Nils Kavanagh Album Launch: No Expectations

Sligo native Nils Kavanagh launches his debut album "No Expectations" at the Hawk's Well. Having grown up in Sligo, Kavanagh is well acquainted with the venue, playing there regularly since childhood, and first headlining in 2023 as Sligo Jazz Project's Young Artist in Residence. Nils is now returning in November, bringing his debut album to his hometown.

Audiences will journey through Nils’ unique upbringing rooted in the north-west of Ireland’s mystic landscapes and joyous fellowship, while also inviting listeners to explore the sense of unity and introspection present in Denmark and broader Scandinavia. Home, joy, family, mythology, folk music, loss and longing are all key to the music, with an overarching focus on warm melody and musical storytelling.

Award-winning rising star on the UK and Irish scene, Nils Kavanagh is already making his mark with a unique compositional voice and a fearless approach to improvisation. Winner of the Young Irish Jazz Musician of the Year award 2022, and BBC Young Jazz Musician finalist in 2024, the pianist has already been making waves as a promising young musician. With his debut release, Nils is poised to elevate his career as an artist and bandleader. Having a six-date Irish tour under their belt already in 2023, the band is ready to bring this new release to the public in a live setting for 2025.

Stepping into the Trio Tradition

Philip Watson review.

This is something of a golden age for the art of the jazz piano trio. Ever since such quicksilver virtuosos as Erroll Garner and Bud Powell made the holy trinity of piano, bass and drums popular in the late 40s, the format has both captivated master players and moved in and out of music fashion.

In the late 50s and early 60s, classically trained pianists Ahmad Jamal and Bill Evans made landmark trio recordings that both democratised the form and advanced its more poetic potential. Throughout his career, post-bop maestro McCoy Tyner released albums that showed the piano trio at its most driving and exuberant. And from the early 80s onwards Keith Jarrett and his Standards Trio set the benchmark for endlessly creative interpretations of gems from the Great American Songbook.

More recently, triumvirates such as the Brad Mehldau Trio and the Bad Plus have championed the power of three, bringing compositions by Radiohead, Nick Drake, Nirvana, the Beatles and Stravinsky into the jazz piano fold. In Europe too, threesomes led by Scandinavians Tord Gustavsen and the late Esbjörn Svensson, with his group EST, have expanded the audience for piano trios by incorporating elements of folk, classical, minimalism, electronics, chorales and rock into the mix.

Today the possibilities inherent in the form are myriad: from living legends such as Kenny Barron and Bill Charlap exploring timeless standards within the tradition, to forward-thinking modern jazz trios led by Vijay Iyer and Kris Davis, and the freer territories mapped out by Matthew Shipp and Myra Melford.

In Ireland too the domestic jazz scene has long been energised by trios led by pianists such as Jim Doherty, Myles Drennan, Phil Ware, Greg Felton, Johnny Taylor, Francesco Turrisi and Carole Nelson (who has just released a new trio album, Through the Storm, on Livia Records) – as well as the drummer Kevin Brady’s three-way unit with the great American pianist Bill Carrothers.

Into this lofty Irish and international tradition this autumn steps the young Sligo-born pianist Nils Kavanagh, who has recently released his debut album, the modestly titled No Expectations, recorded by the leader and his trio two years ago when he was 21.

The son of a Danish mother and an Irish father, Kavanagh began classical piano lessons at the age of six – only discovering jazz when he was 16, through his local youth jazz orchestra and the Sligo Jazz Project’s much admired international summer school. He never looked back, practising obsessively and progressing rapidly; during Covid he took Zoom lessons with the Belfast-based pianist Scott Flanigan, who also fronts his own jazz trio.

In 2022 Kavanagh won the inaugural Young Irish Jazz Musician of the Year award; two years later he was a finalist in the renowned BBC Young Jazz Musician of the Year competition. This year he graduated with a first class honours degree in jazz performance from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff, where his tutors were the British pianists Huw Warren and Elliot Galvin.

No Expectations is a snapshot of Kavanagh’s talents, recorded over two days at University Concert Hall Limerick (where he won the Young Irish Jazz Musician award) at the end of his debut 2023 tour of Ireland. Joined by fellow Royal Welsh College students Marcus Baber on bass and Sam Green on drums, the pianist plays six original compositions, plus one penned by Sligo Jazz Project director Eddie Lee, who co-produced the album, on a Steinway D concert grand bought for the hall by Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin.

About the compositions, Kavanagh has written: ‘Home, joy, family, mythology, folk music, loss and longing are all key to the music, with an overarching focus on warm melody and musical storytelling’, and it’s not hard to locate many of these themes and qualities.

The offbeat and harmonically ambitious waltz ‘For Seán’, for example, is dedicated to Kavanagh’s paternal grandfather, who passed away during the writing of the music for the album, while ‘Bornholmerur’ uses a simple though evocative chiming two-note melody borrowed from the grandfather clock in his maternal grandparents’ home in Denmark. Both compositions provide ample space for contributions from Baber and Green; this is a new trio playing new music, yet there is a remarkable degree of interplay and integration built into the overall sound.

The eight-minute ‘Queen Maeve’s Grave’, one of the standout tracks on the record, uses a melody inspired by Irish traditional music to build a study in dynamics. As well as possessing a radiant piano sound, Kavanagh has a kind of sensitive assurance to his playing. This is demanding music played with skill, yet the leader can also inject a quieter, more reflective mood into the music – as he does on the unexpectedly dark, cinematic and unsettling ballad ‘The Old House on the Hill’.

That same duality holds for the title track, a successful composition with a lilting melody that gradually opens out into an EST-type groove; it inspires a piano solo that resolves into a passage of almost classical romanticism. There is a sense of joy and revelation at play too.

It’s true that the emerging pianist occasionally wears his influences a little too clearly. You can hear the block chords and octave runs of Red Garland, the lyricism and thematic improvisational flights of Brad Mehldau and the exploratory freedom and harmonic complexity of Keith Jarrett. There is also, to cite pianists closer to Kavanagh’s age, the sense of discovery you find in the music of the English polymath Jacob Collier and a feeling of exhilaration you experience in the playing of the Scottish prodigy Fergus McCreadie.

These are big names and perhaps unfairly big comparisons. And it’s true Nils Kavanagh is just starting out. Yet there is enough in this accomplished debut to suggest that his subsequent direction and development are things to follow closely.

Philip Watson is a freelance journalist and author. Visit www.philipwatson.info.