Ronan Guilfoyle: Blog

Today was mostly about food - at least the beginning and the end of it. It started off badly enough, for me anyway, with one of those dire 'cooked breakfast' things at Jury's Inn in Limerick. God knows the traditional Irish breakfast is not exactly a healthy option at the best of times, but the places where you can order your bacon/sausage/egg etc and then it's cooked for you, are fast disappearing. Instead the stuff is cooked in vast batches and left to sweat in its own juices and harden under lights, so that you're left with bacon that's as hard as a bullet and nearly cold, eggs that are overdone and tasteless sausages, everything covered with a layer of grease. Grim. I like an occasional Irish Breakfast - I never eat it at home - while on the road in Ireland,  but really I need to be more careful about where I order it..........

And then it was off to UCC in Cork for a workshop - boosted by the discovery of a very decent coffee and flapjack in a local Centra! An hour and a half to Cork, with the usual music talk leavened on this occasion by rhythm practice (should probably be illegal while driving) and geeky software discussion. On arrival at UCC Jim and I went off in search of a pre-workshop sandwich and encountered that usual mixture of charmingly delivered yet confusing directions by local people when we asked where the nearest shop was. But eventually we found it and returned with the trophy of an egg salad sandwich, some brown bread and some local smoked cheese. Just time to wolf it down then we did the workshop, literally wiping the crumbs from our lips.

This was a different workshop to the one in Newpark the day before – the students here are doing a music performance degree, and are not necessarily focussing on jazz, quite unlike the hard-core jazzers we had the day before in Newpark. So it’s hard to know how to pitch what you’re doing to an audience like this. But it went well enough – we opened up by improvising a piece and then taking questions. The students were pretty shy generally, but a few good questions opened up a few avenues for us to explore, which we duly did and the whole thing went off pretty well. All of us have clear opinions about why we do what we do and the choices we make as improvisers, so there’s never much problem filling in the time at a workshop like this. And I love to hear the guys talk about their take on how they work – Jim did a particularly interesting rap on the possibilities of dealing with completely controlled elements in music and with random elements. I hope the students enjoyed that as much as I did!

I posted a couple of photos from the day on my Facebook page - here

And the day ended with food as well – this time more happily than it began – in  Isaac’s restaurant in Cork city. I’ve eaten here a few times, usually during the Cork Jazz Festival, and it’s always been good, and not too expensive. This time most of the conversation between the three of us was about food – all three of us are very interested in food and so we passed a very pleasant couple of hours talking about food and eating good food – sometimes it’s good being a musician!