Guilfoyle / Neilsen Trio

About this event

The Guilfoyle-Nielsen Trio are back where they started 30 years ago, in a room barely big enough to swing a guitar, poring over charts of fiendishly difficult music. And having great craic doing it.

Back in the late 1980s, bassist Ronan Guilfoyle, drummer Conor Guilfoyle and guitarist Mike Nielsen locked themselves away in a tiny basement room of Newpark Music Centre and emerged two years later with what was essentially a new way of playing jazz.

It’s not that easy to make an original contribution to what is still essentially an American art form, and certainly not if you’re three guys from Ireland, but their unique combination of rhythmic complexity, harmonic intrepidity and raw, ear-shredding volume won them admirers among forward-thinking musicians around the world in the 1990s.

Even if they have yet to receive the recognition they deserve in their home town, there are still adventurous young musicians in most other cities in the world listening to their recordings and studying their books. In the rarefied world of “odd meter” jazz, these guys from Dún Laoghaire are the gold standard.

“Thirty years ago next year,” says Conor Guilfoyle when I ask him when it all started.

“Jaysus,” intone Ronan Guilfoyle and Mike Nielsen together, as if realising it for the first time. “But it’s been amazing how quickly we got into our old way of working – and our old way of slagging each other off,” says Ronan. “This band may be in the virtuoso class concerning rhythm, but our slagging is of Olympian proportions too.”

Ronan Guilfoyle Bass
Conor Guilfoyle Drums
Mike Nielsen Guitar