Oddly perhaps, the Irish tour wound down in the village Carrigaholt, Co Clare, half way down Loop Head. A remote place with a population of about 80, Carrigaholt is remote enough to render mobile phones on the 087 network useless.
However, the village has a unique link with jazz thanks to the West Clare Jazz Summer School, a week-long affair which takes place there during June. Founded two years ago, the school was the brainchild of guitarist Louis Stewart and Jim Connolly, a sculptor and founder of the Rural Resettlement Scheme who lives in the area. "I've no idea where the idea came from for a jazz summer school, but with 70 students, it's one of the biggest in Europe," says Connolly. "What's important is that we started with the highest standard. The other important factor is that west Clare is the heartland of traditional music. You'd think that wouldn't help, but it had precisely the opposite affect."
The audiences in Clare were relatively small, but even so, the band turned on the style. Needless to say, the ambience was completely different from that of Renards. One suspects also, that what Connolly calls "West Clare time", a determined laid-back attitude to the rigours of the clock, was different also from the heaving Jamboree nightclub in Barcelona, where the band's tour started out.
Michael had a "working honeymoon" in Barcelona with Colette. "Colette's a sculptress and she teaches pottery. I'm interested in her thing and she's interested in mine. I wouldn't be where I am today without her. She steered me in the right direction as to what I wanted to do rather than what people were telling me I should do. She thinks on the same wavelength about music as I do."
That Buckley has travelled a fair distance on his musical journey is not in doubt. A prodigy of little formal tuition, he taught himself flute from the age of five by listening to his father's records. Sonny Rollins, Joe Henderson and Lester Young aren't even on the average 25-year-old's listening list, but the child was serious about the task.
Again, it doesn't sound complicated. "I used to just play along with the records. It felt very natural. That was my method of practice, although I didn't really have to practise. It was good then, but later in life it's not so good."
The boy shone. Still at primary school, he was appearing regularly on TV. He had a slot on Maureen Potter's Gales of Laughter show, on The Twink Show and on The Brendan Grace Show. At 12, he was a soloist with the European Jazz Orchestra. "I made more money than I'm making now."
He took up sax when he was 14, by which stage he had already left school. However, the teenager was not as much in demand as when he was a wonder child. Working by day as a panel beater, Buckley quickly adapted to the sax, learning at first on his father's instrument before buying his own after he won a competition associated with the Dublin Millennium in 1988. He stayed two years as a panel beater - the sax was the long-term thing.
It was a natural progression. He used to practise hard, but these days he prefers to listen. "About two years ago I stopped practising because I realised I was playing the same things. I listened more. I felt I was learning more from listening to music - I mean really listening to two records a week and really drowning myself in it. I've already done the technical work."
He continues: "I was going to gigs and realising that I was playing things that were familiar, like little quotes from an old movie or a classical piece. `Now where do I know that from?' Then I realised that I'd have soaked it in, so now I listen. But you still have to practise to keep the chops [fingers] going."
Getting started as full-time musician wasn't easy. Dodgy impressarios who fail to pay at the end of the night and fellow musicians who wouldn't help with tricks of the trade were especially trying. "The biggest hindrance for my whole career was that I played so young. It took people an awful long time to take me as a serious grown-up musician and also to look on me as an individual musician rather than somebody from a well-known musical family."
PEOPLE say Michael doesn't see much of his brother Richie - it's not a subject he discusses. Of his father, he says he was never short of encouragement, but never took formal instruction from him. "Around the time I was playing in Renards I realised all of a sudden that I was thinking about him. He died on that day a year before."
Many say jazz is difficult? "When people say I can't understand the music, it's because their ear can't get used to it. It's like going back to when I was young - why I played this music is because I listened to it, and not purposely listened to it, it was just by accident.
"People are always saying what does it mean and why are you doing it? People think when they listen to jazz that they have to understand jazz - everything about it. When they listen to Garth Brooks they don't really care."
Buckley has little time for the stereotyped image of the drug-addicted jazzmen of old, and there were many of them, whose intake of drink and narcotics was as debilitating and tragic as it was legendary. "The new generation of musicians is very healthy in mind, in body and in spirit. I think people dwell on peoples' habits too much. Jazz has a good future."
Personally, he takes a long-term view. "I hope I'll never stop learning. I always like to keep ahead of the new guys. One of my main aims for the future would be to write music for strings and orchestra and saxophone, with me as soloist."
He welcomes the renaissance of the scene here. Previously seen as the slightly stodgy preserve of a select group of middle-aged men, the new interest in jazz can be seen in sell-out concerts of big-name stars and in booming CD sales. While the backcatalogue of his forebears is impressive, Buckley agrees with the suggestion that a key task for new musicians is to capitalise on the renewed interest in the older work.
He cites the positive influence of two promoters, who have made a business of jazz. He says The Quartet Jams tour would not have happened without Ben Jackson, who combines an enthusiasm for the music with an uncanny knack for attracting international stars to Dublin. Another friend is Gerry Godley, founder of the Improvised Music Company, which organises Dublin Jazz Week, stages concerts and releases recordings.
Back in Renards, the atmosphere is intimate. During the interlude, the band talk with the audience. This is no place for masters-of-the-universe style ego-lapping. As Stephen Keogh says, "jazz is one of the only musics left where there's a direct communication with the audience, without racks of technology between you and the listener".
The key to the music, perhaps, is its unerring confidence. While the writer may take several years on a book, or a painter brood for weeks over a canvas, jazz players perform on the spot, with no prop but the melody. Done well, this makes for tense moments of heightened unselfconscious spontaneity - and a millisecond-by-millisecond game of wits with the tune. As with a plane in the sky, it's important not to lose momentum. Whether one finds one's soul or one's dreams is another matter entirely.
Outside on the streets, the light is neon. Figures in suits fumble their way home, conquered by drink, faces full of laughter or its opposite. And there are harlots, hard men and the cackle also of sirens in the air. A beggar asks for money while a famous film director hails a cab. Night town. This is jazz too. The rigmarole of morning seems far away. Play it again. Play it again.
Michael Buckley, accompanied by brothers Conor Guilfoyle (bass) and Ronan Guilfoyle (drums), plays The Pendulum @ JJ Smyths, Aungier Street, Dublin, tomorrow night at 8.30 p.m.