Welcome to the second Blind Date Jazz episode of IMC’s Creative About Music Podcast. For this musical blind date, we paired up guitarist Mike Nielsen and saxophonist/clarinetist Cathal Roche.

Each episode in Blind Date Jazz is a new encounter between 2 artists , playing ‘blind’ with no knowledge who the other person is, no advance preparation or even an indication of instrumentation. Halfway through we drop the curtain and they can see who their new improvising partner is -can we hear a change in the music? 

Director of Jazz Performance at the TU Dublin Conservatoire, and a leading exponent of microtonal music in Ireland, Mike Nielsen is considered “one of Europe’s most distinctive and iconoclastic guitar voices, equally innovative on electric and acoustic guitars.” [Sunday Tribune]. He holds a PhD in microtonal performance, MPhil in physics and microtonal music, LTCL in classical guitar performance and received a Jim Hall Incentive Award to attend Berklee College of Music, Boston. Among many other highlights, his work features in The Contemporary Guitar by Grammy Award winning guitarist, John Schneider, has published a book on rhythm for Schott, Germany, and has taken the stages of jazz festivals including the Wangaratta Jazz Festival Australia, with Dave Liebman. Mike features on 23 CDs.Find out more about his work here: https://www.improvisedmusic.ie/artists/details/mike_nielsen 

Cathal Roche is composer-performer based in the North-West of Ireland specialising in solo saxophone performance-installation. Working 20 years as an improviser, Cathal has developed his practice through countless innovative projects and recordings exploring extended saxophone techniques, improvisational forms, speech transcription and immersive installation. Long-term musical collaborators include The Dirty Jazz Club, Izumi Kimura, Rafael Kolachi (DAO), Ian Wilson (crOw), Vanbrugh and ConTempo string quartets, the Sligo Jazz Project and many others. Find more of his work at: https://www.cathalroche.org/ 

You can watch this Blind Date Jazz in full video form on our YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/YARi1ya6WmI 

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Improvised Music Company is an Arts Council funded promoter and resource organisation www.improvisedmusic.ie

Thanks to Justin Carroll's Togethernessfor our podcast theme - the track is their 'Feelgood Factor' from 2009 album 'Togetherness'. You can listen to the rest here: https://justincarroll.bandcamp.com/album/togetherness