really serious about jazz in the late 70s. Noel’s quintet played in a hotel every Sunday night for over two years, and going to see them was like a pilgrimage for me. The music was hard bop and post hard bop (music by Horace Silver, Herbie Hancock, Miles etc. As well as Noel’s originals), and the band were great, with the rhythm section in particular, (which featured another international standard musician, the drummer John Wadham) being outstanding. This was for me the first chance to hear jazz being played live, week after week, at a very high standard, and it made a huge impression on me.

I don’t have any recordings of those gigs (unfortunately.....), but here is a trio version of "Gone With The Wind' recorded by me around that time, on one of the first recording Walkmans (remember those!?) which shows how Noel sounded in those days. On this gig he was battling with a cottage piano (even smaller than a normal upright), and playing in a bar, complete with casual conversations going on in the background. The music is compressed by the Walkman’s built-in mic, and the version you’ll be hearing has been transferred three times – but despite all this, you can still hear what a great swinging pianist Noel was, with a tremendous vocabulary. There are shades of Red Garland, Oscar Peterson and Bill Evans in there, but I would recognise Noel’s playing anywhere.......... He is accompanied by two stalwarts of the Irish scene of those days, the bassist Jimmy McKay and the drummer Peter Ainscough.

Gone With The Wind

It was around this time that I first began playing with Noel, and it was an education. It was an education trying to keep up with him. He was a very busy player – lots of notes and lots of chord substitutions, which would appear out of nowhere. Speaking as a bassist, unless you really paid attention, he could leave you for dead in a split second. But with Noel it wasn’t just teaching by musical example, he was also one of the few players of that era who would actually sit down and show you stuff if you asked him. Some of the other players took a delight in playing tunes you didn’t know and making you look foolish, but Noel never did anything malicious. He was always positive and supportive to me despite being light years ahead of me in knowledge and experience.

This musical and personal generosity was something he was renowned for, both in jazz and in his dealings with everyone. Here’s an example of it, and an hilarious moment of Irish musical history. The event is a ‘talent’ competition from 1961, in which the talent was so bad that the engineer in the studio decided to capture it for posterity. Noel was leading the backing trio, and in this track has to deal with the most incredible rendition of a maudlin Irish ballad in which ‘Mrs. Daly’ wanders through numerous keys, with the band in hot pursuit. It’s hilarious, but notice both how brilliant Noel is in following her harmonic trail, and how generous he is to the singer, trying to accompany and help her out as best he can.

Doonaree

And the generosity he displayed here is a recurring theme whenever musicians discuss Noel. When I was starting out trying to do some writing, Noel gave me several invaluable arranging lessons for which he refused to take any payment, a typical gesture on his part. And I also remember when I got my first orchestral music commission, the first thing I did was call Noel, plaintively asking for help. I’d taken the commission without having any experience of writing for an orchestra, and the euphoria having worn off, was faced with the reality of my situation. Noel, as always, helped enormously and I can still remember him saying “Number 1, don’t panic, and number 2, get a copy of ‘Orchestration’, by Gordon Jacob” - both great pieces of advice, the second of which undoubtedly saved my bacon, and I’ve used and recommended the Jacob book ever since.

Noel was a great musician, a pioneer for jazz in Ireland, a musical and personal example to younger musicians and when he became ill a few years ago it was a real blow to the scene here to have one of its real heavyweights sidelined like this. About a year ago he came to a gig I was playing with my group Trilogue – I caught sight of him out of the corner of my eye and felt the usual mixture of delight and nervousness that his presence at any of my gigs always brought on. We chatted afterwards and he was his usual generous and witty self, complimenting Izumi and Sarah and saying how much he enjoyed the music. As far as I know, it was the last gig he went to and I feel both sad about that, and privileged............

I remember seeing Noel play with Art Farmer and play an exquisite solo on ‘Blame It On My Youth’. At the end of the piece Art took the microphone and said ‘As it turned out, that tune featured Noel Kelehan on piano’, a generous and honest acknowledgement of a great musician by a great musician.

Here is Noel, as most of us here will remember him, burning through ‘This I Dig of You’ with Michael Buckley, Michael Coady on bass, and Peter Ainscough on drums. Michael’s solo is pretty savage too.... Yeah guys!

This I Dig Of You





'Hands', Concerto for Electric Guitar and Orchestra - Premiere and Video Diary

Rick Peckham


Next week sees the culmination of a year’s work – the premiere of ’Hands’ my new concerto for electric guitar and orchestra which will be performed by the RTE National Symphony Orchestra with the great American guitarist Rick Peckham This will be the fifth piece I’ve written for symphony orchestra and the third concerto, (the other two were for violin and piano respectively), and hopefully I’m getting better at it!

