Every summer of his early childhood, the Irish pianist, composer and arranger Cormac McCarthy would travel with his family to musical gatherings in Italy. Organised by the maverick pianist, musical polymath and Irish traditional-music devotee Antonio Breschi – a friend of McCarthy’s father, the noted flute, whistle and fiddle player Johnny McCarthy – the concert and festival appearances brought together musicians from many backgrounds.
“As well as my dad and Irish musicians such as [the accordionist] Máirtín O’Connor, [the guitarist] Steve Cooney and [the uilleann piper] Joe McHugh, I remember there would be flamenco guitarists from Spain, a jazz bass player from Slovenia and a Moroccan fiddle player called Jamal Ouassini, who also played in the Verona Opera Orchestra,” McCarthy says.
“Much of the music was written by Antonio, and it was this visionary kind of world music that blended flamenco with Irish traditional music, jazz and blues. We’d sometimes tour Italy for a couple of months, and being around all those different musicians is definitely one of my strongest memories as a child.”
Although the 41-year-old says he has always taken such an open and adventurous approach to music-making for granted – his father, for example, is equally at home in the worlds of trad and classical – he recognises now that these Italian musical meetings were at once highly unusual and powerfully formative (as well as a lot of fun). They have also provided some kind of model for much of his subsequent musical career.
RM Block
McCarthy is a singular musician who is admirably hard to classify and pin down: “genre-fluid” is the apt phrase used to describe him by one of his students at Cork School of Music, where he is a lecturer.
He has played traditional Irish music in a variety of settings and with much success – including, for example, with master fiddle player Martin Hayes in his borderless Common Ground Ensemble, in a free-flowing trio with singer Iarla Ó Lionáird and clarinettist Matthew Berrill, and with the forward-thinking group Notify.
McCarthy has composed contemporary classical music for various ensembles and recently completed a commission for the National Symphony Orchestra. His compositions and arrangements have also been performed by singer-songwriters such as Mick Flannery, Gavin James, Niamh Regan and Jack O’Rourke. As a conductor, McCarthy has led the Irish Chamber Orchestra, the RTÉ Concert Orchestra and the Cork Opera House Concert Orchestra.
I meet McCarthy at his home in Nohoval, half an hour south of Cork and 10 minutes or so across the fields from the sea.
If he is pushed, he will agree to being principally a jazz pianist and composer. McCarthy has worked in a highly interactive duo with the jazz trombonist Paul Dunlea, led the sprightly jazz piano trio Súp and for the past decade been the director of the Cork School of Music Big Band.
“If I’m writing a big-band chart, that’s probably where I feel most comfortable, most at home,” he says. At the National Concert Hall in Dublin at the start of August, McCarthy will present Big Band Evolution, an evening featuring an RTÉ Concert Orchestra ensemble that explores the glorious history and vitality of the jazz orchestra.
There is a kind of protean positivity to his approach. Hayes once described how he and McCarthy were trying to work out a tune: “I said to Cormac, ‘Now where would I find a jazz pianist that could lilt a reel at the same time?’ That’s the knowledge he has at his fingertips,” Hayes said. “He is an incredible musician. Cormac is world class.”
McCarthy seems to provide plenty of space for disparate styles to naturally coexist and organically connect, a generosity of spirit that can be heard most clearly on his two albums as leader: the 2015 group record Cottage Evolution and the 2022 solo piano release On the Other Hand. In an episode of TG4’s Cumasc: Seisiúin sa Black Gate, Ó Lionáird uses the word “rhizomic” to evoke such a process: it’s an adjective used to describe a system or network that allows connections between any of its constituent parts.
McCarthy grew up the eldest of three children in a remote cottage near the village of Ovens, about 15km west of Cork City. His parents are from working-class northside Cork; his mother, Ger, played camogie for the county, loves music and recently retired as a nurse. Quickly becoming immersed in the tight-knit traditional-music community of his father, McCarthy frequently travelled with him to sessions.
Uncommonly, his father, Johnny, also played classical silver flute, performing with ensembles and orchestras, and studying for a time at the music conservatory in Zurich. “I’m obviously biased, but, because he can play both traditional and classical music, the sound he makes on the flute is something totally unique,” McCarthy says. “My dad’s a big influence.”
McCarthy had classical piano lessons from the age of four; around the time he was 14 “the bug bit”, and he began to dedicate himself more fully to becoming a classically trained pianist. He also had health issues that meant he could no longer feed his other passion, sport. “I channelled everything into music. It became my refuge,” McCarthy says. He competed in competitions, attended masterclasses and went on to an undergraduate degree at Cork School of Music.
