Ronan Guilfoyle: Blog

It’s a rare luxury to be able to play and stay in the same place. Tonight we played for the Triskel Arts Centre, but not at the Triskel Arts Centre. They’re having a new theatre built at the moment and are holding their concerts in Jury’s Hotel. We were also put up by them in the hotel – in fact we’ve been here since yesterday – another luxury! It’s so great to stay two nights in the same place when you’re on the road, it’s like a holiday. And this is a really nice hotel too, very comfortable and with 4 Star standards.

But though it’s like a holiday to stay two nights here, it’s also not like a holiday in that I spent a lot of the day in the room taking care of various business stuff. The internet is great in some ways (for example being able to post this blog...........) but in other ways it’s a drag since your work follows you around. Anyway, I took a break from that at lunchtime had lunch in a very nice French patisserie, and went to the English Market – the famous food market in the centre of town. For a foodie like me the English Market is a paradise – I could spend hours there and I wish I lived closer to it – there’s really nothing like this in Dublin. And the patisserie was good too.

In fact, much to my amazement on this trip, I find that I like Cork! I say much to my amazement because for years I’ve not been fond of this town – principally because of some bad experiences at the Cork Jazz Festival in the early years – drunken mobs roaming the streets, being gouged by local shops and restaurants during festival time, playing in less than optimal conditions. As the years went by my playing situations got better there, (particularly when playing at the Triskel) and I had some really good musical experiences over the years, but the damage was done – I always associated Cork with bad experiences, it was a gut reaction rather than anything rational.

But on this trip I really enjoyed the city – it has a certain faded charm that Dublin doesn’t have, and there are some really nice little neighbourhoods up on the hill that almost have a country feel to them even though they’re in the city. And there’s some very good food here too! And the city can look really nice at night as well – looks like I’ve become a convert to Cork!

As to the gig tonight – the biggest problem with it was the room. A hotel function room, it was a carpeted acoustic-less box, very dry sound. I use an Acoustic Image amp, a great design where the bass speaker is in the bottom of the amp and fires downwards onto the floor. It therefore uses the floor as a sounding board, dispersing the bass sound across a wide area. This works great on most surfaces, especially wood, but carpet – such as there was in this room – kills it. I managed to get a wooden box and sit the amp on it and this helped, but the sound still hadn’t much body to it and I found this to be a bit constraining. Sound is everything really, and if you’re not getting the sound you want, and like, then it’s hard to perform at maximum effectiveness. So I had to work a bit harder tonight to get it going, but we still managed to play some good music – there was one improvisation in particular, that started with Jim bowing the cymbals, that I particularly liked. The crowd wasn’t so big tonight, but were very enthusiastic, (Triskel audiences are always good in this regard), so that was good. I even sold a CD! I must admit I’m the worst CD salesman in the world – I even forgot to announce that I had CDs for sale. And since the trio only tours every couple of years you’d imagine I’d be a bit more efficient at using the sales opportunity presented by this tour  - but no, I admit it – I suck at being a travelling salesman. Better stick to the day job.............