I remember the first piece I wrote for the orchestra in 1994 and the incredibly gauche orchestration gaffes I made (what, string players need to have bowings written in!?) and how I sat up all night after the first rehearsal adding in hundreds of dynamic markings and slurs and bowings in an effort to a) not be as humiliated as I was the day before, and b) to get closer to what I was hearing in my head. I’ve never had any formal training in orchestral writing or composition and I’ve learned on the job, in the same way as I did in the jazz world. But discovering things by trial and error is often a deeper experience than having someone show you something – the act of discovery seems to deepen the experience, one is actively learning rather than passively receiving. Having said that I wouldn’t have minded receiving some basic orchestration lessons and being spared the agony of that first orchestral rehearsal!

In music, (by necessity rather than desire), I’ve always been an autodidact and have had to figure out different ways to get to where I wanted to go in terms of musical knowledge, technique etc. In the case of orchestral music, courtesy of my father who raised us all in an environment of great music, I am very familiar with the classical tradition and how an orchestra should sound, but I had no idea how to achieve those sounds. So I read some orchestration books, including the wonderful ’Orchestral Technique’, by Gordon Jacob, a crash course in orchestration in less than 100 pages recommended to me by Noel Kelehan, a great Irish jazz pianist and arranger, in response to my cry for help upon receiving my first orchestral commission and realising that if I was to keep the money I’d actually have to write some orchestral music...... I also checked out some orchestral scores, studying them closely while listening to the recordings, and making notes in a little book in which I would reference things that particularly caught my ear, and note the place they occurred in the score so that I could access this information later.

Over the years my orchestral writing has become more confident and competent and I don’t worry so much about orchestration any more, but relish the opportunity to work with that Rolls Royce of the musical world - the symphony orchestra. On setting out to write this new piece I decided to keep a series of video diaries of the process and make them available to anyone who might be interested.

Here is the first episode in which I describe my way of working and my plans (and hopes) for the piece



My first step of the actual writing of the piece took place in March last at the beautiful Tyrone Guthrie Centre, an artist’s retreat in Ireland where I was able to work for a week, undisturbed by everyday life. As you can see from this episode of the video diary, I met with both success and difficulties...........

One skill I've never aquired is conducting, and even if I had, I don’t think I would have got it to the level of being able to conduct a symphony orchestra. And of course the conductor is such a vital part of the interpretation of a symphonic piece and speaking as a composer, a conductor can make or break you when it comes to having your orchestral piece performed. With my pieces, rhythm and feel are vitally important, and getting 90 musicians to play together with a particular rhythmic feel, or even cohesiveness, are among the hardest things to achieve with an orchestra. To have any chance, you definitely need the right guy on the conductor’s podium.

So I was lucky to have the wonderful Scott Stroman to conduct the piece. Scott is adept in both jazz and classical idioms and is vastly experienced as both a conductor and composer. I know Scott very well too, so I was able to look forward to the performance of the piece without the necessity of that first meeting with an unknown conductor where you find out if the he (or she) ‘gets’ what you’re trying to do. In June I was working with Scott in London and took the opportunity to meet him and have a chat about the piece.

Later in the same month, I did an interview with the Contemporary Music Centre in Dublin and talked in a more general way about composition. You can see the interview here

In August I was in Boston and met the soloist Rick Peckham at his home, and we talked pedals and general guitaristic stuff.

As the final interview in the series, I met some of the orchestral players who would be playing the piece. Oftentimes in classical composition, the orchestra is seen by the composers as some kind of impersonal machine whose job it is to reproduce what the composer hears, but of course an orchestra is comprised of individuals too and it makes sense to talk to them about what they like or don’t like when playing new music. We had a really great chat and I hope we can do it again soon.

The piece itself comes in at around 20 minutes, is in three movements, and has an improvised cadenza that will connect the first and second movements, as well as some spaces for improvisation for the guitar in the first movement. I know Rick's been experimenting with different sounds for the piece, so I'm really looking forward to hear what he comes up with.

We have two performances of it next week - an incredible luxury - a kind of workshop/preview on Tuesday (17th) at lunchtime at the National Concert Hall in Dublin and the official world premiere on the following Friday as part of the full symphony concert, alongside music by John Adams and Shostakovitch - no pressure then!

Here's the final segment of the video diary - I hope some of you who are in Dublin can make it to one of the performances

Listening Again (2) - Mahavishnu Orchestra - Birds of Fire

I have included several sound clips from the subject of this post - all are very short and are intended as a taster for the music on the album, and to illustrate various points. If you're interested in this music please go and buy the album, support the musicians and enjoy its full sonic beauty - don't settle for some crappy compressed version on Youtube!

