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I was born in Belfast, Ireland, in 1949. Unlike a lot of my trad - playing compatriots, I was not born directly into the music. My family was in fact singularly unmusical. That all changed when at around 9 years old, I made my first drum out of a biscuit tin and a "skin" from a plastic raincoat. I beat upon my creation with my mum's no.7 knitting needles. Don't know if my parents appreciated a 9 year old's approach to free jazz as much as I did! About 5 years later I bought a cheap drumset and a couple of second hand cymbals and drummed my way through my last two years of high school, doing Who, Beatles, Stones and Kinks covers with schoolmates. I don't think I was a particularly great drummer and when I left school I left the drums aside aswell, but the seed had been sown........ I got seriously into music when I discovered the bodhran (Irish frame drum) some years later. I was very influenced at that time by the playing of Johnny 'Ringo' McDonagh, Colm Murphy and the inimitable Tommy Hayes. While the bodhran is still my main instrument, I've added quite a few others since; um, about 500 or so!....
In the late 60s I used to lie awake late at night listening to the (late) John Peel's radio shows. That opened my ears to live beetle jew's harp, Pygmy water-slap, and wierd and wonderful music from all the corners of the globe (do globes have corners?) plus the Incredible String Band, Third Ear Band, Captain Beefheart, Indian classical music, and all sorts of weird eclectic stuff, whatever WASN'T pop in fact!!!
In Ireland, throughout the mid to late 70s, I had played mostly trad Irish, but my stay in Switzerland in the 80s broadened my musical horizons. Zürich was, and I suppose still is, a great meeting place and cultural melting pot. Aswell as a lot of wonderful Swiss musicians like Gabi and Roli Schildknecht, Luzi Dressler, Co Streiff, Marco Cerletti, etc., I met and played with others from Turkey(Burhan Ocal, Tangu Dalgic), Lebanon (Haissam Salah Edine), Croatia (Ljubo Majstorovic), Italy (Antonio Breschi), Africa (Paul Ubana Jones), USA (Sandi Miller, Art Lande), etc. At this period also I was getting a lot of exposure to jazz and listening to Miles, Zawinul, and a lot of ECM stuff (Garbarek, Gismonti, Vasconcelos, etc)
It was in Switzerland that I got around to putting some of my musical ideas onto record and in 1987 the album Gaia was released. Gaia was a sort of ecological meditiation project. It was followed in 1990 by Hear the Grass, an album devoted to bamboo. Tangara in 1995 was a kind of shamanic or totemic project based on various animal cries (bear, wolf, eagle, jaguar, etc.)
In 1992, after being invited by Jean Michel Veillon and Gilles Le Bigot to join Barzaz, I moved to Brittany in France, where I have been ever since.
Although essentially a percussionist, my passion for wind and string instruments has led me to dabble with a few windy and stringy things (gu zheng, guimbri, santoor, rebab, ney, bawu, duduk, didjeridu, peulh flutes, whistle, etc.)
After almost 30 years playing percussion with various bands, I have finally formed my own band "Horizon" in order to perform live the tunes from my last solo album "Parallel Horizons". This repertoire has gone through sometimes quite dramatic transformation as the material had to be re-arranged for quartet (the album has 19 guest musicians!!!) The live version gives more space to improvisation than was possible on the studio album. It could therefore be described as more jazzy - all the more so with brilliant jazz pianist Philippe Turbin on board!!! (thanks Phil! :-) As the album set out to illustrate the different influences that have inspired my musical career over the years, so Horizon takes the adventure further with very significant input from Jean Luc, Philippe and Yann, who bring along their own rich and diverse horizons.
Parallel to Horizon I also enjoy playing with Pat O'May, Erne, the Brian McCombe Band, Loar Gann,Toud Sames, Daouad.... past horizons included Arkadas, Inside Out, Schildpatt, Barzaz, Bleizi Ruz, Guichen Quartet, Didier Squiban, Stok an Dans and others. Future horizons? Who knows?.......
