Carole Nelson
She/Her
London-born, Carole Nelson is a composer, improviser and performer living in South Carlow. She works primarily in jazz and in film. Her instruments are piano, saxophone and voice. Carole has spent several decades in music of all kinds, forming her first band of original soul/funk songs in London in 1978. Since then she has written and recorded five albums for the Irish ArtPop group Zrazy, touring North America and Europe. Her choral compositions include Beloved, currently to be included in a publication of women choral composers from the Baroque to the present day.
Her most recent projects are the Carole Nelson Trio and her work with the Na Cailleacha art collective. The Carole Nelson Trio formed in 2015 at the Dublin Trio Trio Festival. They then recorded three albums of critically-acclaimed music, One Day in Winter(2017), Arboreal (2020) and Night Vision (2022). Both Arboreal and Night Vision were in the Irish Times Best Albums of the Year and All About Jazz described the trio as ‘one of the most arresting trios in Ireland and the UK’. Carole’s latest composition for the trio, The Last Song, was supported by the 2023 Ban Bam Award for women jazz composers and premiered in January 2024 at Smock Alley Theatre. The trio have also recently formed a creative performing relationship with jazz vocalist Honor Heffernan.
Na Cailleacha formed in 2020. It is a collective of eight older artists (all over 70 except for Carole at 68) Carole’s music has contributed to an award-winning documentary about the group- Dawn to Dusk by Therry Rudin, and she has formed a creative partnership with experimental film-maker Barbara Freeman. Their last film, Ithaca, has won best film at the Berlin Art Film Festival and is showing at the New York Art Film Festival among others. Carole’s approach to this work involves field recordings, electronics and vocal techniques, taking a left swerve from jazz and improv performance-based music.
Carole currently mentors younger musicians in composition, improvisation and maintaining joy and freedom in music.
If there is an underlying philosophy to be found in Carole’s life and music, it is one of continued openess and exploration. Her life is enriched by Zen Buddhist practice and by growing food. Hands in the soil and a relationship to the intrinsic creativity of life is a great counterbalance to performance and public life.