Chris Guilfoyle is one of Dublin’s most exiting guitar players. Best known for his work with his own band Umbra as well as for collaborations with his father, Ronan Guilfoyle, and as a Band member of Aleka Potinga’s group. Chris mixes extraordinary technical ability with a deep understanding of the music and forward thinking, modern rhythmic concepts. In this episode Chris talks about playing with jazz greats like Dave Liebman or Eric Ineke as well as his own evolution as a player and educator at DCU.
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.
