Christy Doran: in The Corner Of The Eye

For forty years, Irish-born, Lucerne-based guitarist Christy Doran has recorded prolifically for numerous labels. Inevitably perhaps, many of his earlier works are out of print, so it's cause for celebration that this release brings together the very best of Phoenix (hat Art, 1990) and What a Band (hat Art, 1992), two long-neglected yet essential Doran recordings.

The majority of Doran's releases have been with bands, from the seventies jazz-rock/free jazz group OM to New Bag, his main working group of the past two decades. Yet Doran's five-decade-long discography is peppered with outstanding solo and duo recordings.

Phoenix—duo collaborations with Ray Anderson, Hank Roberts, Marty Ehrlich and Urs Leimgruber—and What a Band, a stunning acoustic/electric solo adventure, represent some of the most visceral, experimental and lyrical performances in Doran's distinguished career.

It can't have been an easy task to select just half the tracks from those two releases for this compilation, but the end product gives a fascinating insight into a more intimate side of Doran's artistry.

Don't confuse intimate with relaxed, however, for the solo acoustic tracks represented here—the orchestral ambition of "Solomutations" and the fiery "In the Corner of the Eye" -are pure exhilaration. The former, underpinned by a throbbing metronomic riff, sees Doran utilize loops and delay effects in a thrilling and at times ambient excursion reminiscent of Ralph Towner. On the latter, Doran exhibits fretwork as charged as anything John McLaughlin—an undoubted influence—has ever committed to record.

"McLaughlin? Yes of course," acknowledges Doran. "I used to listen to Extrapolation (Marmalade Records, 1969), My Goals Beyond (Douglas Records, 1971) and his playing with Tony Williams's Lifetime and Miles Davis. He was a great influence." Both numbers are, in a sense, snapshots in time: "My playing has changed a lot, of course," admits Doran. "I don't think I could play them like that again." Though Doran has since returned to the solo acoustic format, notably on the CD/DVD Acoustic Isles (Creative Works Records, 2006)—a bold audio-visual experiment with Susanne Dubs—these days, the acoustic format remains something of an occasional diversion.

"It's a really different instrument," says Doran. "To be able to invent new things on the acoustic guitar, at the moment at least, seems more difficult for me because everything has been played already. There's a bigger field with the electric guitar." Doran certainly pulls no punches on electric guitar, evidenced by his searing solo interpretation of the traditional Irish folk song "She Moved Through the Fair," where his tortured feedback and crying lines can't help but evoke Jimi Hendrix's performance of "The Star Spangled Banner" at Woodstock.

"Hendrix was and still is an influence," admits Doran. "He had a uniquely personal sound and the solo thing he played at Woodstock, "The Star Spangled Banner," is one of the great anti-war tunes—one of the most spectacular I've ever seen."

The haunting "Celtic Ballad"—with renowned avant-garde saxophonist Marty Ehrlich at his most lyrical—is another nod to Doran's Hibernian roots; Doran's father was a well-known balladeer in County Wicklow and his mother was an accordionist. With just a little imagination, Doran and Ehrlic's caressing sound sculpture could hail from Irish balladry as old as the Wicklow Mountains.

On the brooding "Beyond Worlds," Ehrlich's clarinet dovetails with Doran's tumbling, blues-inflected acoustic lines, the two voices eventually fading in quasi-psychedelic union. While much of the collaborative music on the album has an improvised feel, instead the tracks with Ehrlich sound more through-composed: "I was on tour with Marty for eighteen concerts, with the car up and down Germany," explains Doran, "so the compositions were able to go further. The cascade of the tunes are more defined."

Doran sails closest to the jazz tradition on "The Warm Up" with trombonist Ray Anderson, although their boppish unison lines soon give way to simultaneous soloing of an altogether less codified nature.

On the episodic "Seven Shadows" and the celebratory "Lou Yuri" Doran is joined by versatile cellist Hank Roberts, a mainstay of Bill Frisell's projects over the years. These two tunes—flights of grace and gravitas in equal measure—were recorded with minimum fuss when Doran and Roberts happened to coincide in Stuttgart one day. "It was very spontaneous, pretty much first takes really," recalls Doran. "Hank has great ears. He doesn't close you in."

The same could be said for Doran—a most generous leader who's always open to the unexpected.

The final cut, "Spirale," is by some distance the most outré of the collection. This extended free-form exploration pitches Doran and Urs Leimgruber into a rarefied world of sonic manipulations that are primal and tender in turn.

The pair first locked horns in the early 1970s, along with Fredy Studer and Bobby Burri, in the legendary Swiss jazz-rock/free jazz group OM, which reconvened, following a twenty five-year hiatus, in 2007. Suffice it to say, the two are on the same wavelength.

"I remember I came back from New York that day and went directly to the studio in Zurich," Doran recalls. "Urs came and we just improvised for an hour or so. That was the most spectacular tune."

Despite the passage of time what's most striking about In the Corner of the Eye is just how innovative Doran's music sounds today, a quarter of a century later. In The Corner of the Eye is a thrilling affirmation of Doran's status as one of contemporary music's most significant acoustic and electric guitarists—on either side of the Atlantic.

Liner Notes copyright © 2024 Ian Patterson.

In The Corner Of The Eye can be purchased here.

Contact Ian Patterson at All About Jazz.
Ian is dedicated to the promotion of jazz and all creative music all over the world, and to catching just a little piece of it for himself.

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