Known for his rhythmic, hand-drawn loops and clever visual narratives, Bristol-based illustrator Con McHugh spontaneously leaps into the world of live jazz performance, blending music and motion in an expressive new collaboration with clarinettist Adrian Cox.
What happens when a jazz musician and an illustrator walk into a live venue? In Con McHugh’s case, you get a snake that swallows a cowboy and morphs into a gramophone.
It’s this kind of unexpected surrealism that defines his latest project, which features a series of looping, hand-drawn animations created to accompany a live performance by jazz clarinettist Adrian Cox in Bristol.
“It was the first time I’d done anything like this,” Con admits. “And the thought of it made me pretty nervous.” Still, he jumped at the chance. The pair had worked together before on album art and tour posters, but this was a different beast.
Adrian didn’t come armed with a mood board or strict brief. Instead, he offered complete creative freedom, giving Con the space to experiment, respond to the music instinctively, and revive the looser, messier drawing style he’d drifted away from over time.
“This project came at a pivotal time for me; as I’ve taken on bigger clients, my style has become more refined,” Con reflects. “But I found myself nostalgic for the looser work I did when I was just starting out. And with it being jazz – spontaneous and expressive – it felt right to embrace that again.”
The initial plan was ambitious: a long-form animation running for nearly a minute and a half to one of Cox’s tracks, Rehearsing for a Nervous Breakdown. It became a visual narrative about an impatient man trying to get a coffee in Bristol, a tale laced with McHugh’s own struggles to quit caffeine at the time.
However, as the deadline loomed, practicality kicked in. “I soon realised there simply wasn’t time to create long-form animations for every song,” he says. So he pivoted to short, looping sequences – a kind of flowing visual stream of consciousness, with transitions as strange as they were satisfying.
In true jazz spirit, Con allowed the music to guide the ink. There was no overthinking and no erasing. Just a raw response. “The goal wasn’t to make something polished and beautiful but to have fun and hope that joy showed through,” says Con.
The resulting animations are charmingly chaotic: spaghetti strands double as musical staves, meatballs dance and are devoured, and a snake fizzes with music after swallowing a cowboy. Each transition leads to the next with wild, improvised logic.
At one point, Con had to double-check whether spaghetti had any ties to New Orleans jazz. “A quick Google showed that spaghetti was actually big in 1920s New Orleans due to the large population of Italian immigrants. Phew.”
If the creation process was unpredictable, so was the payoff. On the night of the show, the animations were revealed to both the audience and the band simultaneously.
“This was the first time Adrian and the trio had seen most of the animations, so watching them react in real-time, wrapping their heads around a snake turning into a gramophone, was amusing, to say the least,” says Con. Verbal cues like “when you start playing, the snake will eat the cowboy” became part of the backstage chaos.
“Performing with projections brought a different energy to the room,” Cox later reflected. “Jazz fans who didn’t know what to expect, people who followed your illustration work but had never been to a jazz concert – everyone was equally wrapped up in the experience.”
It was a career-high for Con, who’s more accustomed to social media metrics than standing ovations. “Sitting backstage with a glass of wine, watching it all unfold… that was such a career highlight,” he says. “Most of the time, the only audience interaction I get is through social media, so having a live crowd reacting—laughing, clapping—was something else entirely.”
It’s a poetic full circle for someone whose artistic journey began with doodling Beano characters in quiet corners while his dad worked as a painter and decorator. After a decade working in London’s design scene, Con moved to Bristol for a slower pace. It was here, in 2023, that an animated poster for the Bristol Jazz Festival unexpectedly went viral, racking up millions of views online. Since then, he’s worked with clients, including Bloomberg Businessweek and turned that viral spark into a thriving freelance career.
Much like jazz itself, Con’s path has been a mix of improvisation, happy accidents, and daring to say “yes” even when unsure. “Looking back, this project reminded me why I love illustration—the joy of making something without overthinking it,” he says. “It also confirmed what I’ve started to realise: people are drawn to the ideas in my work more than the polish.”
That ethos of embracing the unpredictable feels baked into both the project and Con’s outlook at large. “Sometimes, saying yes to something terrifying leads to the best kind of chaos,” he reflects. “Adrian and I hadn’t met in person before the show, but the whole thing felt incredibly organic—like we’d been working together for years. And now, we’re already thinking about the next one…”
If there’s a lesson in Con’s latest venture, it might be this: let the line wobble, trust the rhythm, and don’t be afraid to follow the music, even if it leads to a snake eating a cowboy.