I can remember where I was when I first heard ‘Birds of Fire’ – I was fourteen years old, and I was in a friend’s house, in the kitchen (where they had a record player for some now unfathomable reason). We were all prog-rock guys – King Crimson, Gentle Giant etc. and considered ourselves to be very sophisticated (no Black Sabbath for us!) in the superior way that only teenage boys can. I had been raised on classical and jazz music and had been exposed to pop music for the first time only the year before (seriously!). I had a brief flirtation with pop music, an even briefer one with Heavy Metal and then discovered King Crimson, which probably appealed subconsciously to my need for and experience of listening to structurally more complex music. And subconscious rather than conscious would have been an accurate description of my musical knowledge or expertise at that time.

So, back to my friend’s kitchen - he produced the album, (which had a very satisfyingly intriguing cover featuring soaring birds), put the record on the turntable, lowered the needle and…….. And basically my musical life changed from the moment I first heard the gong being struck and shimmering through some kind of phaser effect, followed by a dense and dark arpeggiated guitar figure, in what is one of the most dramatic opening moments of any album in my opinion. I sat there transfixed and almost shocked – I really had never heard anything like this. In retrospect I realize that I had in fact heard some of the elements of this music in other contexts – both classical and jazz – but at the time it just sounded like music coming from another planet.



And to cut a long story short, it set me off on a journey that returned me to jazz, and planted the seed of being a jazz musician inside me.

What’s interesting to me, almost forty years later, is that the music on ‘Birds of Fire’ not only has a function in my own personal history, but objectively, listening to it now, it more than stands up to the scrutiny of the decades. It’s still great music, on any level, and looking at it now, knowing what I know now and having the experiences I’ve had in the intervening years since I first heard it, I realize what a unique musical document it is – something that had never been done before, and has never really been done again – even by the protagonists involved in my opinion.



The Mahavishnu Orchestra was an interesting band for many reasons, one of which is the fact that it was probably the most multi-national major group in the history of jazz. There was only one American in it (Jerry Goodman), a Czech (Jan Hammer), a Panamanian (Billy Cobham), an Englishman (McLaughlin), and an Irish man – the bassist Rick Laird - someone we were very proud of around here because he came from my home town of Dun Laoghaire. Laird had left Dublin many years before Mahavishnu and gone to Australia and later London where he became the house bassist in Ronnie Scott’s club and accompanied an endless stream of American jazz legends including Rollins, Wes Montgomery, Ben Webster, Clark Terry etc etc. This was where McLaughlin, (who went to New York at the behest of Tony Williams who wanted him for the seminal ‘Lifetime’ band) had met Laird. London had an amazing scene in those days with future giants such as John Surman, John Taylor and Dave Holland all playing on the scene.

All of the Mahavishnu group had a jazz pedigree with the exception of Goodman who came from more of a rock background. Mclaughlin had played with Miles and Williams, Jan Hammer with Sarah Vaughan and Elvin Jones, Billy Cobham with Miles and Horace Silver, and Laird with just about everyone (He's almost certainly the only bassist to have played with both Wes Montgomery and John McLaughlin). Yet the music they produced was not a ‘jazz’ sound. This is the early 70s, post-Bitches Brew, post-Lifetime, all the instruments except the drums are electric, there are no swing feel pieces and odd metres abound. Both McLaughlin and Cobham played with Miles (together on Jack Johnson) and were among the Miles diaspora who created the genre that is now known as Fusion, but was known then as Jazz-Rock. And apart from Goodman, McLaughlin had connections with the rock scene, jamming with Jimi Hendrix, and playing in the same London rock/blues scene that produced Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page.

The group had been around for a while and ‘Birds of Fire’ was its second album. The first, ‘The Inner Mounting Flame’ caused a bit of a sensation on its release, its combination of instrumental virtuosity, complex time signatures, electric instruments and rock energy proved hugely popular and the band became an overnight sensation, selling a phenomenal amount of albums for an instrumental group. This album has always had its advocates as THE Mavishnu album, but for me it’s more like a prototype for what was to come rather than a definitive statement. I don’t think the compositions are as interesting or the sound as developed as on ‘Birds of Fire’ and I think at times it lapses into the solo-histrionics-over-static-rhythm-section-groove that was to so blight the Jazz-Rock movement as a whole, and which was to even become apparent on the Mahavishnu’s later live album between ‘Nothingness and Eternity’ - a blitzkrieg of duelling soloists and impossible tempos delivered with great virtuosity to an audibly ecstatic audience in Central Park. But between the bookends of these two albums the band delivered what was to be a seminal recording, both vastly influential on musicians of my generation and beyond, and also featuring music that has more than stood the test of time.




