American drummer Eoghan McCloskey heads up a new quintet, Emergent Ensemble, that aims to strengthen the burgeoning Dublin Jazz scene’s love of soulful grooves.
Irish born, Texas raised, drummer Eoghan McCloskey is on a mission, a quest to celebrate the under-appreciated nuggets of the post/hard bop era of jazz which, in its heyday – and its most commercial – was selling lots of records before whippersnappers like Elvis and The Beatles changed the course of popular music forever.
Emerging in the 1950’s, Hard bop is a style of jazz that came about as a response to the more complex, cool, and cerebral sounds of earlier bebop and cool jazz. It brought jazz back to a deeper groove, drawing heavily from blues, gospel, and rhythm & blues. Acts like Art Blakey, Horace Silver, Lee Morgan and Sonny Rollins are among its most famous exponents and tunes like the all time classics Moanin, The Sidewinder, Song for My Father, Blues Walk and Dat Dere are amongst the most recognisable in music, each song being endlessly sampled and reimagined by the doyens of rap, hip hop, acid jazz and funk since their original release.
The hard bop pioneers sought to bring jazz back to the audiences, to make music that was memorable, catchy and riff laden. They achieved this with a unique combination of accessibility and experimentation, most notably on Lee Morgan’s The Sidewinder, the 1964 hit which crossed over to pop audiences and helped revitalize Blue Note Records. Its funky, danceable title track became an unexpected radio hit, charting on the pop and R&B lists, a huge success that not only made Morgan a star but also stabilized Blue Note financially, influencing many contemporaries to explore soul-jazz grooves.
One of Hard Bop’s essential ingredients is its accessibility and McCloskey is keen to bring Jazz out of the cliques and onto the radar of general ‘gig-goers’.
“I was talking to people who say, I never listen to jazz but I really dig you guys, so I’ve always been curious about how we reach those people. How do we tap into those people? Because I think, if more of those people can see jazz live, it would really turn them on to it. There’s this weird cultural thing, where you wouldn’t necessarily want to just wander into a jazz club. There’s all these attitudes about not having a music degree to enjoy it but I’ve always felt that this period of jazz in particular is a good gateway for people who might be curious about jazz.
There was a group of people who were taking a really high level of musicianship – because they were brought up in the bebop tradition – but they were also really interested in forms of music that were starting to become popular. Things like R&B and gospel, soul, rock and they were figuring out how to mix in all these influences, and to make it appeal to people who were just into music, not necessarily just Jazz heads. So I always thought that playing that kind of music live with that kind of mindset might be a good way to really turn on more people to Jazz who might not have tried it out before.”
McCloskey moved to Dublin in 2022, a return as he was born here but moved to San Angelo, a small town in West Texas as a kid and that’s where the story really begins. “I started playing drums when I was 10, so I was already doing a lot of music in San Angelo. I came up in the metal scene, if you can believe that. I started in underground, extreme metal and played that for a long time. But, when I got to Austin, it’s such a bigger, more diverse scene, I started getting exposed to a lot of different kinds of music, and obviously there’s a really high level of musicianship there.
That’s when I started to get into things like prog and fusion and eventually Jazz, and I was doing a lot of session work and taking all kinds of different gigs. So yeah, that’s really where I got a lot more serious about drumming and music. I spent the guts of 20 years in Austin before I moved to Ireland in 2022, so I’ve really just been kind of trying to establish my career over here.”
The Dublin Jazz scene is on a buzz at the moment with a genuinely mouthwatering selection of top class sessions happening citywide in hotspots like O’Regans and Luckys, along with the long established bastions like Arthur’s etc.
“There’s some wonderful players here, like honestly players that I would put up against anybody anywhere, you know. And there’s a really cool kind of energy here, because it’s still kind of a new scene. I feel like there’s a lot of — you might call it, like, entrepreneurial energy. Like a lot of gigs are people just going around to pubs, just asking if they want to start doing a Jazz night and then kind of building it. So there’s a real kind of DIY energy to it. Whereas in a more established scene, you might have a lot of jazz clubs where there’s like established gigs and residencies and stuff.
Here, there’s like this energy that you kind of have to build it, you kind of have to create the opportunities you want. And that’s a really cool kind of energy to be around. It’s really kind of inspiring, you know. Another thing I’ve noticed here is a lot of young people are interested in learning about it and bringing their perspectives to it. That’s a really good sign for the scene.”
Where does a drummer from Texas fit into all of this?
“Yeah, that’s a good question. I mean, I guess I’m still kind of trying to find my place here. You know, I obviously didn’t go through Newpark or DCU or any of those and, actually, didn’t go through any kind of academic programme. I’m self-taught so that’s a little bit rare in the jazz world. So I think that kind of gives me a little bit of a different perspective, just because I kind of had to figure all this stuff out on my own. But yeah, I’ve just kind of networked everywhere I can, I’ve played Arthur’s a bunch, and I go to the jam there a lot.
The club that Hayley (Kavanagh) runs is a wonderful resource for the scene here. The Pizza Jazz in Luckys, the O’Regan’s thing that has been going on for a while. I’ve gotten to know a lot of people, done some sessions, and some gigs, but yeah, like I said, I feel like I’m still kind of a newcomer here. I’m still kind of trying to find a footing and hopefully this project will be it.
Emergent Ensemble is this idea I’ve had forever that I wanted to play some of these tunes from that hard bop era that I love. I’m so obsessed with this era that I’m buying records all the time from this period. It’s a really prolific period. People were putting out records, like 3 or 4 records a year. It’s incredible, you know. And when I was going through them, I noticed that there were songs that a lot of people play to this day, because they became standards, but the deepcuts, the other tracks on the album that never became standards, to me a lot of those were just as good as the ones that became legendary. Sometimes they were even better. So I thought man, it’d be a fun idea for a project to go through and pick out some of these obscure tunes that nobody really remembers, put them in a live band.
The stars aligned for me to be able to do this band the way that I wanted to all these years; I’ve got Hayley Kavanagh on sax, Bill Blackmore on Trumpet, Scott Flanigan, on piano, and Cormac O’Brien on bass. So, it’s a stellar band. I’m so stoked that they all said yes.”
Emergent Ensemble’s upcoming shows are listed below but the reality of jazz is that it has to be experienced live?
“It is, I mean, that’s what that’s what made me fall in love with it. My dad, the whole time I was growing up, lived in a town called Santa Cruz in California. So, we would go to visit him and Santa Cruz has one of the most famous jazz venues in America, The Kuumbwa Jazz Center and so way before I was even interested in jazz — way before I was even interested in music, really — he would take us to gigs there and I would sit, you know, three feet away from the drummer and just be floored, just absolutely floored.
And it’s true, obviously there are tons of great jazz records, but when you’re there, when you see the interaction, when you see it happen in real-time, when you see a performance — that’s completely different from how it’s done on the record, just because that’s the mood they were in that day. And that’s what’s really magical about it. Makes it feel like every performance is something really novel and special and unique and that’s the environment where an audience can be bitten by that bug.”
Words: John Brereton
Emergent Ensemble play Wednesday, 3rd June – Kaleidoscope Night at Bello Bar, 8pm
Saturday, 20th June – Arthur’s Blues & Jazz Club, 9pm
Thursday, 30th July – Venue TBD
