Jazz Articles about Ronan Guilfoyle

About Ronan Guilfoyle

Album Review

Ronan Guilfoyle's Bemusement Arcade: At Swing, Two Birds

Read "At Swing, Two Birds" reviewed by Ian Patterson

by Ian Patterson
May 13, 2025

If there were Grammys for the most punning name for a jazz band, or for the most enigmatic album title, then Irish bassist Ronan Guilfoyle could well bag a brace. The title of the wonderfully coined Bemusement Arcade's debut album is a wordplay on Irish humorist Flann O'Brien's At Swim Two Birds (Longman Green & Co., 1939) --a wild and woolly work of satirical postmodern metafiction beloved by existential philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, writer Aldous Huxley and rock 'n' blues guitarist ...

Album Review

Ronan Guilfoyle: Hands

by Ian Patterson
January 21, 2016

In a thirty-year career as a leader, Irish bassist Ronan Guilfoyle has built an international reputation as a rhythmically advanced musician and a sophisticated, challenging composer. From indo-jazz suites to contemporary classical music (composed and improvised) and from extended works inspired by the writings of Samuel Beckett and James Joyce to suites for jazz guitar trio and string quartet, Guilfoyle's music draws from a large and diverse vocabulary. His small jazz ensembles, however, often provide the setting for his most ...