Ten Irish Jazz Musicians from the 1960s and 70s

Like Newcastle in the 1960s and 70s Dublin was full of venues with live music and in particular you could find clubs and bars offering live jazz most nights. As I was a frequent visitor to many of these places my BSH List of 10  is Irish jazz musicians I heard playing live during this period.

Number 1 - Rock Fox (aka Chas Meredith) - trumpet and saxophone

I first heard live jazz as a teenager in our local village hall in Foxrock outside Dublin. It was a mainstream seven-piece group called the Butler Fox Jazz Band and the sound of all the musicians playing together at full volume made an indelible impression on the 50 or so youngsters crammed into the tiny room. One of the leaders, Rock Fox, was an amateur jazz historian who made wonderfully long-winded introductions to each track, particularly those by his favourite composer Duke Ellington, in a rich, mellifluous accent that greatly increased the entertainment value of the session. 

We also liked him because he actually lived locally and because he was a practising solicitor called Chas Meredith. when he started playing professionally he needed a stage name at short notice and took inspiration from our village. No wonder I was drawn to the music as, thanks to Chas Meredith, jazz was embedded in our village’s name from the late 1950s.

As well as his erudite intros, Rock Fox was a very good trumpet and saxophone player and excellent arranger and he and the band were regularly called upon to back visiting British and American jazz stars during visits to Ireland. He famously accommodated Gerry Mulligan in his house for a number of weeks in the early 1970s and took him on an elegantly manic series of gigs around the country.

I saw the band a lot during those early years and caught up with it a few times later on trips back home. Rock Fox was still going strong and playing with different bands at least 40 years after I first heard him and for a long time he had an influential and long running jazz programme on Irish national radio. He is generally recognised as one of the important figures in the development of jazz in Ireland.

About five years ago I had the genuine pleasure of interviewing Rock Fox for a musical project I was working on and after two hours of fascinating but unfinished memories we decided to stop and arrange another time. Unfortunately, he died shortly afterwards and I was never able to complete the interview. This was a real sadness as we had only reached 1952 so I never did get to talk to him in detail about those early sessions that were so important to me.

JC