MacD on Music: All that jazz (again)

Derry has long history with Jazz, tracing back decades and continuing to the present day, with our annual Jazz Festival bringing visitors and artists from all around the world to our fine city.

For a more complete history of Jazz in Derry, see my column last year on the festival. Alternatively, get the book ‘City of Music’ in Little Acorns Bookshop in Great James Street. In fact, just do the second one. That’s where most of my information came from anyway.

These days, Bennigan’s is the home of Derry Jazz, hosting live music on Saturday evenings, and this week I’m talking to one of their key players, Meilana Gillard, ahead of the release of their self-titled debut album on the 20th of this month.

I met Meilana recently to talk about the album and about her own musical history: “I’d heard the saxophone on pop records and I was like ‘What is that thing? I like that sound’.

“When I was ten and a half, almost eleven, it was time to pick a band instrument at school and I wanted to play the tenor saxophone specifically, and it was as big as me basically. I wasn’t playing an alto. You couldn’t tell me ‘No’, and my mom was like, ‘why not a flute?’.

“When I was thirteen I was in High School, and we only had enough people to have a big band. We had a really unique situation where we basically went to school every day and played a gig.

“There was this 400-chart dance band book with Mingus and Bassie and Ellington, and all these composers and they were all numbered. We’d come and play the set down. I was getting this experience that other kids weren’t getting. I started playing gigs when I was sixteen, subbing in bands in the Columbus, Ohio area and then started doing gigs on my own.”

Next, we moved onto the RBG Trio: “The trio got together in 2019. I was called to do a gig down in Dublin, and the trio that I’d been working with weren’t available for it, so I called Kevin Brady, a fantastic drummer in Dublin and Dave Redmond, a fantastic bass player.

“I’d been wanting to work with the two of them, and I just didn’t really have the opportunity so I was like ‘I’ll give them a call’ and see if they’re free for this gig. It was such an easy experience. It felt so natural. There was no rehearsing. We called some tunes.

“Some standards and some originals I’d told them about. It was just such a good time playing. A couple of months later they were going to be going to Mexico City and the pianist they were meant to have in their trio couldn’t make it so they asked me if I’d want to come and do that trio.

“We went to Mexico City to the Euro Jazz Festival, and it was such a good experience, and I knew I just wanted to keep playing with them more. We all were in high school in the nineties and grew up with Pixies, Nirvana, Soundgarden, so we would cover a lot of tunes that we just liked the melodies to because in a trio it’s very open.

“You don’t have somebody doing chords on guitar or piano. It’s such an open sound that it really focuses on the melody. Those tunes like ‘Lithium’ or ‘Black Hole Sun’, ‘Come As You Are’, ‘Heart Shaped Box’, things like that. They work so well as a trio. We improvised with it, but we all write for the band as well.

“Me and Dave Redmond wrote almost an equal number of tunes for the record and Kevin Brady wrote one. There’s one fully improvised track on there, ‘Deep Blue’. We did a few free tunes but that was the one we liked and that made it on.”

Meilana and the RBG Trio’s debut album is out on the 20th September and is available on their Bandcamp page. They’ll be playing a gig on the 23rd in Bennigan’s.

Now, onto other business. As well as the RBG Trio’s gig, the 23rd September also sees the legendary John Robb’s book tour stop at Little Acorns Bookshop. Robb is a TV and radio presenter, musician (vocalist and bass player for The Membranes and vocalist for Goldblade), journalist (he was the first person to interview Nirvana, while working for ‘Sounds’), inventor of the term ‘Britpop’ and, of course, author.

“His most recent book, ‘The Art of Darkness-The History of Goth’. The book, a deep dive into the history of the subject, starts with the fall of Rome and ends with Instagram and TikTok influencers, with stops through Lord Byron, European Folk Tales, Indian Sadhus, Gothic architecture, Romantic poets, philosophers and idealists, moving and thriving to the dark end of the sixties youthquake and finally blooming like Baudelaire’s ‘Les Fleurs Du Mal’ in the post-punk era.

John Robb will be in Little Acorns Bookshop on September 23, the same day the RBG Trio play Bennigan’s.

John Robb can be found on Instagram @johnrobb77, Meilana Gillard @meilanamusic, the RBG Trio @rbgtrio, Bennigan’s @bennigans.bar and more information about Little Acorns Bookshop can be found on Facebook.