This record began life as a research presentation at Scoil Gheimhridh Ghaoth Dobhair in April 2022. During the Covid pandemic I had been doing a deep dive into archival recordings of various Donegal fiddle players trying to find pieces that I had previously overlooked or not properly understood. Soon I discovered an entire repertoire of interconnected pieces that stood apart from the reels, jigs, highlands and mazurkas that I had been playing all my life. This repertoire, I eventually discovered, gave an insight into a surge of creativity that occurred with the arrival of jazz culture in Ireland after the Great War. In the summer of 2022, I got the chance to spend a month working on these ideas at Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris, and some of the material recorded there with Ryan has survived onto the final record. Owing to my dawdling and busy schedules all around, the rest of the record came together over the ensuing eighteen months at Dan Byrne-McCullough’s studio in north Belfast, with the last notes played in late February 2024. It has been somewhat of an odyssey from beginning to end, but a very enjoyable one and I hope that the results honour the spirit of curiosity and inventiveness that I found in the recordings that I studied.

The public debate around jazz culture in the 1920s and 1930s was particularly polarising in the new Free State, in which the creation of a pure and Gaelic national identity was an obsession for the political power brokers. The nation’s moral guardians were powerless to stop this new and curiously indefinable jazz culture from permeating into every section of Irish society. Government ministers were being accused of secretly attending jazz dances, while skilled musicians in the various vernacular styles around the country began to adapt the new popular favourites into their repertoires. My conclusion was that it was this gradual process of changing tastes, and not the infamous Dance Halls Act (1935) which led to the decline in interest in Irish traditional music in the midtwentieth century.

‘Jazz’ as it was understood in the early twentieth century in Ireland did not mean what it does today but referred to a musical ‘other’. People began to differentiate between what one correspondent to the Dublin Herald called ‘hot jazz’ (‘the raucousness of early jazz’) and ‘sweet jazz’ (‘commercialised music fitted with words’), but ‘jazz’ also referred to military marches, light classical music, Tin Pan Alley songs and much more besides. This recording is an attempt to imagine what the unlikely marriage of traditional music and ‘jazz’ may have become in Ireland had it been given more space to grow and develop in the mid-twentieth century. Instead, the cultural space that it created was filled by showbands and eventually by rock and roll.

Conor Caldwell
May 2024
Oh, Listen to the Band!

1. Yes, we have no bananas! (3.10)
2. JD’s Rags (5.17)
3. Pawel Walc (4.25)
4. Bonnie Kate (2.58)
5. Colonel Bogey (3.19)
6. When they started Jazzing there (3.10)
7. La Marseillaise (5.19)
8. Miss Patterson’s (3.29)
9. Oh, Listen to the Band! (5.09)
10. Swinging Sliabh Liag Jigs (3.40)
11. Beautiful Ohio (5.30)

Musicians:

Conor Caldwell (fiddle) – all tracks.
Ryan Molloy (piano/fiddle) – all tracks except track 6.
Ben Castle (clarinet/saxophone) – tracks 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11.
Matthew Jacobson (drums) – tracks 1, 2, 5, 7, 9.
Cathal Ó Curráin (vox/bouzouki/banjo) – tracks 6, 11.
Conal O’Kane (guitars) – track 4.
Dan Byrne McCullough (mandolin/banjo) – 3, 5, 11.

All tracks arr. by Caldwell and Molloy,
except track 6 arr. Ó Curráin and Caldwell.
All tracks traditional except where noted in the liner notes.