A new suite by Ronan Guilfoyle celebrates all things Cork, from the jazz festival to the city's one-way system, writes Ray Comiskey.
When songwriter Sammy Cahn was asked which came first for him, the words or the music, he answered "the phone call". Composer and bassist Ronan Guilfoyle's commission to write something for the Guinness Jazz Festival in Cork wasn't quite so out of the blue; it had been in the air for a while as a kind of non-specific piece intended to be performed at the festival.
Then the festival's artistic director, Jack McGouran, suggested holding off for a few years and writing something to mark the approaching year of Cork 2005, European Capital Of Culture.
The result is a seven-movement suite, South Facing, so called because every October, jazz aficionados turn towards Cork; it's their musical Mecca. The suite is, incidentally, not without some humorous connotations; the city's bewildering - to outsiders, anyway - one-way street system inspired one of the movements. But it's also an adventurous mixture of the written and the improvised, and the septet to perform it has some of the finest, cutting-edge European and American jazz musicians in its ranks.
"What I decided to do," said Guilfoyle, "was to write a piece that's based on my experiences of things relating to the festival, because that would be the way I know Cork best, going down there every year. It's kind of programmatic, but in a broad sense.
"For example, one of the pieces has a definite influence of New Orleans music on it. I was thinking of the marching bands they used to bring in from New Orleans for a while," he laughed, "poor guys marching around in the rain playing their New Orleans marching music". He called it, unsurprisingly, Street Music.
And the one-way system? He smiled. "I have a movement that's called Cork Circular, that's based on the one-way system, because one of the things I thought about was that in Cork it's true that, with the one-way system, you're never where you want to be. You can see where you want to be, but you can never get there without driving another circle around the whole city." Is he going to do something similar, musically, to his players? "That piece - I think it's pretty obvious when you hear it."
One movement has a particularly touching origin. "It's called Departed and dedicated to a lot of musicians who are no longer alive, who we saw at the festival or with whom we played there. And in particular that movement is dedicated to John Wadham, who was the first musician I played with at the Cork festival." Wadham, who died last year, was a much-loved and respected drummer who was a major influence on jazz. The mere mention of his name sparked a flood of reminiscence. When he died he left all his musical things to Newpark, where Guilfoyle has built up a considerable jazz faculty.
"It came as a real shock to us," he says. "Nobody knew and I feel really sad that I never just thanked him for that in advance. Of course, it would be very typical of him that he'd never just say it. Anyway, amongst the effects was a stack of videos, and one of those was an RTÉ recording of me with John, Louis Stewart and Jim Doherty playing in the Opera House in 1980, the first year I was there as a player. I remember it very well. We opened for Louis Bellson and the full concert is there. I dunno what I looked like - a child."
ANOTHER MEMORY WAS, as he puts it, "the day we nearly played with Sonny Rollins". A legendary tenor saxophonist and one of the great figures in jazz, Rollins played Cork in the early 1980s. Wadham met him backstage at the Opera House, where the tenor responded politely to his conversation until The Wad mentioned Ivor Carroll. Irish-born Carroll, who died not long ago, was a saxophonist, a one-off who spent virtually all his adult life abroad, much of it in the inner circle of the music's great players in New York. He was an extraordinary character, like someone out of the Beat generation writings of Jack Kerouac.
Rollins's whole demeanour changed at the mention of Carroll and Wadham, encouraged, suggested - half jokingly - that he come down the following afternoon and play with them. Rollins said "maybe" and the band thought no more of it. The next day, when they turned up at the venue, it was locked and shuttered.
"So we were standing there with our instruments," said Guilfoyle, "and Rollins comes round the corner with his saxophone case and he said 'I'm ready to play'. We're standing there and the place is locked up and he said 'oh, is it not open? Well, maybe I'll come back' and he went off. Of course, he never came back."
That bizarre incident hasn't inspired any part of the composition, but what of the suite's other movements?
"The first movement is called South Facing and I guess it's kind of a celebratory thing. So is the last movement, which is very celebratory. I wrote it very optimistically - jeez, I must be getting old; what happened to all my angst?
That piece is definitely celebratory of the great music that's been heard and played at the festival over the years. The first movement also, but it's not as obviously celebratory as the last movement; it's a very up, kind of lyrical but quite rhythmically complex piece."
Another piece is called Urban Myth, "because every city has its urban myth and Cork has its own, so I wrote a piece that's very urban. And I wrote a tune called In Fairness, because that's a great Irish expression that's always before the worst insult you've ever heard in your life - it's a bit like the English 'with all due respect'," he says with a wry smile.
In fairness, then, it has to be said that he has assembled a gifted collection of players to perform the suite in Cork. Trombonist Nils Wogram is, he believes, "the greatest player of the instrument ever" because of his colouristic palette and ability to play in any idiom. Julian Arguelles, who doubles on tenor and soprano, is an unclassifiable, crackshot saxophonist who can be relied on to bring his own ammunition to the party, while Mario Laginha, with whom Guilfoyle has played in Portugal several times, is a pianist he greatly admires.
That's just the Europeans. The Americans all belong on the cutting edge. Drummer Tom Rainey is well-known as a visitor to this country, while alto saxophonist Dave Binney was in Dublin leading a band earlier this year. And the remarkable violinist Mark Feldman was in Ireland a while ago with the marvellous group led by guitarist John Abercrombie.
WHAT WAS THE thinking behind assembling them? "I was looking for players who could play challenging music. I was looking for players who could play changes, for guys who could play free and who could play lyrically. And there's not that many people who can do all those things, where I know that no matter what instructions I give them in terms of the improvised material they're not gonna say 'well, what exactly do you mean?'.
"Sometimes I've given them instructions such as 'A7 tonality' and I'll have in brackets 'ish', and I know they'll know what I mean. And at other times I've given them very specific chord changes, and other times I have introductions to tunes where I just say to, for example, Julian and Nils, 'you guys play together' and they know where it's gonna go and they have to get there somehow.
"They'll figure it out because I know they will. They'll use thematic ideas because they will have played it - I've sent them the music a long time in advance - and then Tom is going to join them and set up a groove and then we're gonna come in.
"That's the beautiful thing about these people - that I can give them as much or as little instruction as I need to, and they will play extraordinarily explicit things, rhythmically, harmonically. And they are completely comfortable being allowed to do whatever they need to do. And at different times within the piece everybody gets to do each of those things. So everybody gets to play over changes at some point and to play completely open because they're really comfortable in both arenas."
And, in a busy year for Guilfoyle, which saw him in Japan, New York, Boston, Cairo and Amsterdam, it seems somehow appropriate that, the day after all this music has been played in Cork, he jets off with his drummer brother, Conor, and guitarist Tommy Halferty, to tour Australia and New Zealand with the stellar American saxophonist, Dave Liebman. That's south-facing with a vengeance.
South Facing will be premièred at the Guinness Jazz Festival at the Everyman Palace Theatre, Cork, on Saturday, October 23rd, at 2 p.m. www.corkjazzfestival.com