There is a photograph of the quartet led by the Irish jazz drummer Kevin Brady that makes it look a little like a Scandi death-metal band.
The American keyboardist Bill Carrothers – buzz-cut, beard and steely eye – is decked out in camouflaged military-style hunting jacket. The London-born, Vancouver-raised and Cologne-based saxophonist Seamus Blake, whose father was from Dublin, is peering out over lowered eyebrows with what comes across as a combination of scepticism and menace. Brady, who is dressed, like Blake, all in black, is solemn, glassy-eyed and half in deep shadow. The Irish bassist Dave Redmond, to the rear, looks, as Brady jokes to me, “like he urgently needs to be somewhere else”.
In reality, the group, which works under the banner of the Kevin Brady Electric Quartet – in which Carrothers plays Fender Rhodes electric piano, Redmond switches to electric bass and Brady is increasingly integrating electronic drum percussion – is one of the most acclaimed and ambitious international jazz ensembles working in Ireland.
Formed in 2019, the band combines a highly intuitive and interactive Irish rhythm section that has played together for 20 years or more with two of the most gifted and admired, if sometimes criminally undervalued, musicians in modern jazz.
Carrothers, who is based in Michigan, has a long association with Redmond and Brady – as a piano trio they have released three highly rated studio albums, many featuring Carrothers’s winningly eclectic compositions – and he is renowned for his harmonic elegance, broad musical knowledge and many-sided virtuosity. Blake, a master tenor saxophonist, is a muscular and commanding soloist somewhat in the Michael Brecker and Chris Potter mode, yet with his own elastic sound, advanced sense of lyricism and endlessly inventive style.
The overall result lands in several sweet spots between late-1960s Miles Davis and early-1970s Herbie Hancock: liquid electric postbop with catchy melodies, deep grooves, rhythmic ingenuity, consummate improvisation and a strikingly contemporary edge.
While the group’s multinational nature and heavily in-demand members may make regular creative get-togethers something of a challenge, the Electric Quartet has released one celebrated album, Plan B – “timeless, joyous music that will further burnish the reputations of all concerned”, according to the Irish Times review. Next month the band embarks on one of its rare tours of Ireland, playing seven dates across the island.
Brady is a highly respected musician and teacher. A fluid and versatile drummer with a great sense of swing, he can play anything from funk to free jazz, but he is primarily influenced by some of the pioneering American drummers of the 1950s and 1960s, including Tony Williams, Max Roach, Jimmy Cobb, Art Taylor and Elvin Jones – as well as the irresistible polyrhythms of Afro-Cuban and Brazilian music. “In the 20 years I’ve been coming to Ireland, Kevin’s the best drummer I’ve heard,” Carrothers says.
As a side musician and group anchor, Brady, who is 51, has become exceptionally popular with bands both in Ireland and abroad. At home he has been a crucial member of groups led by the guitarist Tommy Halferty, the pianist Phil Ware and the keyboardist Scott Flanigan, and by the saxophonists Richie Buckley and Meilana Gillard; in addition he has performed and recorded with Irish acts ranging from Van Morrison to the Irish Baroque Orchestra, Gráda to Dave Geraghty of Bell X1.
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Brady has also worked with the English jazz vocalists Norma Winstone and Ian Shaw, the American saxophonist and 1960s James Brown creative force Pee Wee Ellis, and the American guitarist and “godfather of fusion” Larry Coryell, among many others. “I try to bring an emotional response to any music I’m involved in, and an energy,” he says. “I want the music to be active.”
He is also the composer of tight, melodically strong and rhythmically dynamic tunes that defy the lazy commonplace that drummers are there to keep time, not contribute original music. “The idea that if you play drums you’ve got no sense of cop-on with regard to knowing what a scale or a chord or a melody is … I think we’re way past that now,” he says.
We meet in the recital room of Newpark Academy of Music, in Blackrock in south Dublin – “this room has been the venue for masterclasses by many great visiting jazz musicians, including the drummer Art Blakey,” he says – where Brady has been teaching drums for approaching 25 years; he is also head of the jazz programme at the school and lectures on the BA jazz degree course at Dublin City University.
