Contemporary Jazz & Improvised Music

Atlantic Road Trip is an international project combining prominent musical voices from Europe and America, exploring the evolution and fusion of traditional indigenous folk musics from Scotland, Ireland and Slovakia, and their historical coalescence through the medium of contemporary jazz and improvised music.

The project also draws upon intertwined musical paths of European folk traditions and their historical interplay with music from Africa, South America, and beyond. Co-led by Chad McCullough (USA), Miro Herak (NED), and Paul Towndrow (SCO), the band’s international journey began with a virtual concert at the 2021 Glasgow Jazz Festival, and continued with subsequent European tours in 2022 and 2023 with performances in Edinburgh, Glasgow, The Hague, Rotterdam, Leiden and Antwerp.

Their debut album ONE (released internationally on Calligram Records) explores folk traditions filtered through the lens of 21-Century improvising musicians. Recorded in Glasgow during a 2023 tour, the band will tour in support of the release with a three week long tour through the United States.

During that tour, the band will also premier their first large-scale work Over Mountain, Under Sky, featuring Miro, Paul, and Chad with a full jazz band and string orchestra.

Each musician has their own story to tell, both musically and culturally. Compositions, arrangements and improvisation distil into a story-telling musical narrative that reflects and combines music’s evolutionary journey and its ability to shine an honest light on the history of humanity as well as the present day human experience As such, Atlantic Road Trip presents a unique, ‘multi-angle’ take upon historical world events including Colonialism, the Transatlantic Slave Trade, The Highland Clearances, World Wars, and the rise and fall of the Iron Curtain - all of this reflected in the melding of folk music traditions within, and outside of the jazz idiom. Indeed, the importance of cities such as Chicago as a cultural crucible in both the conservation and evolution of Celtic music, is to be recognised and celebrated. One can point to the efforts of people like Francis O’Neill, Chicago’s Chief of Police at the turn of the 20th Century, whose efforts in writing down and obsessively documenting the music played by Irish and Scottish immigrants, played a huge role not only in cementing the traditions into American culture, but in making the music, and it’s associated folklore available on the worldwide stage.