Triskel Arts Centre, Cork, 28 March 2007

We first knew Chris Wood in these parts as the fiddle-playing half of a musically rich and good-humoured partnership with the accordion player, Andy Cutting. In more recent times, we have known him for his robust campaign on behalf of the English folk tradition, if not the English folk scene per se. So, as we waited for him to take the stage at the Triskel Arts Centre in Cork, we wondered who would turn up – the entertainer or the campaigner?

In the event, we got both, all wrapped up in a warm, witty and intelligent performance that ran for well over two hours. The music was certainly there, but so was the message. And the message was made all the stronger by the fact that it was delivered without resort to either sermon or harangue. Wood played without a safety net – no support act, no backing musicians, just his fine textured voice and an extraordinary guitar that incorporates parts from an old English post office (long story…).

Opening with ‘The Silver Dagger’ (‘Shakespeare in an Appalachian accent’), Wood was soon into the centre of his musical territory with ‘John Ball’, a Sydney Carter song, and ‘The Cottager’s Reply’, a wail against the ruin of ancient Cotswold villages by ‘the kind of sham that only the arriviste can create’. We also got good value from his solo album, The Lark Descending. ‘Hard’, an affectionate picture of his six-year-old daughter, was somehow more tender than the recorded version. ‘One in a Million’, a highly improbable tale of chip-shop romance, brought audible sobs from sections of the audience.

The Morris dance tradition came in for mention – both honourable and dishonourable. ‘When it’s bad, it’s really bad,’ he tells us. ‘Six overweight members of the computer industry, sometimes with an Arts Council grant attached.’ But when it’s good? Wood played ‘Haste to the Wedding’ to invoke the real spirit of Morris.

We got self-explanation in ‘Summerfield Avenue’, and a brilliant ‘atheist’s spiritual’ in ‘Come Down Jehovah’. But at the heart of Wood’s performance lie the great defining English songs such as ‘John Barleycorn’ and ‘Lord Bateman’. In the latter – and in his one-man mummer’s play England in Ribbons – he mixes the medieval world and the modern and, in the process, blurs the edges of history. He leaves the question hanging: is he singing about the original Crusades or the twenty-first century edition?

Yes, the venue was much too warm and, yes, the English bells relayed over the PA at the close of business teetered along the borders of tweedom, but Chris Wood brought us a type of magic that is all too rare. In creating this suspended atmosphere, he was helped to a great extent by the natural acoustic instincts of his sound man, Rob Harbron.

Chris Wood represents the English tradition in a proud and honest fashion, and he adds to it with every note and every word.

Fergus Kelly/Judith Ring, Will Guthrie, Joe Colley, Wade Matthews/Andrea Neumann
Printing House, Trinity College, Dublin, 30 March 2007

In its three-year existence, the i-and-e festival has become one of the most interesting annual events in Dublin. The purpose of the festival is to bring some of the best artists working in the field of electro-acoustic improvisation to town for a weekend of evening and afternoon shows.

There’s certainly no lack of talent nowadays in this particular genre; although there’s a bit of debate as to what to call the music (lowercase, New Silence and onkyo being only three of the terms that show up in the press), it hasn’t stemmed the growth in the number of people using a combination of electronics and acoustic instrumentation in an improvisational setting.

i-and-e has been crucial in bringing together musicians in this field. Along with showcasing home-grown artists like David Lacey, Dennis McNulty and Gavin Prior, acclaimed international artists such as Keith Rowe, Mark Wastell, Rhodri Davies, Annette Krebs and many others have also made appearances.

Although past years’ festivals have favoured the quieter side of the music – minute-long stretches of total silence weren’t uncommon – this year’s festival got off to a rather noisy start with four excellent performances. First up was the duo of Judith Ring and Fergus Kelly, the former on laptop and the latter on a homemade contraption that he calls ‘The Cabinet of Curiosities’. Ring tended to keep a lower profile with background bass rumbles, styrofoam-like squeaks and watery melodies, while Kelly stoically attacked his Cabinet with a hand-held air fan and violin bows.

