Gerry Godley, promoter and broadcaster
I grew up wanting to . .. escape from the suburbs, which I duly did, to London in my late teens. I still love London's anonymity and the smell of the Underground is very Proustian for me.
Music at home when I was a boy was. . . listening to my older sisters grapple with their piano grades and rifling through the very limited parent's record collection, which lurked within a massive Nordmende cabinet machine. Salvation was the weekly appointment with Top of the Pops, then in its pomp, and my sister Mary, a 1970s folkie with a penchant for Kate and Anna McGarrigle [see page 12].
My first career was. . . A kitchen porter in The Abbot in Monkstown, then one of a tiny handful of restaurants with grand ambitions in the early 1980s. I graduated quickly to the stove and fell in love with kitchen life: the pressure, the viscera, the camaraderie, its deeply satisfying artisanal nature, and above all the misfits, ne'er do wells, would-be philosophers and Hollywood drifters who are the working population of the restaurant business. I loved the cooking too, now more than ever.
When I'm cooking I like to listen to. . . The food: the rolling bubble, the searing pan, the falling blade. Cooking is instinctive and immersive, and requires all your senses to be present. I feel the same way about music, and I'm with GB Shaw, who said that listening to music while having your dinner was a disrespect to both the pianist and the cook.
My mentors. . . have been the musician Ronan Guilfoyle, the corporate angel Barney Whelan, the publicist Christine Monk and the sculptor Paul Ferriter. These days daughter Amalia, wife Yanti and mother Lily are the women in my life, and they all project qualities of durability and stoicism that I do my best to absorb.
I chose the sax as my instrument because. . . like most people, I thought it was the ultimate passport to cool. As a nipper, my brother would sneak me into a southside session, where the McGuinness brothers would regularly cut loose, sowing the seeds of my jazz corruption. They germinated a decade later, hearing players like the majestic Dexter Gordon in London's Ronnie Scott's, where my musical education began in earnest.
Music gives children. . . the same things it gives the rest of us. A spectrum of emotional experience far beyond our descriptive capacities when we listen to it, and profound spatial, cognitive and social skills when we make it. Can any of us imagine a life without music?
Dublin needs a jazz venue because. . . This is a great city of music, and a decent room with a Steinway and a nice acoustic would be an undoubted success. It would also provide a locus in which to incubate the next generation of audiences and performers – there is plenty of talent here. Until then, you could do a lot worse than a Thursday night in JJ Smyths on Aungier Street.
If I had to reinvent myself again I'd . . .take heart from having reinvented several times before. At various times I have been a chef, musician, concert producer and arts administrator, with skirmishes into teaching, criticism and lobbying.
Musicians are. . . tough, uncompromising and thrifty, at least in my world. They are also brave and beautiful, and can sometimes be hard work. It is the way of all artists.
My most important life lesson has been. . . experience is the thing you get when you didn't get what you asked for.
Gerry Godley is director of the Improvised Music Company, a presenter on Lyric FM and curator of music for this year’s Kilkenny Arts Festival (August 5th-14th).
In conversation with Catherine Cleary