So what’s so special about this recording? It’s a combination of things - first of all there’s a cohesiveness about the entire album, it feels like something that was conceived as a whole rather than as a series of tracks that were put together to make an album. In the manner of ‘A Love Supreme’, ‘Kind of Blue’ and ‘Blues and The Abstract Truth’, a consistent atmosphere hovers over the whole album – the music feels all of a piece and not episodic in any way. It’s a much better recorded album than the previous one and this helps to create the feeling of an over-arching musical intelligence at work.

Then there is the sound of the music, much of which is due to the unusual instrumentation. Guitar, violin and keyboards combine together to give the music a lightness that is unexpected considering the gnarliness, chromaticism, and dense rhythmic tangle of much of the music. Jan Hammer featured the Moog extensively in the music, and these early monophonic synths didn’t have a a very wide sonic range, so Hammer favours the higher register which blends very well with the electric violin and guitar. The sonic spectrum of the front line instruments favours the upper register and they
create so homogenous a sound that sometimes it’s hard to tell who’s soloing where........



At the time I first listened to this music I was just blown away by it in its entirety, and it sounded to me like something that had come out of nowhere. But looking at it from many years later, and with thousands of musician’s flying hours under my belt, I can see the many influences that are in this music. The influence of Hendrix and the electric guitar culture of the 60s is easy to discern, what’s perhaps not so immediately apparent is the influence of Coltrane of the ‘Love Supreme’ period – but it’s there in McLaughlin’s playing – listen to the Coltrane-like way he soars chromatically over the shifting odd metre groove of the title track.




Another interesting thing to my ears now, having spent a lot of time over the past 20 years studying the rhythmic aspects of South Indian music, is just how much Carnatic music influenced McLaughlin’s writing in this period. Later of course he went on to form Shakti, (and presage the jazz meets world music movement by about twenty years), but he made a serious study of the Veena and this clearly be heard both in the sound of some of the melodies he composed and in the rhythmic structures of the odd metres he used which are clearly related to the tala structures of Carnatic music, while the structure of the melody, in a typical McLaughlin-ism, is clearly related to both Indian music and the blues



But I think McLaughlin not only used Indian music in his own writing, he very probably influenced other members of the group in this respect. On ‘One Word’ - which Cobham famously opens with a snare drum roll that has left generations of drummers in open mouthed disbelief – the drum groove that Cobham uses has no real precedent in jazz, yet is very common in Mridangam grooves of South India. Here is a percussion group from South India



And here is Cobham on ‘One Word’



Was Cobham checking out Indian percussion at the behest of McLaughlin? It certainly sounds like it!

But not all the pieces were either lightning fast, or odd metre workouts, the group could also get in the pocket with the best of them - ‘Miles Ahead’ is almost Headhunter-esque



But Headhunters would never have done anything as radical with this groove as Cobham and McLaughlin do later in the piece



Or how about this haunting Moog solo on ‘Sanctuary’, played over the shifting metre of the rhythm section, evoking an atmosphere worthy of the quieter passages of ‘The Rite of Spring’..............



There is just so much great music on this album – so many different ideas and approaches yet all contained within a very unique and immediately identifiable sound. The virtuosity of the players, even at a distance of forty years, is amazing (has there ever been a greater guitar right hand technique in jazz than McLaughlin’s? How can he play at that speed, with such rhythmic accuracy yet never slur anything!?), yet the virtuosity is put at the service of the music and is never subservient to it. Unfortunately the success of the Mahavishnu unleashed a slew of poor imitations all vying with each other to be the fastest, loudest highest.......

And unfortunately the Mahavishnu itself imploded not long afterwards, with the other members of the band wanting a share of the composing duties (McLaughlin had previously been the sole composer)– which wasn’t a great idea as evidenced by the release years later of ‘The Lost Trident Sessions’ which featured compositions by Hammer, Laird and Goodman, none of which rises to the heights of the earlier McLaughlin compositions. Internal disagreements ensured the the disintegration of the band, but by the time they split up they had already fallen from the heights of ‘Birds of Fire’ and had allowed their virtuosity to take precedent over the other elements of their music. But for a while their flame really did burn brightly, inventing a whole genre, influencing and inspiring countless musicians and creating one of the greatest albums of the modern jazz era.

Here they are in their prime playing in London in 1972 – chops and ideas to go, and notice the quote of the 'Jack Johnson' riff, which McLaughlin almost certainly wrote despite Miles being credited with it.............