Jazz Articles about Christy Doran

About Christy Doran

Album Review

In 1982, after five albums in ten years, Swiss free-jazz quartet OM called it a day—its four members, Christy Doran, Fredy Studer, Urs Leimgruber and Bobby Burri going their separate ways. A supposed one-off reunion in 2007 to open an exhibition on the youth movement of the 1960s and 1970s led to a successful series of festivals appearances on home turf. Those concerts resulted in the live album Willisau (Intakt Records, 2010), a return to OM's improvisational heartland, and signalled ...

Album Review

Christy Doran's Sound Fountain: Lift The Bar

Read "Lift The Bar" reviewed by Ian Patterson

by Ian Patterson
May 6, 2020

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 ...

Album Review

Christy Doran's Sound Fountain: For The Kick Of It

Read "For The Kick Of It" reviewed by Ian Patterson

by Ian Patterson
July 13, 2019

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 drums—and the uncategorizable, and sonically challenging, Âme Sèche (Leo Records, 2018). The template here is broadly the same as that ...

Album Review

Walter Fähndrich - Christy Doran - Remo Schnyder - Samuel Wettstein: Âme Sèche

Read "Âme Sèche" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
December 14, 2018

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 ...

Album Review

Christy Doran: 144 Strings For A Broken Chord

Read "144 Strings For A Broken Chord" reviewed by Ian Patterson

by Ian Patterson
August 24, 2018

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 ...

Album Review

Christy Doran: Undercurrent - Live at Theater Gutersloh

Read "Undercurrent - Live at Theater Gutersloh" reviewed by Ian Patterson

by Ian Patterson
June 24, 2018

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 ...

Album Review

Christy Doran: Undercurrent - Live at Theater Gutersloh

Read "Undercurrent - Live at Theater Gutersloh" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
May 9, 2018

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 ...