A new night in Portobello focuses on experimental musicians

Four bands cycled through the stage at the underground candle-lit Bello Bar in Portobello last Thursday.

It was the first outing for Off Grid Fusion, a new monthly night given over to experimental artists.

Each event is to focus on the fusion of different genres, they wrote in their promotional material.

For this first event, the artists each brought their own flair – some were instrumental, others with vocalists, but they were united by a jazzy element, said Shaun Garry, who performed and also helped curate the set with Mikey Fowler of Skyrocket Promotions.

"That was my first set with that line-up of the band,” said David Eamon, who heads his band which performed. 

It was fantastic, he said. “I think that was probably the best set of my music we've played overall." 

“I came for the music,” said Sarah Lee, who was standing at the back of the venue just before David Eamon’s band came on.

Attendees were a mix of friends of band members, people alone, young and old, many not drinking, just there for the show.

Off Grid Fusion

It’s hard to pin down Mount Pyrus, said Finn Smyth who leads the band with Mabel Thew.  

“I wouldn't go as far to say that Mount Pyrus is a jazz band, to be honest, it has elements of it,” he said.

Smyth studied jazz at Dublin City University. He and some peers played on Thursday. 

The structure of the performance was loose-ish, he said. Maybe that is jazzy, but it wasn’t really jazz, he said. 

The distinction is important, said Smyth, sitting on the canal on Monday, just down from where he’d played on Thursday.

Jazz is difficult and specific – it takes a lot of work to play it at a certain level, he said, so he didn’t want to take credit for it.

"I'd say the elements in our music that are kind of borrowing from jazz would be like, you know, improvised sections, or, you know, the harmony as well," he said. But there are pop influences too, he says.

The band doesn’t fit in a box right now, he says. “I'm sure a box will appear. Maybe make our own box.”

Guitarist Arthur Noswitz – who played with a quartet he put together– said he pairs jazz and fusion. Fusion to him means Miles Davis, he says.   

He thinks of the 1970s and 1980s, he says. “When people started to blend, like different rhythms and with jazz and different textures in music, you know?” 

Noswitz grew up in Brazil, he says, in a family of musicians.

Jazz for him is cosmopolitan too, he said. It’s a union of people from all over, trying to communicate and listen. 

“We all have, like, different accents, even when we play,” he said. “Different accents in our instruments, different situations, rhythm situations, rhythmics or anything like that.”

A new scene?

Jazz elements are becoming more popular in music scene in Dublin, said Garry, one of the night’s organisers, who curated the evening’s bands.

He said his quartet had jazz-style compositions, along with hip-hop influenced tracks, and some R&B too. 

This is a thing, he said. 

"Every indie band that's kind of on the scene right now seems to have some songs with some very interesting chord choices,” said Garry. “It's all just kind of, you know, jazz‑infiltrated."

When Garry did his degree at BIMM Music Institute Dublin, everyone was in their late 20s to mid-30s back then, he says. 

He was 18 years old and jazz, he said, was almost a dirty word. It seemed elitist and outdated, he said. 

But now he’s 26, and he said these days, that’s not how his contemporaries see it.

There’s no AI, nothing automated, nobody has ear monitors, he said. It’s built around spontaneity, improvisation. It’s growing again, he said.

“It's literally like someone has done a sound check,” he said. “A sound guy has tried their best, and everything else is up to just the spontaneity and the music and the instruments.”

That’s a direction music is going in, he said: something more raw, in the moment.

"Off Grid Fusion is just a microcosm of this bigger thing that is absolutely unavoidable. You go on Instagram,” he said. “This is a thing that's happening in Dublin right now."

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.