The compositions are based on a strong narrative, linking the brass, woodwind and guitar with specific characters and scenarios, which in particular, influence the solos.
Though recorded nearly 40 years ago, the suite maintains its vibrancy and relevance. The release will be marked by a Dublin concert on 28th February 2025
About Jim Doherty –
Jim Doherty is a veteran of the Irish jazz scene, who also worked extensively as a session musician and composer/arranger for both TV and theatre. He led numerous bands of his own, from duets to big bands. His trio was a first of choice for countless visiting jazz musicians, along with his contemporary, pianist, Noel Kelehan.
He proudly takes the credit for identifying the exceptional talents of a teenage Louis Stewart at an audition in 1960. This ultimately led Louis to New York, where he decided to return to Ireland and dedicate himself to playing jazz. Then, in 1968, while playing in a quartet led by Jim, Louis’s supreme talents were rewarded with the best European soloist award at the Montreux jazz festival.
While Louis’s international profile and jazz career took off from then, Jim and Louis remained close friends and often performed together. SPONDANCE was the first jazz recording featuring both musicians, though Jim and Louis later recorded a duet album, TUNES, in 2013.
Jim is still performing today. SPONDANCE is his proudest jazz recording and he is delighted to have it performed again, coinciding with the album reissue.
Jim’s legendary quick wit, and his love of comedy, is reflected in the use of “SPON” which recurs in Jim’s band names, reflecting his love of the Goons, featuring Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan et al. Coincidentally, one of his sons, David O’Doherty, is now a successful stage and TV comedian.
You can listen to the opening track Nordic Maiden via by clicking on the following https://liviarecords.bandcamp.com/album/jim-dohertys-spondance
Ronan Guilfoyle’s Bemusement Arcade – At Swing, Two Birds Livia Records LRCD2502
It’s nice to see bass guitarists getting some exposure as leaders and not only does Ronan get that with his own album on Livia, the added bonus is that he composed all of the seven compositions which make up the recording.
It’s been said that “You don’t find the instrument, the instrument finds you” and I’ve always thought that given its quiet and relatively unobtrusive nature that nowhere is that axiom more apparent than with bass guitarists.
The difficulty in playing it and playing it well are often overlooked and/or underappreciated. However, when it’s not played well, you feel it before you hear it because the music loses its steady “heartbeat.”
No need to worry about a lost pulse when Ronan is on the date as his virtuosity on the bass guitar sensitively powers all of the music on this recording.
Here’s more about Ronan and “the bemused boys in the band” from Dermot’s media release.
“AT SWING, TWO BIRDS, from innovative bassist Ronan Guilfoyle with seven original compositions. Completing the quartet are alto saxophonist Sam Morris, guitarist Chris Guilfoyle (Ronan’s son) and highly experienced drummer Darren Beckett.
The compositions feature typical jazz characteristics – swing, groove, blues, standard form, chord changes, solos, drum trades, shout choruses etc. within atypical rhythmic shapes, showing that innovation and jazz tradition are compatible, and the music can swing with non-standard time signatures and structures. The album title references Irish humourist Flann O’Brien’s classic book, At Swim Two Birds, while blending rhythmic and harmonic ideas from two Charlie Parker tunes.
About RONAN GUILFOYLE
Ronan Guilfoyle is a major figure on the Irish jazz scene with an international reputation as a performer, teacher and composer. He began his career in the early 1980’s with Louis Stewart, then studied at the Banff Centre for the Arts with guitarist John Abercrombie, bassist Dave Holland, and saxophonist Steve Coleman. Ronan is one of the acoustic bass guitar’s leading exponents, and is in demand as a jazz bassist, both in Ireland and internationally.
He has performed with saxophonists Dave Liebman, Joe Lovano, Benny Golson, and Sonny Fortune, pianists Kenny Werner, Brad Mehldau, Jim McNeely, and Richie Beirach, guitarists John Abercrombie, Larry Coryell and Emily Remler, trumpeter Kenny Wheeler, and drummers Tom Rainey and Keith Copeland. He has led his own groups since the mid-1980s, and has toured widely in Europe, Asia, and North America.
He has recorded extensively both as a sideman and as a leader, including the award winning “Devsirme” in 1997, for which he won a Julius Hemphill Jazz Composition award.
Ronan composes for classical ensembles too, specialising in compositions featuring both improvised and written music. His large body of work ranges from solo piano to chamber works, to orchestral compositions. He has had commissions from ensembles and organisations ranging from the RTE Concert Orchestra, The Opus 20 String Orchestra in London, and the European Jazz Youth Orchestra. He has written commissioned works for many soloists including saxophonist Dave Liebman, violinist Michael d’Arcy and virtuoso accordionist Dermot Dunne.
A formidable jazz composer, his music has been performed by jazz luminaries like Dave Liebman, Kenny Werner, Kenny Wheeler, Keith Copeland, John Abercrombie, Andy Laster, Simon Nabatov, Richie Beirach, Tom Rainey, Julian Arguelles, Rick Peckham, and Sonny Fortune.
He is well known for teaching advanced rhythmic techniques for jazz improvisation and his book, “Creative Rhythmic Concepts for Jazz Improvisation” is seen as the standard text for this. He has taught at many schools including Berklee College of Music, The New School, the International Music Congress (UNESCO) in Copenhagen and is an associate Artist of the Royal Academy of Music in London. Ronan founded the jazz department at Newpark Music Centre in Dublin before it transferred to Dublin City University as a BA in Jazz performance, for which he is the course director.”
Louis Stewart – I Thought About You Livia Records LRCD2501
And just when you thought that Dermot couldn’t top this three course feast with the new music by Buckley, Doherty and Guilfoyle [not a law firm], he turns it into a four course banquet with the CD issue of master guitarist Louis Stewart’s I Thought About You using the original London sessions remixed, remastered with extra tracks.
