Hugh Buckley is one of Dublin’s best known Jazz Guitarists. Over many years he became somewhat of an institution for jazz guitar in Ireland. As a mostly self-taught player is style is unique and deeply rooted in the origins of Jazz while constantly striving for modern sounds and inspirations. As the founder of the well-known Dublin Guitar Night, Hugh’s reach spread outside the Jazz scene. In this episode Hugh talks about the history of Jazz in Dublin. His own development as a musician and the way he learned music and playing jazz in a very practical way, on the band stand.
Dublin Guitar Duets is a video series aiming to portrait, promote and archive as many as possible Jazz guitarists living and performing in the greater Dublin area. I started this project inspired by “The Seasons” project from by Ben Wendel. I love his approach of combining the promotion of his own new compositions while at the same time showcasing other musicians he likes working with. I feel sometimes we easily fall into a “me against them” attitude regarding other musicians.
A healthy portion of competition of course is great for the development of every scene but I feel we should never forget that we are all together in the aim of creating beautiful music to enrich our and other people’s lives. Therefore this project features guitarists I love and personally would find very interesting to talk to. I hope this can spark people’s interest in the featured artists and maybe even result to better attendance at gigs or awareness of their music in general!
I’m aiming to keep the conversations and duet parts at the end as honest as possible. Not many second takes or too much editing. Just the closest you can come to an actual conversation. Partially because this series should also have an archival character.
Dublin for many years had one of the greatest jazz guitarists of all time performing on a weekly basis: Louis Stewart. Since he sadly passed away recently, I thought it’s a shame that there wasn’t more material of him anywhere in terms of interviews etc. I hope this series can help the people I portrait as well as the community in general and of course for me it is great to hang out with all those guys and play with them.
