IN THE words of oul’ Mr Brennan, after more years than we care to remember, our long-running Sunday night jazz club The Pendulum will swing no more, and our final outing took place on October 31st last.
It has been quite a journey since I double-parked on Dame Street, ran into Brogans Pub, and emerged a few minutes later after extracting a commitment from the ever affable Ben Brogan to let us run gigs three nights a week in his basement. When I came out the car was still there and mobile, but then this was spring 1996, and Dublin was pre-tiger and pre-clamper.
We started up a month or so later, running gigs Sunday to Tuesday, with a PA bought out of the Heraldclassifieds for 200 of your Irish pounds, a portabl(ish) stage my late father made from plywood and 4 X 2, and a backdrop made by an artistically-inclined girlfriend, proudly emblazoned with the letters IMC.
Instant jazz club, just add players and punters. The space was suitably subterranean and held 60 at a push, but the sight lines were pretty disastrous and the basement was imbued with that special bouquet of Dublin pubs that find themselves in close proximity to the Poddle, the culverted river whose questionable contents flow beneath Dublin Castle, Dame Street and Temple Bar, onward into the Liffey.
People pitched in to make it work, especially drummer Ray McCann, equally seduced by the lure of jazz club entrepreneurialism, and with whom I hauled many the Hammond Organ up and down those tortuous narrow steps. Hard though it is for a Dublin pub habitué to imagine “Brogans” and “renovations” in the same sentence, a year into the operation, we had to find an alternative home as Brogans underwent some work, and we moved deep into the belly of Temple Bar to The Norseman, the bar on Eustace Street now known as Farringdon’s. An even better room, plenty of space, good sight lines, and we started to stretch ourselves, with memorable performances by visiting musicians like Kenny Wheeler and Ronnie Cuber.
But it was not to last. Not for the first time, the irresistible force of creative music had met the immovable object of a publican’s cash-flow statement.
A more creatively engaged publican was waiting on Aungier Street, and it has been our great pleasure to work alongside Brian Smyth in JJ’s, in what is now the spiritual home of jazz in Dublin, as well as being the birthplace of lyric poet Thomas Moore.
We moved there in April 1999, so the closer made gig number 700, give or take, over the 11 years we’ve been there. That’s a lot of music under the bridge.
Leafing through old fliers, its apparent that we had a tilt at bringing the world’s best musicians up that flight of stairs on Aungier Street, sometimes with their own bands, often to hook up with Dublin’s finest, but always in expectation of a discerning, appreciative audience. Here’s a smattering of the Pendulum hall of fame. Andy Laster, Don Weller, Gerard Presencer, Ronnie Cuber, Cuong Vu, Kenny Wheeler, Jim Mullen, Yuri Honing, Furio Di Castri, Keith Copeland, Seamus Blake, Peter Van Huffel, Will Vinson, Lage Lund, Tom Rainey, Ingrid Laubrock, Trio Corrente, Tim Ries, Empirical, Terrell Stafford, Dave Liebman, Chander Sardjoe, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Lionel Loueke, Julian Arguelles, Michael Formanek, Mark Turner, Soweto Kinch, Ryan Blotnick, Charles Gayle, William Parker, Mark Saunders, Gerald Cleaver, David Berkman, Dick Oatts, Colin Steele, Michel Zenino, Martin Speake, Keith Copeland, Adam Nussbaum, Michael Moore, Han Bennink, Akamoon, Ramesh Shotham, Zoltan Lantos, Christy Doran, Joe Morris, Kate McGarry, Rick Peckham, Andrea Piccioni, Jesse Van Ruller, Jamie Oehlers, Fay Claasens and many more.
The lineage of Irish musicians has been no less stellar, and names like Buckley, Halferty, Guilfoyle, Nielsen, Carroll, Ware and Drennan have been the bedrock of the Pendulum over the years. We were fortunate also to bear witness to an emerging generation of players who are now making their mark, like Simon Jermyn and Sean Carpio, making careers for themselves in New York and London respectively. There were some sad goodbyes too, like drummer John Wadham and singer Herb Dade, both typical jazz people, both good company, both sorely missed.
The decision to call time on The Pendulum has been difficult but inevitable, as we have watched the slow erosion of the core audience without which the club ceases to have a rationale. We can’t ignore the obvious economic pressures, but we should also attribute other factors and changes in social patterns, some of them profound like the changing role of pubs in our society, and some as simple as Sunday nights being less and less attractive to people who have to haul themselves out of the scratcher come Monday morning. It goes without saying that live music will continue to thrive in what is, let’s face it, one of the last music venues of its kind in the city, and thus deserving of your support. We will doubtless be back to promote the occasional gig in JJs ourselves when the occasion demands.
Nor should our departure from Aungier Street be read as a portent of things to come, or a contraction of IMC’s role in bringing creative music to Dubliners. We’re planning for 2011 and beyond, including a year long series of “pocket jazz festival” events through which we intend to energise the Dublin jazz scene, bringing the
very best in visiting international artists and the cream of established and emerging jazz talent from Ireland, together under one roof in a multi-stage format.
To finish; regrets, reflection and gratitude. Regret that a city as musically vibrant as this one is still without the kind of dedicated performance space that would offer permanent tenure, not just for jazz, but for all the musics with which it shares common creative cause. There is much windy political and cultural rhetoric about the value of music to Dublin, but little evidence of a municipal commitment when it comes to jazz, traditional, folk and all the other wonders that sit between the polarities of disproportionately subsidised orchestral music at one end, and commercially leveraged rock and pop at the other. Modest ideas like the one above struggled for purchase on the high gloss, unforgiving stone exterior of the tiger edifice. Paradoxically, perhaps it can flourish in the years ahead that, for all their economic austerity, might yet allow for a deeper, broader conversation about cultural value.
Hey, we now own the world’s biggest property management company, surely something in that vast Nama portfolio would lend itself to musical reinvention!
The reflection is one of a small measure of pride that in the guts of 15 years, we never cancelled a gig, with the exception of spring this year when a pesky volcano thwarted our best efforts. There were plenty of nights when the band outnumbered the audience, and it was hard going for musician and punter alike, but to me they were the most important nights of all, because jazz is an essential element of the soundtrack of all great cities, and like athletes, jazz musicians need to stay on top of their performance game. In any event, there were plenty of nights that made up for it, when the place was heaving.
Lastly, gratitude. To the many listeners who made The Pendulum tick down through the years. It must be in excess of 35,000 people who parted with a few pounds, then euros, to hear this music as nature intended, up close and acoustically personal. To the musicians, both Irish and visiting, who despite the modesty of the surroundings always treated playing there with just the right amount of gravitas. To Billy O’H, Podge, Spanner and the other guardians of the door who took your money and told you to pipe down during the bass solos. To Claude and the others behind the bar, who poured an excellent pint, and kept their counsel when the music got a little too hairy for their taste. And to Brian Smyth, a man in the tradition of old school Dublin publicans who has been a good host and an unsung champion of jazz in our city.
As he might put it himself, on behalf of The Pendulum we say “Time, gentlemen and ladies, please.”