Using a tableful of miked-up springs, snare drums, cymbals, empty boxes, a transistor radio and countless other knick-knacks, Australian Will Guthrie’s set came as something of a surprise. He managed to use all that gear to create some astonishingly lifelike noises: distant thunder rolling across a field, the mournful pealing of church bells and even a Lilliputian building site, complete with jackhammers, power saws and rattling chains.

Joe Colley was certainly the most hilarious act of the evening. The Californian threw himself completely into his set, with eyes closed and head banging as he blasted out some seriously demented noise. I’m not sure exactly what he was using – some sort of theremin-like thing that changed sound as he waved it around and a machine that sounded exactly like one of those electric mosquito-zappers – but he sure looked like he was having fun using them. With his surfer-boy looks and his moronically unsubtle music, it was like a Brian Wilson-fronted Wolf Eyes. Altogether great.

The final act was the duo of Andrea Neumann on ‘inside piano’ and Wade Matthews on laptop. Neumann’s instrument is exactly what she described it as: the inside of a piano, which she would pluck, scrape with steel wool and generally mess around with. Matthews tended to take a back seat, generally following Neumann’s lead rather than direct the music himself. It was the quietest set of the evening, although that’s a relative term: there were moments where it felt like being trapped in a box of Rice Krispies, and there were plenty of cartoony boings and sproings. And so another i-and-e festival gets off to a great start...

Paul Williamson (trumpet), Michael Buckley (saxes and flute), Joe O Callaghan (guitar), Justin Carroll (keyboards), Ronan Guilfoyle (bass), Sean Carpio (drums)

Projects Arts Centre, Dublin, 7 April 2007

Ronan Guilfoyle’s seven-part suite Terms and Conditions Apply, performed by six of Ireland’s best jazz musicians at the Project in Dublin on 7 April, falls within the slender but significant tradition of jazz as social commentary. Invoking Charles Mingus’ Fables of Faubus and Don Byron’s Tuskegee Experiments, Guilfoyle has created an innovative extended composition with the ambitious aesthetic goals of setting music in the broad context of human life and asserting its power to testify.

Integrating recorded spoken text and projected visual imagery into the music, Terms and Conditions Apply comments on a range of political and social features of Irish life. Unlike Mingus and Byron, however, whose compositions were a response to state-sponsored racism of the nastiest kind, Guilfoyle targets much softer issues – the M50, the health service, Celtic Tiger market-speak. The result is less a cry for justice than an ironic poke at incompetence and excess.

But what the suite lacks in political impact, it makes up for in its writing and musicianship. Skilfully blending carefully written ensemble passages with improvised solos and occasional collective free improvisation, Guilfoyle and his band fashioned a challenging set of musical ideas, contrasting and often contradictory, that nevertheless maintained freshness and momentum throughout the performance. At times it was difficult to distinguish between the written and the improvised – evidence of the piece’s innate integrity. And when the link between music and multimedia worked well – such as the walking blues line beneath a recording of Charlie Haughey’s famous austerity speech – the effect could be richly satirical.

But the most effective movements of the composition were not the ironic but the celebratory. A more appropriate model than Mingus or Byron might be Ellington. Like Black, Brown and Beige or New Orleans Suite, Terms and Conditions Apply is at its best when commenting on what the composer holds in high esteem: traditional music, the local landscape, ethnic diversity. The final movement, ‘Ireland of the Welcomes/Guests of the Nation’, with its calypso-like main theme, its energetic collective passages and its wonderful range of solos (especially Guilfoyle himself on bass and Michael Buckley’s blues-inflected tenor sax), captured the country’s contemporary energy and diversity of voice and tradition with informal ease and sustained passion.

Also like Ellington, Guilfoyle writes with the personalities of his band-members in mind. All of the musicians contributed sensitively and with a unified sense of purpose – they clearly know each other well – and transitioned with skill and confidence from funky groove to sublime tone poetry to controlled dissonance. And for music that depends so much for its success on a powerful rhythmic underpinning, Guilfoyle and his young drummer Sean Carpio worked very well together to drive an evening of memorable music.