To give you some idea of the depth of Louis’s roots in the music, and the importance of his voice before his passing in 2016 check out this background information as excerpted from Simon Spillett’s The Long Shadow of the Little Giant: The Life Work and Legacy of Tubby Hayes:
“ … [Tubby] cannot have helped but feel the loss of Pyne, Mathewson and Levin. The quartet had undoubtedly been his best unit yet, and had brought him closer than ever to the kind of group empathy he’d witnessed in bands such as Miles Davis’s and John Coltrane’s….. [A]lthough he now faced a situation unimaginable just a few years before – that of a positive glut of young, gifted players – his next group began with the altogether more cautious recruitment of two former colleagues, Phil Bates and Bill Eyden, This time round, he had chosen just one new face, “a wonderful guitarist called Louis Stewart from Dublin.”
Wonderful was certainly the word. After cutting his teeth on the provincial Irish jazz scene, Stewart had gone on to win the prestigious soloist award at the 1968 Montreux Jazz Festival. Following the victory, he had opted to base his career in London, but the right kind of work was proving frustratingly elusive. At the time of his recruitment by Hayes, … [a]lthough only twenty-four years of age, the guitarist already had plenty of jazz experience behind him, and clearly had the ability to stand out in a crowd, but being asked to become a member of the Tubby Hayes quartet was tantamount to receiving a musical knighthood – the honour amplified when one considers that Hayes cancelled a scheduled audition for John McLaughlin after hearing Stewart just once. “I haven’t played anything like this before,” the Irishman told Tony Wilson of Melody Maker shortly after joining. “I’d been working with organ and tenor playing ordinary kind of things but Tubby has been very helpful and patient. Some of Tubby’s compositions are quite unusual with different bar lengths and things like that. If Tubby wants to keep me I’ll be happy to stay.”51
Regardless of Stewart’s reservations, his leader seemed happy enough, praising him unstintingly in the press. “He handles the difficult comping’ role unobtrusively and with taste in the absence of a piano,” Hayes wrote soon after the band’s formation. “In this role he follows Terry Shannon, Gordon Beck and Mike Pyne and when I say that I do not miss the piano, it is meant as the highest compliment.”
Following these bona fides, Dermot continues with more insights into Louis and his music, as well as, the attention to detail involved with making the recording into a compact disc in the following from his press release:
“I THOUGHT ABOUT YOU is a major remixed, remastered, and extended release of Irish jazz guitar master Louis Stewart’s 1977 quartet album with the English pianist John Taylor and the American rhythm team of bassist Sam Jones and drummer Billy Higgins.
Recorded when Louis was working with Ronnie Scott’s house band (as was John Taylor), the session coincided with pianist Cedar Walton’s quartet’s stint at Scott’s London club. Walton’s sidemen Sam Jones and Billy Higgins so impressed Louis, that he invited them to record with him and John Taylor.
Originally released in 1980 with some edits and overdubs, this enhanced re-issue uses the original London masters and adds two extra tracks.
The tunes are mainly by then contemporary artists (Miles Davis, Chick Corea,
Thelonious Monk, Sam Jones, Jimmy Heath etc.) plus one standard. With superb trio accompaniment, the result is possibly Louis Stewart’s best studio recording.
I THOUGHT ABOUT YOU was recorded on 18th March 1977 in London’s Olympic Studios on 2″ tape, which captured tracks for each of the instruments. In 1978, Louis Stewart brought a 1/4″ copy of the tapes back to Dublin and decided to record some alternate solos on some tracks, which were used with the first release of the album in 1980, though the reason for doing this remains unclear. This hybrid’s combination of two tape sources didn’t work well.
Restoring the album, nearly 50 years after it was recorded, required digitisation of the original two-inch studio tapes, which had been in a lock-up for 20 years. Digitization by FX Labs in London revealed an alternate version of November Girl and Miles Davis’s All Blues. The 1/4″ overdub tapes were also digitised but not used due to their poorer quality sound and the impossible task of making them work well with the original 2″ masters. Sean Mac Erlaine remixed and remastered to create the best version of the album for re-release.
Louis Stewart (1942-2016), known simply as Louis, and revered by a loyal Irish jazz fan base, was better known and admired abroad. From his award winning 1968 Montreux festival debut, he was soon playing with major names. Over the course of a long career, Louis Stewart would appear on over seventy albums, and tour the world in the company of some of the foundational stars of the music he loved, including Benny Goodman, JJ Johnson, George Shearing, Ronnie Scott, Tubby Hayes etc. Though mainly London-based in the late 60s and 1970s, he was a regular visitor back to Dublin to play sell out shows. Gerald Davis established Livia Records in 1977 specifically to record him on home soil.
It was only towards the end of his life, that he gained honours at home as Ireland began to realise that he was one of the great geniuses of modern music, an Irish artist to stand alongside Heaney, Beckett, and Le Brocquy as one who transcended his art form. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Trinity College Dublin (1998) and Aosdana membership (2009) (Arts Council body to acknowledge outstanding contribution to the creative arts in Ireland). Louis died in 2016.
Sunday Times critic Derek Jewell: “… a musician to be spoken of in the same league as Django Reinhardt, Wes Montgomery, or, among contemporary virtuosos, Joe Pass.”
Ronnie Scott: “In my book he’s one of the world’s great jazz guitarists”
DownBeat Magazine: “must be considered one of the instrument’s world class players”
Louis inspired generations of guitarists, in Ireland and around the world, and enjoyed the regard of many of the great musicians who he had so carefully studied, including Barney Kessel, Tal Farlow, Jim Hall and Pat Martino.