Córas Trio

“Córas Trio”

(Coracle Records CR002)

Kevin McCullagh – fiddle, electronics, Paddy McKeown – guitar, electronics, Conor McAuley – drums

Formed in 2022 the Belfast based Córas Trio merges jazz with electronics and Traditional Irish folk music. It’s a unique musical blend that has resulted in them playing prestigious jazz and improvised festivals in addition to supporting leading figures on the folk scene. The trio have also been featured on radio programmes in the UK, Ireland and Australia.

Despite their involvement with improvised and electronic music the members of Córas Trio are also active on Belfast’s seisiun or session scene, informal gatherings where musicians get together to play Irish Traditional Music.

The trio’s website describes their music thus;
“Córas Trio reinvent the spontaneous. Traditional melodies weave in and out of compelling textures that foreground fiddle, guitar and percussion with transcendental electronics; suspending elements of collective free improvisation with proper seisiún style playfulness.
Córas Trio are part of a new creative wave of musicians based in Belfast exploring how traditional music relates to the experience of the 21st century. Challenging ideas of cultural purism, they sweep the lines of contemporary musical practice, unafraid and unapologetic in their exploration of new ideas.”

As the group readily admit their appropriation of Irish Traditional Music within a contemporary musical landscape informed by jazz, improv and electronica has both cultural and political implications.

The majority of the music is improvised and was recorded over the course of two sessions at the Sonic Arts Research Centre in Belfast in July 2023. Although the playing is improvised the recording sessions were preceded by intensive discussions with regard to the shape and form the music would take. The word “ Córas” means “system” and the band cite the influence of artists such as Frank Zappa, Supersilent and The Necks, other improvising musicians who combine spontaneity with an element of pre-planning,  while revelling in the paradoxes that this approach implies.

McCullagh says of the group’s approach;
“Conor and I had been experimenting with trad and improv on fiddle and drums for a while, particularly ideas around flow and chaos theory and fluid dynamics, creating parallel streams of consciousness, independent yet able to influence and inform each other. It made sense to extend the duo into a trio, bringing everyone’s musical language together and trying new things out – not knowing where it will go next, what path it will take to reach its destination”.

The tune titles borrow from Irish Traditional Music and are intended to invoke a sense of place. Opener “Jackie Fitzpatrick’s” establishes the template for the trio’s sound as fiddle melodies inspired by Irish Traditional Music are juxtaposed with guitar and drum / percussion sounds that have their roots in avant garde jazz. The fiddle melodies are hummable, but the guitar and drum parts are far less predictable, giving the music an internal tension. Kevin McCullagh has said of his group’s sound;
“Our music is about all three of us playing in a way that is very personal and true to our own life experiences and letting the music that comes out inform what happens next. We sometimes think of it as being like a river, it can flow in layers and at different rates depending on how deep or shallow the layers are, whether they are diverging around a rock on the riverbed or being obstructed by a felled branch on the surface or whatever. The layers are fairly independent yet they all form part of the same river and are interconnected.”.

“Tommy Peoples’” incorporates melodies written by the great Irish Traditional fiddler Tommy Peoples (1948 – 2018). Also known as “Black Pat’s” this is an atmospheric piece which has something of the feel of a Traditional air about it, but which also makes discrete use of electronica and Bill Frisell like guitar, while drummer McAuley occupies a colourist’s role.

“Eddie and Nancy” contains material by the fiddler Liz Carroll, born in Chicago in 1956 to Irish parents. Introduced by an unaccompanied drum passage from McAuley the piece continues the trio’s blending of avant garde / free improv techniques with Traditional folk melody. The group developed from McCullagh and McAuley’s duo experiments with fiddle and drums and there’s a particularly strong dynamic between the pair here as McCullagh’s folk inspired improvised melodies dance above the polyrhythmic flow of McAuley’s drums. McKeown’s guitar features more prominently in the atmospheric closing section, which also incorporates an element of ambient electronica, with Brian Eno named as yet another of the trio’s numerous influences.

There are more electronically generated atmospherics on “The Heights of Muingvuara”, which also features the distinctive sound of McCullagh’s pizzicato fiddle. He later takes up the bow and leaves the plucking to McKeown, the guitarist deploying extended techniques. The introduction of bowed fiddle and drums gives the music more of a Traditional feel, but still filtered through Córas Trio’s unique prism.

“George White’s” also has something of a Traditional feel, mainly thanks to McCullagh’s fiddle melodies, although McKeown’s guitar atmospherics and McAuley’s consistently inventive drumming soon help to take the music somewhere else, edging closer to the jazz avant garde whilst still retaining an element of beauty and mystery.

McAuley’s cymbals introduce “The Roscommon”, another piece to feature the sound of plucked fiddle. Again McCullagh subsequently picks up the bow, his fiddle melodies underscored by the furtive scuttling of McAuley’s drums. Perhaps the press release that accompanied this album summarises it best;
“With its atonal plucking and irregular rhythms this is Irish Traditional Music taken to the outer reaches, where the spirits of Arnold Schoenberg and Sun Ra play with Sean O’Riada and Tommy Potts, feeling entirely at home in those realms. At once earthly and unearthly”.

Those qualities apply equally to the extraordinary “Julia Delaney’s”, which follows. Here the trio produce remarkable droning sounds, presumably generated by electronically enhanced fiddle. It’s an astonishing and deeply atmospheric sound that is different again to anything else on the album and which has prompted comparisons with the music of the Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek, but which still retains its roots within Irish Traditional Music.

The album concludes with “Boys of Ballisodare”, an equally atmospheric and evocative piece, but one more obviously centred on the Irish folk tradition. As elsewhere the music revolves around the contrasting yet complementary approaches of McCullagh and McAuley as Traditional folk fiddle melodies are juxtaposed with avant garde jazz drumming, with McKeown occupying the middle ground as well as providing additional colour and texture via his guitar and its associated electronics.

The use of folk melodies as a basis for jazz improvisation is not new and the links between the folk and jazz scenes in Scotland is particularly strong. However these folk melodies are normally used as the foundation for a formalised jazz composition with improvised jazz solos. But I haven’t heard anyone else use folk melodies in a totally improvised free jazz context in quite the way that Córas Trio do. It’s a genuinely innovative and unique approach that very much reflects the group’s Belfast origins.

As much as I admire Córas Trio’s adventurous approach I do worry that this is music that might fall between two proverbial stools, too folky for the jazz and improv crowd and too abstract for the folkies. Speaking from the perspective of a jazz loving English outsider this is music that would be very interesting to see being performed live – and it would be even more interesting to see just what kind of audience the trio attracts.

 

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