Tuesday night's opening Vicar Street concert of the ESB Dublin Jazz Festival was a study in contrasts. Ronan Guilfoyle's multinational Lingua Franca looked to Irish traditional music for its sources, while Brian Irvine's ensemble, from the North, found its inspiration from somewhere between Loose Tubes and the manic fastness of the leader's imagination.
Lingua Franca - Americans Rick Peckham (guitar) and Tom Rainey (drums), Canadian Tanya Kalmanovitch (viola/violin), Briton Julian Arguelles (tenor/soprano), Irishmen Guilfoyle (bass guitar), Martin Nolan (pipes/whistle) and Peter Browne (accordion) - provided the more substantial musical sustenance.
With Guilfoyle, the composer and arranger, doing a sort of deconstruction of heritage on the traditional tunes used as a starting point, the origins were far less important than what he did with them.
Effectively, these were new compositions, recast in terms of line, harmony and time and packed with incident, blending the unusual instrumentation to achieve exciting sounds and textures.
To pick just two examples out of many, the third, unnamed piece included some superb writing for the closing ensembles, involving all the band, and there were some lovely blends after Arguelles's lyrical tenor solo on Kid On A Mountain/Isolation.
But this is difficult music, and the band never seemed so fully on top of it as to enable them to release its expressive potential. Given the fraught circumstances of the group's coming together - again, events in the United States - this was hardly surprising.
They did an impressive job in the circumstances, but the rhythm section seemed more at home with the music (despite a rather dominant Rainey, who is a great drummer) than the front line, of which Peckham was perhaps the best soloist.
In contrast, Irvine's group has been together a long time, and it showed in the crisp ensembles and excellent dynamics of this 15-piece band. The titles - Mango On My Old Grundig, Joking Apart and a hilarious That's Amore, which became a rocker - give some idea of what this group is about.
This is fun of all kinds: witty, irreverent, anarchic and, alas, sometimes a bit undergraduate, rather like Loose Tubes meets Spike Jones and His City Slickers. It's enjoyable but doesn't linger in the memory - which may explain Jean-Paul Sartre's rather quizzical description of jazz many years ago. "Jazz," he said, "is like bananas. It's consumed on the spot."
Why did the word "bananas" come to mind?
