Brian Dunning has one foot in trad and the other in jazz - and he's brilliant, writes Ray Comiskey

Where critics are concerned, there are times when the biter is bitten. Occasionally, they're memorable, like the artist who wrote to a critic: "I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review before me. Soon it will be behind me." Or, in a different context, the reaction of the great US singer and lyricist Johnny Mercer to the words of an English songwriter. "Lyrics? I could eat alphabet soup and shit better lyrics."

Talking to the flautist Brian Dunning made me remember, after we had said goodbye, that years ago, when he recorded an album for Gerald Davis's Livia label, I gave it a less than favourable review. A few days after it was published, he came over to me at a concert. Oh, I'm for it now, I thought. There was no time for a weak, "Listen, Brian, it was nothing personal."

But he didn't suggest I was a mental deficient born on the wrong side of the blanket, in the tertiary stage of a social disease or, worse, the mutant pond life spawn of the genus critic. Instead, he stuck out his hand and said: "I agree with every word you wrote."

Did he do it to make me feel small? No. He was just calling things as he saw them. Dunning is a direct, no-nonsense, warmly funny person: mature, honest, shrewd, easy to respect and impossible to dislike. That he is a terrific flautist straddling the worlds of jazz and traditional Irish music is a bonus.

It tends to be forgotten that, in 1977, he became the first Irish jazz musician to get an Arts Council scholarship to study abroad. It took him to Berklee, Boston's famous jazz college. He stayed on after his studies, spending a year in California before coming back to Dublin, and the familiar routine of a freelance musician, in 1980.

"It was great at first," he says, "but after a few years I had it in my head that I really wanted to go back to America. I suppose it is the land of opportunity, and I wanted to do something myself. Here, if you get a call for the symphony orchestra and they're doing Beethoven's Fifth, you can't go, 'Ah, jaysus, can we not do Beethoven's Ninth?' " For someone whose attraction to jazz, apart from the sound and feel of it, was that you could make it up as you go along, not being able to do your own thing was hard to take.

Increasingly interested in traditional Irish music, he wanted to incorporate something of a flavour of that into his own music.

"That was where the idea of Puck Fair" - the band he will lead at Bray Jazz Festival this weekend - "came into being. I met Tommy Hayes here in Ireland and then we hooked up in New York in 1983 or 1984 and, with bassist Lindsey Horner, we started Puck Fair.

"The great thing about New York," he adds, "was that I wasn't going to get a call from the New York Phil looking to see was I going to do some work and I wasn't going to get a call from Broadway to see would I do a Broadway show. So I had to go out and knock on doors myself and get the band gigs, which is what we did. And then here we were, doing our own thing, which was great."

They weren't confined, either, to the Irish clubs on the Murfia circuit. "The beauty of Puck Fair was that you could get gigs in Irish bars, but you could also get gigs in jazz bars. It's not a jazz band, because we weren't playing jazz standards, and it wasn't a trad band, because we weren't playing traditional music.

"But because we were using bodhrán and whistles and flute and guitar, it had that flavour of Celtic music, and there was an awful lot of improvisation and a lot of high energy, which the jazz guys felt comfortable with."

Although the absence of drums and a grand piano eased things for him on a volume level, the modal basis of much Irish traditional music was a different matter.

"I find in the jazz thing," he says, "there's changes" - chord sequences - "almost like a path there for you to fit into, and everybody knows what you're at and it's comfortable, whereas with the Puck Fair thing you're more out on a limb, so it's a bit more challenging even though the music is simpler."

After a year in New York with his wife, Fiona, they decided to move to Portland, Oregon. That - and the idea of Puck Fair - had its seeds in a 1980 jam session during an Irish festival in Birmingham, Alabama, when he played with Micheál Ó Domhnaill, the Skara Brae and Bothy Band guitarist. It opened up a new world of improvising for him.

Ó Domhnaill had since settled in Portland, formed a duo with the violinist Billy Oskay and invited his sister, the distinctively voiced clavinet player Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill, and Brian to join them in a new band, Nightnoise. It enabled Dunning to pursue his interests in the mingling of Irish traditional and jazz concerns while expanding his musical horizons.

But doesn't Portland have the reputation of being one of the wettest places in the US? "No. They just say that to keep it to themselves. Portland's a great town. It's a little smaller than Dublin and it's got musicians crawling out of the woodwork. I suppose the best way to describe it is [to say that] jazz musicians in America, they're like traditional musicians in Ireland. There's loads of them, they're really, really good and a lot of them," he laughs, "have day jobs, guys that would blow away lots of professional guys in Europe."

Nightnoise was, to put it mildly, successful. "Yes. We played some great concerts, recorded seven albums, were in Japan three times, played all over the States, played about six or seven tours of Spain."

Through Nightnoise and Puck Fair, it could be argued that he was among the first to bring jazz into Irish traditional music and Irish traditional music into jazz. But, while acknowledging the truth of this, he says he wasn't trying to do that. He loves the improvisatory qualities of jazz, while Irish music, he says, has a certain kind of "ngeaw" that he really likes.

Last year, with Puck Fair, he did the music for an animated short, Diarmuid And Grainne. He also wrote and performed additional music for Ice Pack, a documentary on the Irish Antarctic expedition, due to be broadcast on TV3 on May 25th.

And while he was living in Portland, he recorded four albums with the keyboard player Jeff Johnson - "basically New Age, slightly Celtic, big sound, some good stuff, my tunes, his tunes" - and a tune from one of the albums is in Martin Scorsese's most recent movie, Gangs Of New York. Since coming home, he has set up a studio in his house, which allows him to continue to collaborate with Johnson.

And I bet he still shakes hands with critics. I also bet he will tell them unpalatable truths, if necessary. With a smile. Of course.

Puck Fair, with Brian Dunning (flute), Sean Whelan (guitar) and Robbie Harris (percussion), play at Bray Town Hall, Co Wicklow, at 7 p.m. today as part of Bray Jazz Festival, www.brayjazz.com