Jazzy James Joyce Ulysses inspired album.
Irish author James Joyce published his epic novel Ulysses in 1920, 105 years ago. In July 2025 in Adelaide, the novel inspired a jazzy music debut album Here Comes Everything by Derek Pascoe and Chris Martin.
Derek Pascoe, a saxophonist from England was in the British pop group Flintlock. In a Brixton restaurant in 1991, where the band was playing jazz, he met Kirsten Coelho, a woman from Adelaide, Australia, looking for work.
Now, they are married, she became a ceramicist, and he teaches at the Elder Conservatorium of Music in Adelaide.
Having read James Joyce’s Ulysses when he was about twenty years old, in Adelaide, Derek Pasco re-read the novel. Composer and producer Luke Altmann encouraged Pascoe to “capture as much of his own playing as possible – a lifetime of experience distilled into one marathon recording.” With his longtime collaborator friend, pianist Chris Martin, Pascoe took on Altmann’s challenge.
Using James Joyce’s story of the protagonist’s one full day in Dublin as inspiration, Pascoe and Martin took to the studio to record an “open-ended aural diary of a musical relationship that began in 2000 when they were both students at the Elder Conservatorium. But Pascoe did not tell Martin that the inspiration for the project was the great and controversial novel by James Joyce.
In the studios, they improvised one recording at a time. For Pascoe, he saw the parallels between the 700-plus page Ulysses with its stream of consciousness style and the unstructured sax-and-piano jazz they were creating.
At the end of 18 studio sessions, they had an 18-disc improvised jazz recording album, Here Comes Everything, released by Altmann’s label De La Catesssen Records in July 2025.
Photo by Denis Smith: Derek Pascoe and Chris Martin at Wizard Tone Studios to record Here Comes Everything.
Read the InReview IndailySA article: Adelaide duo turns James Joyce’s Ulysses into 18-hour jazz odyssey
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