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Chris Guilfoyle
Chris is an up and coming guitar player on the Dublin jazz scene. He grew up in a musical family where his father Ronan Guilfoyle and uncle Conor Guilfoyle are household names in the Irish jazz scene. He has studied at Berklee College of Music - where he was awarded a scholarship from Fender Guitars and the Jazz and Improvised Music Salzburg conference in Austria. Chris was also selected to represent his college at the International Association of Schools of Jazz in The Netherlands in July 2010. In August 2011, Chris was accepted to study at Dave Liebman’s Chromatic Harmony Workshop in Stroudsburg Pennsylvania, USA. Since graduating, Chris has been actively performing in the Dublin music scene as well as abroad. In November 2011 he performed in Paris with Ronan Guilfoyle’s Lingua Franca as part of the Festival Jazzy Colours; in October 2011 he performed on a 3 day tour of Ireland with Dave Liebman, Ronan Guilfoyle and Finnish drummer Jussi Lehtonen; In March 2011 he performed with the great drummer Ralph Peterson in Dublin and in February 2011 he played with Greek pianist/organist George Contrafouris at the National Concert Hall in Dublin.
Chris also leads his own group Umbra, a quintet featuring some of the most promising musicians in the country who play all original compositions and Oxygen Thief, a new project aiming to expand the vocabulary of the jazz guitar trio. He also plays as a sideman in 3G (Ronan Guilfoyle, Conor Guilfoyle, Chris Guilfoyle), Kevin Higgins’ Nature, Aleka and The Long Way Around. Chris also produces electronic music under the name Exit Introvert. Currently, Chris is part of the guitar and ensemble faculty of Newpark Music Centre’s jazz performance degree where he teaches 1st, 2nd and 3rd year guitar as well as 2nd and 3rd year ensembles.
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Ronan Guilfoyle's Bemusement Arcade: At Swing, Two Birds

by Ian Patterson
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 ...
Continue ReadingAleka Potinga: Romania: Songs Of Love And Longing

by Ian Patterson
You can take singer/cellist Aleka Potinga out of Romania, but you cannot take Romania out of her musical soul. Classically trained in Bucharest, and Dublin-based since 2012, Potinga has slotted into the city's fluid jazz/improvised music scenes, working with Izumi Kimura, Ronan Guilfoyle, Tommy Halferty and Cello Ireland. Her debut album Person I Knew (Self-Produced, 2019) featured imaginative interpretations of modern jazz classics by Wayne Shorter, Thelonious Monk and Bill Evans. Prior to that, her debut EP Aleka (EM, 2016) ...
Continue ReadingUmbra: West

by Ian Patterson
American road trips have long inspired writers, from Jack Kerouac, John Steinbeck and Tom Wolfe, to Hunter S. Thompson, Robert M. Pirsig and Bill Bryson. Fewer are the extended works, similarly inspired, written by musicians. Some things, it seems, may be easier put into words. Umbra's West is inspired by founding member Chris Guilfoyle's 2017 road trip, as evidenced through the song titles, through North America's Western states to Canada. It marks Umbra's full debut, but can be seen as ...
Continue ReadingMatch&Fuse Dublin 2017

by Ian Patterson
Match&Fuse Dublin 2017 dlr Lexicon, Dun Loaghaire, Dublin, Ireland September 16, 2017 We are Rocky Road and we've existed since Wednesday," bassist Anneleen Boheme announced to the Saturday afternoon audience of the first Match&Fuse festival to be held in Ireland. Well, we're used to pop-up shops after all, so why not pop-up improvised music? Match&Fuse was conceived by London musician/promoter Dave Morecroft in 2011 as a festival and touring project to promote ...
Continue ReadingUmbra: Umbra

by Ian Patterson
Dublin guitarist/composer Chris Guilfoyle's Umbra has been around for half a decade, so its debut album can be seen as the product of patience and endurance. Critically acclaimed performances at the IMC's Down With Jazz and 12 Points festivals, as well as Bray Jazz, have helped raise the band's profile, but with band members not always residing in the same country, gigs have been too infrequent and tours too short for a combo of such evident talents. Forty minutes of ...
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