For participants who range from toddlers to final-year secondary students, Newpark is “the gold standard of musical education in Ireland”; founded in 1979, it is a registered charity with 42 staff and 600 students. Hozier is one of its alumni.
Last year, at short notice, it was threatened with closure. Brady was one of the leaders of the campaign that saved the centre; from September the academy will transfer to new, though as yet unannounced, premises nearby.
“I think people saw the importance of what’s been achieved here, both in the past and for the future,” Brady says. “If you start closing down music schools that have legacies like Newpark, then that’s not a world I would like to be living in.”
Brady was born in Dublin. Neither of his parents was a musician, though his father sang in local musical societies, had a large vinyl collection and was a passionate fan of big-band jazz, as well as of the artistry of the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and the singer Sarah Vaughan.
He began private piano lessons at the age of six, progressing through to the highest grades; a couple of years later he began playing trumpet, and later cornet, in a local concert band that sometimes toured Europe.
In his teenage years Brady began playing keyboards in local jam bands, moving to drums “purely by coincidence” when one drummer failed to show for a rehearsal. He began teaching himself, initially falling under the influence of Stewart Copeland, the multifaceted American drummer from The Police, and at 17 began lessons at Newpark with the drummer Conor Guilfoyle.
“I remember Kevin being a really good student with a voracious appetite to learn; like he is now, he was a complete enthusiast,” Guilfoyle says. “He wasn’t playing jazz at this point, more funk and rock, but he had a really good time feel. And that’s essential. It means you can adapt to many different styles of music – and also that good musicians will always want to play with you.”
Increasingly drawn towards jazz – one of the earliest sparks was the present his father gave him for Christmas when he was 13: Wynton Marsalis’s Marsalis Standard Time, Vol 1 – he gave up a place studying classical music at University College Dublin in favour of a life practising, taking private lessons and playing blues and rock gigs.
When he was 22, on Guilfoyle’s advice, he studied for six months at the prestigious Drummers Collective in New York; shortly after he took the year-long newly formed professional musician training course at Newpark set up by Ronan and Conor Guilfoyle. He has never looked back.
Since then, over the past quarter-century or more, he has led an exemplary jazz life in Ireland, albeit one that has not exactly made him wealthy. He has admirably sought to advance his skills by studying with drummers and percussionists in the United States, Cuba and Brazil.
And, from his early 30s, he has led bands and developed a reputation for being enterprising and hardworking, for being the kind of musician who consistently makes things happen. “His determination and discipline towards grant writing and procuring gigs is pretty legendary. He’s a dog on a bone,” Carrothers says.
As a linchpin of the domestic music scene, Brady is also extremely well placed to gauge the state of jazz in Ireland. “I think it’s pretty healthy,” he says, quick as a flash. “Most nights, in Dublin at least, you’re going to be able to hear great live jazz featuring both established and younger musicians.
“But one thing we’re lacking as a major capital in Europe is a government-backed centre for jazz and improvised music,” he adds. “Somewhere with a 300- to 400-seat venue, education and outreach programmes, resources, an archive, all sorts of stuff that would promote and preserve the music. Something like classical music has in the National Concert Hall and trad has with Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann.
[ Newpark Academy of Music saved from closure through licence reprieveOpens in new window ]
“I know the audience is there, 100 per cent. As is the interest in jazz; I can see it in my students. But we need to follow through and take the initiative, take the next step. A dedicated venue would be a massive bonus not just for jazz in Ireland but for the whole country.”
The Kevin Brady Electric Quartet plays the Yeats Building, Sligo, on Sunday, May 4th; Magy’s Farm, Dromara, Co Down, on Monday, May 5th; Riverbank Arts Centre, Newbridge, Co Kildare, on Wednesday, May 7th; Solstice Arts Centre, Navan, on Thursday, May 8th; Wexford Arts Centre on Friday, May 9th; Arthur’s Blues & Jazz Club, Dublin, on Saturday, May 10th; and Triskel Christchurch, Cork, on Friday, May 16th. The Kevin Brady Trio with Bill Carrothers and Dave Redmond plays Bray International Jazz Festival on Friday, May 2nd, and City of Derry Jazz Festival on Saturday, May 3rd
