Ronan Guilfoyle: Blog

So we set off from Cork this morning and thanks to the new motorway made good time to Dublin – 3 and a half hours, I remember, not that long ago, when it took about 5 hours to get from Cork to Dublin – happy days....... More music chat on the way, more sorting out of the world’s musical problems, more rhythm practice – all in a day’s work for the contemporary travelling band. Tonight we played in the Mermaid Arts Centre in Bray, a place I have a long history with and at which I have played many great gigs – including one with this band on our last tour. The people in the Mermaid are great, and have a very enlightened policy on jazz. I also like the sound on stage very much, it has a clarity to it that suits me very well, and suits this band in particular. We had a very good gig tonight – very different to last night, probably because of the very different sound – no smothering carpet to deal with, instead we had a crisp clear sound in which [...]

It’s a rare luxury to be able to play and stay in the same place. Tonight we played for the Triskel Arts Centre, but not at the Triskel Arts Centre. They’re having a new theatre built at the moment and are holding their concerts in Jury’s Hotel. We were also put up by them in the hotel – in fact we’ve been here since yesterday – another luxury! It’s so great to stay two nights in the same place when you’re on the road, it’s like a holiday. And this is a really nice hotel too, very comfortable and with 4 Star standards. But though it’s like a holiday to stay two nights here, it’s also not like a holiday in that I spent a lot of the day in the room taking care of various business stuff. The internet is great in some ways (for example being able to post this blog...........) but in other ways it’s a drag since your work follows you around. Anyway, I took a break from that at lunchtime had lunch in a very nice French patisserie, [...]

Today was mostly about food - at least the beginning and the end of it. It started off badly enough, for me anyway, with one of those dire 'cooked breakfast' things at Jury's Inn in Limerick. God knows the traditional Irish breakfast is not exactly a healthy option at the best of times, but the places where you can order your bacon/sausage/egg etc and then it's cooked for you, are fast disappearing. Instead the stuff is cooked in vast batches and left to sweat in its own juices and harden under lights, so that you're left with bacon that's as hard as a bullet and nearly cold, eggs that are overdone and tasteless sausages, everything covered with a layer of grease. Grim. I like an occasional Irish Breakfast - I never eat it at home - while on the road in Ireland,  but really I need to be more careful about where I order it.......... And then it was off to UCC in Cork for a workshop - boosted by the discovery of a very decent coffee and flapjack in a local Centra! An hour and a half [...]

So, the day began with a hurried trip for me to the passport office in central Dublin - I'm going to Germany on Monday and this was the only time I could collect it. Still took 45 minutes in the office due to 'industrial action' by the staff.......... Arrived back in Dun Laoghaire and then collected the guys at the hotel, then off to the school to do our workshop. We decided to do it as an open rehearsal kind of thing, where we ran through the stuff we're going to play (an Ornette tune, a Monk tune, one of mine, one of Julian's, one of Jim's) and tried them out in front of the students. I've seen those kind of open rehearsals before (saw Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers - the Blanchard/Toussaint/Mulgrew edition - do it in the same room in 1986!) and always found them interesting as an observer - hopefully the students found it to be interesting. It was good to play again after three years! We took questions too of course . Then it was a quick sandwich and off to Limerick. There’s [...]

And so it begins........... It's been a while since we played together. This is the third tour by the band, and I'm confident it'll be as much fun as ever. This is a wonderful group to play with, very open and loose. I think Jim, Julian and I have quite different musical personalities, at least in the details of how we play - but we have a shared love of spontaneity and musical exploration. And I think it's this combination of a shared broad philosophy allied to a difference in approach that makes the trio so creative.
Usually we only have 4 or 5 actual tunes to play and we often don't even discuss what order to play them in, or even if we'll play any of them - walking on the stage knowing anything is possible is very liberating.
So Jim and Julian arrived today and we had a pre-tour dinner, a lot of catching up and a typical musician's discussion of what's going on, what we'd like to see going on and what we hate to see going on! I'm slightly older than the other two but we're broadly [...]