Magical Dog 21/07/2023
The day began with manual labour. Shovels and wheelbarrows. Running mounds of earth up ramps into trailers. It ended with hardcore jazz fusion. Electric guitars with no headstocks. Stacked keyboards. All the possible notes in the musical vocabulary delivered at a furious rate of speed.
And to be honest, I don’t know which took more out of me.
The kind of rock fusion that was served up in the 1970s by the likes of John McLaughlin, Steve Grossman, Jan Hammer etc. is to put it politely… challenging. And that’s the point. It was boundary pushing, genre expanding, fretboard melting stuff. It’s not exactly something that you’d have on in the background whilst you read the Sunday papers with your trusty dog at your slipper covered feet.
Or maybe it is. People get up to all sorts of weirdness these days. Whatever makes you happy, but just keep it to yourself. Alright?
But back to the point, the music is intense. The moments of rest are few, the gaps for silence are scarce and it is loud. And yet, 70-odd people braved their way through the rain-soaked streets to come and experience it. I don’t think I’m wrong in saying that all of them came away with minds expanded and hair blown back from the sonic force. (Unless they were bald. In which case they had to make do with mind expansion).
Shane O’Donovan graced the stage for a second week in a row, this time with a bigger drumkit. A drumkit FIT FOR FUSION. It’s fair to say that it got put through its paces. Also in the band were Derek Whyte on bass and Darragh O’Kelly on keys, who we’ve hosted previously as part of the Dirty Jazz Club. The Dirty Jazz Club gig was a personal favourite of mine, and it was an absolute pleasure to have the guys back. New to the stage was guitar virtuoso Joe O’Callaghan, who braved potential death along the entire length of Ireland’s rain-soaked motorway network to make it to the club from County Clare!
I don’t think it’s possible to really do a ‘soft’ introduction to this kind of music. There’s no point in tip-toeing around its insanity or extreme nature. Thankfully the guys didn’t bother. After a short introduction from Scott, the crowd, myself, and whoever was on the street below got blasted with the full force of Magical Dog. The drums were like perfectly rhythmic funk cannons, firing in lock-step with Derek Whyte’s bass which ran and ran, winding its way through octaves and modes. Never far behind, (or in front) was the double instrument mastery of Darragh O’Kelly, lifting off with synth and keys, taking us into cosmic orbit.
Cutting through it all was the effect-laden, twenty-notes-a-second guitar work of Joe O’Callaghan, who was so busy playing impossible amounts of riffage that he didn’t even have time to put a headstock on his guitar. Or maybe he did at a stage, but it just fell off from all the abuse.
When the set ended with a perfectly interpreted rendition of Trilogy by John McLaughlin, I felt through my pockets for a cigarette before remembering that I don’t smoke. It had been intense. Borderline transcendent at times. And I needed a lie down.
But if this is what great music requires of us, then so what? Forget your ignorable playlists of “Music to relax and study to”.
Sometimes you need a smash over the head with a sonic sledgehammer to remember that you’re alive and that music is there to be experienced. I think there’s close to a hundred people who were in attendance that would agree with me.
Until Next week,
Richard Brown
(Resident Monkey with a typewriter and sound guy at Scott’s Jazz Club)
