Jazz Articles about Christy Doran
About Christy Doran
Instrument: Guitar
Article Coverage | Calendar | Albums | Photos | Similar ArtistsChristy Doran's Sound Fountain: Lift The Bar

by Ian Patterson
With four records in as many years Christy Doran's Sound Fountain seems in 2020 to have eclipsed New Bag as the guitarist's going concern. However, just because New Bag hasn't recorded since Elsewhere (Double Moon, 2015) doesn't mean that the band, founded in 1997, won't still make a comeback. After all, who could have foreseen the 2016 return to the road of OM, thirty-four years after Doran, Fredy Studer, Urs Leimgruber and Bobby Burri called time on the seminal Swiss ...
read moreChristy Doran's Sound Fountain: For The Kick Of It

by Ian Patterson
Released shortly before turning seventy, Christy Doran's third outing with Sound Fountain finds the Irish-born, Lucerne-based guitarist playing as well as at any time during his fifty-year career. It marks a blistering return for Doran to electric trio terrain, following the experimentation of 144 Strings for a Broken Chord (Between the Lines, 2018)compositions for twenty electric guitars, four basses and drumsand the uncategorizable, and sonically challenging, Âme Sèche (Leo Records, 2018). The template here is broadly the same as that ...
read moreWalter Fähndrich - Christy Doran - Remo Schnyder - Samuel Wettstein: Âme Sèche

by Glenn Astarita
The literal translation of the album title from French to English looks to be 'soul dryer,' but in reality it could imply something else. Regardless, this international quartet abides by a surfeit of unorthodoxies. And while guitar hero Christy Doran is perhaps well-known to the global avant-jazz, improvisation and jazz fusion audience, the other artists' musical appetites span noise music, classical, jazz, improvisation and a host of cross-bred musical idioms. Nonetheless, the musicians' biographies are well-beyond the scope of this ...
read moreChristy Doran: 144 Strings For A Broken Chord

by Ian Patterson
In a long and distinguished career, Christy Doran has fronted or been a founding member of a number of important jazz-fusion / jazz-rock groups, from the seminal Swiss band OM in the early 1970s, to current outfits New Bag and Sound Fountain. His collaborations with some of the most important jazz artists on both sides of the Atlantic, spanning some forty years, are too numerous to mention. A lesser-known facet of the Ireland-born, Lucerne-based guitarist has been his composing for ...
read moreChristy Doran: Undercurrent - Live at Theater Gutersloh

by Ian Patterson
Irish-born, Lucerne-based guitarist Christy Doran is as versatile as he is prolific. From the beguiling duo collaboration with Chinese pipa virtuoso Yang Jing that was No. 9 (Leo Records, 2013) and the swaggering alt-rock of New Bag's Mesmerized (Double Moon Records, 2013) to Bunter Hund's genre-busting, accordion-cum-guitar driven Walkin' The Dog (Unit Records 2014) and the experimental electro-acoustic Kontaktchemie (Boomslang Records, 2016) with drummer Alfred Vogel, Doran's music is nothing if not a moveable feast. Undercurrent--the fourteenth in a series ...
read moreChristy Doran: Undercurrent - Live at Theater Gutersloh

by Glenn Astarita
This release by acclaimed Irish-Swiss guitarist Christy Doran (Tim Berne, Carla Bley, Pierre Favre) denotes volume 14 of the European Jazz Legends series, all performed at the German venue, Theater Gutersloh. With the trio Sound Fountain, Doran synthesizes his mega-talented musical persona, along with nods to one of his primary influences, Jimi Hendrix. Indeed, the audience was most appreciative as the trio opens the set with a capacious walking blues motif on You'd Never Know You Know," where ...
read moreChristy Doran: In The Corner Of The Eye

by Glenn Astarita
Celebrated Irish guitarist Christy Doran's penchant to keep reinventing his musical self is quite evident due to the disparate bands and solo projects he's undertaken for several decades. Whether imparting a jazz fusion spin on Jimi Hendrix with the band Call Me Helium Plays the Music of Jimi Hendrix (Double Moon, 2005) or experimental jazz and improvisational efforts with keyboardist John Wolf Brennan and other notables, Doran's hefty discography yields a kaleidoscopic perspective. The program on In The ...
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