Jim Doherty is sitting in his livingroom, in Ballsbridge in Dublin, recounting stories from his more than 70 years in music. There are anecdotes about playing with visiting American jazz masters to Ireland, such as Gerry Mulligan, Art Farmer and Zoot Sims, about the night Ray Charles sat in and sang a number with Jim’s trio, and about meeting many of his jazz-piano heroes, from shooting the breeze with Bill Evans in Montreux to drinking a bottle of brandy with Errol Garner one afternoon in Berlin.
He is surrounded by scrapbooks of press cuttings, concert programmes, letters and assorted memorabilia – and many photographs – from his top-tier 18-piece big band to his decade as musical director of The Late Late Show, from writing music for Abbey Theatre productions to being elected to Aosdána, in 2020. In almost every image he has a broad, open smile on his face. “Lucky Jim: that’s my nickname, that’s what people called me,” he says. “And that’s how I’ve always felt.”
Doherty has every right to regard his life this way. The highly respected, much-loved pianist and composer, who is 86 (though he says he has “the body of an 85-year-old”), has had a varied and fascinating career that has rendered him a central and crucial figure of jazz in Ireland, an important elder statesman of the music and a living history of modern mainstream jazz and other music in this country. Doherty has been called “Ireland’s in-house pianist” and “Ireland’s number one piano man”.
He has also been a role model for the players who came after him, both by encouraging and employing them and by proving that it is possible to make a living as a jazz musician in Ireland, at times when that challenge was not so easy. Doherty may be comparatively overlooked and underrated in the wider culture, but in jazz terms he is as vitally important as others of his generation who excelled in their field: John Banville in literature, Robert Ballagh in the visual arts, Gay Byrne in television.
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“Jim is our most important living jazz pianist and one of the finest composers of our time,” says the drummer and educator Conor Guilfoyle, who, with his octet, is playing Doherty’s 1986 jazz ballet suite Spondance at the National Concert Hall next week. “He’s done it all as a working musician, from writing TV theme tunes to accompanying cabaret singers. But he has also performed jazz at the highest level, right from the early 1960s, when he was in the vanguard of jazz becoming a music that people actually sat and listened to, an art music. To me, Jim is sort of an unsung hero.”
Doherty grew up in Sandymount in Dublin. His paternal grandparents were the prominent republicans Kitty and Séamus O’Doherty, who stored arms in their house in advance of the 1916 Easter Rising. Jim’s father, Kevin, was a national hurdle champion who held senior positions at Bord Fáilte and became chief executive of the Advertising Standards Authority. His mother, Patricia, brought up six children, two boys and four girls, of whom Jim is the eldest.
Family life in the O’Doherty household was happy. “All I can remember is it being just fun and absolutely idyllic,” Doherty says. “I never heard my parents, or either set of grandparents, ever raise their voice. You read about the awful things that men are doing to women these days, but I think I never heard an argument. And I’ve always assumed that’s the way you should behave, that’s what you should do.”
There was also a tradition on both sides of Doherty’s family of making music, from playing traditional fiddle tunes to singing Victorian ballads. Both his grandmother and uncle on his mother’s side played piano well, and Doherty was both captured and inculcated from an early age. He began with tin whistles and harmonicas, graduated to “endless hours at my granny’s piano, trying to figure things out”, and at six was sent for lessons to the strict Dublin Municipal School of Music, where he was chided for playing by ear and “retired” a year later.
Around this time Doherty began to hear jazz on BBC radio, particularly pianists such as George Shearing, Art Tatum and Dave Brubeck, and over the next few years he became hooked. At 13 he heard the explosive Count Basie Orchestra for the first time. “I sat bolt upright and said, ‘That’s it.’ I had no notion of what I was listening to, but it was all-consuming, and I wanted to find out.”
He was a keen listener and a quick learner, even if, at that time, long before jazz education, he had no choice but to teach himself. Soon he was forming bands with friends at Synge Street school and playing three nights a week at local rugby and tennis clubs, presenting Top-40 hits and Great American Songbook tunes for dancing.
“The first gig I did for money was in 1954, when I was 15,” he says. “It was £2 a night, eight to 12. But I never thought I could make a living from music – that was only for violin players in the symphony orchestra or a bunch of chancers in showbands. And as for jazz, even though I decided that I’d love to do it, to be involved, I also kept thinking, ‘But you’re an Irish fellow, living in Dublin.’ I also knew that the holy men thought it was vulgar and obscene.”