Johnny McCarthy also had a love of jazz, from the vibrant music of such home-grown stars of the music as Louis Stewart and Jim Doherty to the evocative and wide-ranging sound worlds being shaped by Keith Jarrett, Jan Garbarek and Pat Metheny on the influential German label ECM. That enthusiasm also rubbed off on the young Cormac.
Not only did he begin to listen to such pivotal jazz pianists as Bud Powell, Bill Evans and Ahmad Jamal, but, from the age of 15, he also began to play with the newly formed jazz big band at Cork School of Music. “I would’ve had the technical ability but absolutely none of the language of jazz,” he says. “I had to learn pretty quickly.”
His skill and talent, both on classical and on jazz piano, continued to rapidly develop until, aged 20, and in the third year of his degree, they hit an unexpected and cruelly debilitating barrier. Asked at short notice to perform Rhapsody in Blue, Gershwin’s immortal 1924 composition for solo piano and jazz band, McCarthy embarked on an intensive practice regimen. It caused acute tendonitis in his right hand, so much so that he almost could not play the concert at Cork City Hall.
“To this day I’m still not able to understand how I did it, as it was actually painful to hit the keys,” he says. “But at the time I remember thinking these performance-related strains are quite common, and it will pass and I will be cured. But after the concert I wasn’t really able to play for a while, and, to be honest, ever since then my hand hasn’t been right. It’s complex, but it’s essentially a nerve issue; the nerves can shut down and I cannot play.”
On graduating in 2006, McCarthy almost gave up music. “The more I tried to play the piano, the worse it got,” he says. “My hand was sore all the time and it was affecting my daily life – I couldn’t even take the lid off jars and bottles. It was tough and I’d say I was depressed. I thought, I’ll just go and do something else with my life.”
A combination of a year travelling to the British Association of Performance Arts Medicine in London, where he adjusted his technique and learned to play with the weight of his arm as well as his hand, and a course of stability and strengthening exercises with a physiotherapist in Dublin meant that, since then, McCarthy has discovered how to cope with his condition. He can perform, but he often has to take time before and after when he rests his hand and does not play.
The forced break led McCarthy to refocus, and he began to increasingly devote himself to developing his skills as a composer. He went on to do a Master’s in composition at the Cork School of Music, subsequently winning a Bill Whelan bursary to complete a Master’s in jazz studies at the prestigious DePaul University, in Chicago, where he concentrated on composing and arranging for large ensembles. Today he is as well known for this latter aspect of his work as he is as a gifted pianist.
“At times, not being able to play still frustrates me, but ultimately I see it less and less as bad luck and probably 80 per cent as a positive thing,” he says. “I think getting a blow like that at that age probably strengthened me a bit. And even though I’d always written music, I hadn’t composed or arranged for large ensembles, and then hearing my music being played by big bands or string sections and orchestras ... well, I really fell in love with that feeling.”
The Big Band Evolution concert is a celebration of that emotion, of the majesty of a great melody, the glory of jazz harmony and the authority and control of a swinging 18-piece ensemble, drawn from the multifaceted RTÉ Concert Orchestra, plus the American vocalist Dana Masters, in full flight.
In a programme that McCarthy has smartly chosen to trace the history of big-band jazz from its roots in Harlem in the 1920s to contemporary composers exploring and expanding the form a century later, the concert will feature the music of master composers and bandleaders such as Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson and Count Basie, as well as more modernist large-ensemble writers such as Bob Brookmeyer, Maria Schneider and Darcy James Argue. The evening will also include a McCarthy composition that spotlights the guitarist Jake Curran and a specially commissioned arrangement of the wonderful slow air Port na bPúcaí.
Future McCarthy projects include composing a piano concerto, and a new duo album with the versatile violinist Aoife Ní Bhriain – again deftly poised at the interstices of trad, jazz and classical.
“The more I learn about music, and the better and more knowledgeable, I like to think, I get, the less I think about stylistic boundaries,” McCarthy says. “Yes, there are obvious nuances and subtleties, and the possibilities are endless, but more and more I realise that it’s music first, it’s all coming from the one place, and it’s all the same. It’s just all the same.”
Big Band Evolution is at the National Concert Hall, in Dublin, on Friday, August 1. McCarthy also appears with Martin Hayes and the Cork Opera House Concert Orchestra at Cork Opera House on Wednesday, September 10th
