The boys are back in town: Irish jazz trio with the international reputation

The Guilfoyle-Nielsen Trio are back where they started 30 years ago, in a room barely big enough to swing a guitar, poring over charts of fiendishly difficult music. And having great craic doing it.

Back in the late 1980s, bassist Ronan Guilfoyle, drummer Conor Guilfoyle and guitarist Mike Nielsen locked themselves away in a tiny basement room of Newpark Music Centre and emerged two years later with what was essentially a new way of playing jazz.

It’s not that easy to make an original contribution to what is still essentially an American art form, and certainly not if you’re three guys from Ireland, but their unique combination of rhythmic complexity, harmonic intrepidity and raw, ear-shredding volume won them admirers among forward-thinking musicians around the world in the 1990s.

Even if they have yet to receive the recognition they deserve in their home town, there are still adventurous young musicians in most other cities in the world listening to their recordings and studying their books. In the rarefied world of “odd meter” jazz, these guys from Dún Laoghaire are the gold standard.

“Thirty years ago next year,” says Conor Guilfoyle when I ask him when it all started.

“Jaysus,” intone Ronan Guilfoyle and Mike Nielsen together, as if realising it for the first time. “But it’s been amazing how quickly we got into our old way of working – and our old way of slagging each other off,” says Ronan. “This band may be in the virtuoso class concerning rhythm, but our slagging is of Olympian proportions too.”

No tantrums

This time, the enclosed space is not the dungeon in Newpark but Conor’s bright, Swedish-looking drum studio in the foothills of the Wicklow mountains. Ahead of the band’s “reunion” concert tonight at Whelan’s in Dublin, that exhilarating combination of technical precision and raw energy is still there.

Not that the trio ever really split up. For all the slagging, there are no tales of tantrums or broken TVs, no Yoko Ono moments or fist fights on stage. After 10 years of intense activity, during which they accompanied some of the leading figures in contemporary jazz – including Joe Lovano, Kenny Wheeler, Larry Coryell, and particularly ex-Miles Davis saxophonist Dave Liebman – they say they just got busy with other things.

Conor, the younger of the brothers, is perhaps the most respected teacher of the drums in Ireland and the author of two books on the subject; his own music projects, such as Dig Dis and Havana Son, were the first to bring authentic Afro-Cuban music to Irish ears.

Nielsen developed a unique approach to the guitar and recorded a string of fine albums under his own name. These days, he divides his time between leading his own group and serving as director of jazz performance at the DIT Conservatory of Music.

The elder Guilfoyle, meanwhile, has won international recognition as a composer and a pedagogue, and travels extensively, performing his own music on acoustic bass and teaching his rhythm method to students in jazz schools. That’s quite apart from heading up Newpark’s jazz school and turning it into an internationally recognised jazz degree programme.

“That drum room in Newpark was our laboratory,” says Ronan. “We had more time on our hands then, and we started to develop our rhythm thing. Down in that drum room, you could do anything, and nobody would judge you for it.”

“For me,” adds Nielsen, “it was also a great way of developing your writing. Like Ronan’s new piece there,” he says, pointing at the densely written chart on the stand in front of him. “I know the way he writes, and I’m really looking forward to getting stuck into it.”

“The real breakthrough,” says Ronan, “was when the International Association of Schools of Jazz came to Dublin. We played a concert and there were an awful lot of musicians there saying ‘What the f*** is that?’”

Invitations to tour and teach internationally followed, including masterclasses at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, and word began to spread about these Irish guys who were raising rhythmic sophistication in jazz to a new level.

Ronan recalls a story about two eminent American jazz musicians meeting on a plane. Pianist Kenny Werner is shooting the breeze with drummer Adam Nussbaum, and mentions his upcoming trip to the Cork Jazz Festival to play with local group the Guilfoyle Nielsen Trio. “Oh, you mean the rhythm guys?” says Nussbaum. “Man, you’re in some deep s**t.” The trio explode with laughter at the thought of Werner, a master musician, feeling any kind of apprehension about a trip to Ireland.

Odd times

In 1993, the group made a recording of jazz standards in odd-time signatures, which they titled Fucked-up Classics. It went virtually unnoticed at the time, but over the years it has attracted more than 20,000 downloads – a considerable number for any jazz recording – and has become a go-to source for musicians looking to master time signatures other than the usual four-four.

Hearing the Guilfoyle-Nielsen Trio today, carving up an old standard such as All the Things You Are, their sound is as fresh and, in some ways, they're still waiting for the rest of the jazz world to catch up.

Even so, their influence on succeeding generations of Irish musicians has been incalculable, not just in purely technical terms but also as an example of the kind of hard work and dedication required to master contemporary improvised music.

The secret, they all agree, is the chemistry within the band.

“I was pleasantly surprised,” says Conor about reforming the trio. “I wasn’t sure at first, but when we met up again, we spent the whole time laughing. We just realised how much we enjoy each other’s company.”

It is that empathetic chemistry you hear when the Guilfoyle-Nielsen Trio take the stage. Just make sure you stand well back when they swing that guitar.

[ improvisedmusic.ie ]