Doherty left school at 18, in 1957, and got a proper job: he worked for three-and-a-half years as a clerk at various branches of the National Bank. The rest of the time he was playing, practising or listening to music, and hanging out with “the moderns” at the weekly sessions at Ireland’s first bona-fide jazz club, the Green Lounge, on St Stephen’s Green.
In late 1960 he left the bank, first to briefly join the Chris Lamb Showband, where he successfully auditioned Ireland’s great jazz genius, the guitarist Louis Stewart – the two would become lifelong musical partners and close friends – and then to travel to London, where he took private lessons in jazz composition and big-band orchestration for almost a year.
“I think the ethos that saw him risk leaving a pensionable job in the bank in 1950s Ireland to move to London and become a jazz pianist is so much more punk than anything any of my friends have ever done,” Jim’s son David O’Doherty, the comedian, has said. “So he’s certainly a source of inspiration from that point of view.”
When the five-star Intercontinental Hotel opened in Ballsbridge in 1963, Doherty, ever the hard worker and smart opportunist, secured the gig as leader of the property’s in-house trio. (O’Doherty’s surname was soon shortened by the hotel manager, to make it snappier for the posters, a change that subsequently stuck.) With Jim on organ, and originally John Curran on tenor saxophone, clarinet and flute and Johnny Christopher on drums, his groups played (and sang) songbook standards and popular songs six nights a week for much of the next eight years.
In 1965 Doherty released a debut album, Executive Suite; three years later he won the press prize at Montreux Jazz Festival for music from his jazz-trad suite Gael Blowin’, and he developed a strong and enduring reputation – not only for his quick wit, storytelling and love of the absurd (he once defined a true jazz musician as “somebody who never plays the same way once”) but also for being a deft and versatile pianist able to perform an extraordinary number of jazz and standard repertoire tunes at will.
“Louis Stewart once said to me that I could sit down and play somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 pieces of music, in all 12 keys, at an unlimited variety of tempos and time signatures. Which was true,” he says. “And they say Prince was a god for being able to go on stage without a set list and play any one of 65 different tunes!”
Doherty had also begun working for RTÉ radio and television; for the next 40 years or more he maintained an association with the broadcaster, working on The Late Late Show from 1972 to 1982, appearing on music shows, writing arrangements for the RTÉ Concert Orchestra and, famously, composing theme tunes for programmes such as Wanderly Wagon, 7 Days and the evening news. His other day jobs included producing pop records, writing advertising jingles and doing a wide range of session work.
In the 1970s, 1980s and beyond, Doherty formed a variety of bands, from small groups to a short-lived fusion unit to his popular and acclaimed big band, all with one ultimate if indefinable goal: “to make the music swing – that’s number one”. He also worked extensively in theatre, both performing scores for musicals and writing original material for numerous productions at the Abbey, Olympia and Gaiety. “I hardly ever stopped,” he says. “People talk about the bad old dreadful days. I was never out of work for half an hour.”
During one characteristically productive period in the mid-1980s, Doherty wrote what many consider to be his finest work, Spondance, music for a modern jazz ballet that was commissioned by the Irish National Ballet. The six-part composition was subsequently recorded in Los Angeles by an outstanding octet that included Doherty, Stewart and several leading American jazz musicians, among them the trumpet and flugelhorn player Bobby Shew.
Although the score was never performed as a ballet, because of funding issues, Doherty played the music at the 1986 Cork Jazz Festival; over the next few years it was also presented in Helsinki, Copenhagen and Oslo.
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On February 28th, almost 40 years after it was first conceived, Spondance will finally receive its Dublin premiere, at a lunchtime concert at the National Concert Hall programmed to coincide with the album’s re-release by Livia Records. Conor Guilfoyle’s ensemble features many of Ireland’s finest next-generation musicians, including the Belfast pianist Scott Flanigan. Does that mean Doherty has passed the baton?
“Well, you never retire, and I’m still playing,” he says, pausing. “But I’m too f**king old. I wouldn’t be sleeping the nights leading up to the concert. I’m taking the rehearsals, and I’m going to get the music exactly the way I want it, and I’ll introduce it on the day. But after that I’m just going to enjoy myself, and the music, and then I’m going out to the bar. As I said, that’s me: I’m Lucky Jim.”
Jim Doherty’s Spondance will be performed in the John Field Room of the National Concert Hall, Dublin, at 1.05pm on Friday, February 28th. The album is reissued that day on CD, with a new 16-page booklet, by Livia Records; it will also be available to download from Livia’s Bandcamp page
