The curtain fell yesterday on the 20th Guinness Jazz Festival. All the chord changes have been run, chase choruses, solos and rim shots played, and in this particular temple of devotion the candles - liberally burned at both ends - have been doused for another year. And for the devout and Their Sponsor Who Art In James's Gate, it has been a notable success.
With all services well-attended and some brilliant musicians to preach the gospel, it could hardly have been otherwise. And that goes, one supposes, even for the young acid jazz heads, yoof on the hoof, who crammed a made-over Opera House for what Bernard Shaw called "the perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire" (no; he meant dancing).
That was one wildly successful attempt by the organisers to draw in the younger audience. For the converted, however, the real musical message was elsewhere. Jazz was not so much sacrificed on the altar of the Opera House as happily segregated at its usual tabernacles, the Festival Club at the Metropole, one or two smaller venues such as the Triskel, with a debut at the Everyman Palace Theatre.
Pianists and saxophonists were the dominant forces at this year's event; names such as Kenny Barron, Cedar Walton, Benny Green, Jason Rebello, Oliver Jones, Kirk Lightsey and the rapidly emerging Carlos McKinney ensured the keyboard competition was heavy duty stuff, while Johnny Griffin, Jackie McLean, Gary Bartz, Peter King, Dave Liebman, Bobby Watson, Arthur Blythe, Nathan Davis, Chico Freeman, Jerome Richardson, James Spaulding and Alan Barnes would drive most reed players to don sackcloth and ashes.
Take alto saxophonist Jackie McLean, for example. In the messianic zeal of 1950s hard bop, he was certainly High Church. Nowadays, the sacerdotal robes fit a trifle more mellowly - but only a trifle. The man who continued to push the hard bop envelope out even as the movement consolidated its place in the jazz tradition, where it still runs fruitfully, was never likely to lose that edge.
So it proved in Cork. He still plays consistently sharp, but it gives his tone a plangently expressive force to go with a seemingly endless fount of ideas. And he has that American thing of opening sets at blistering pace; a typically Mach 2 Lover on Sunday night rapidly sorted out the altar boys from the clerics.
Luckily, those around him could do considerably more than merely keep up. The rhythm section - Walton, David Williams (bass) and Kenny Washington (drums), with Dave O'Rourke on guitar - was superb, with Walton continuing to show why he is regarded as one of the most profound pianists around.
He and another saxophonist, Johnny Griffin, were probably the biggest of the almost legendary veterans at the festival. Griffin was featured only at Saturday night's opening at the Everyman, where he played with Peter King and the lovely trumpeter and flugelhorn player, Gerard Presencer, in strings and jazz settings of standards and originals.
Through no fault of his, this was a major disappointment. The writing for the strings, who struck me as under-rehearsed, was not impressive - they were mostly used as effects, rather than fully integrated into any kind of ongoing musical dialogue - and Griffin himself seemed undermiked, while the overall balance appeared suspect.
The tenor did produce one of the best moments in the concert, a beautiful solo on his own ballad, When We Were One, but most of what was memorable came from Rebello, in splendid form, and Presencer, with a touching contribution from King, using soprano, on My Man's Gone Now.
As usual, with so much available to balm the soul, obligations elsewhere prevented me hearing more than the opening, Mile- stones, by the following group, Roots - Blythe, Davis, Freeman, Richardson, Lightsey, bassist Mike Richmond and drummer Ed Thigpen (of one of the great Oscar Peterson trios). They are, however, better than the light-speed assault on the congregation's sensibilities they offered with their first number. Some faithful were glad to depart.
The Irish Jazz Orchestra, led by trombonist Hugh Fraser and with another trombonist, Slide Hampton, as guest soloist were always likely to come across better at the Everyman than at the Festival Club. Nevertheless, up close at the Metropole, the power of the big band was a joy. Despite minimal rehearsal opportunities, Fraser has them playing better than ever; there's still some roughness, but the overall feel of the band is wonderfully loose now.
Manteca was a rhythmic orgy garnished by a brilliant trombone solo from Karl Ronan and sustained by drummer Darren Beckett and percussionist Nigel Flegg, while Brian Wynne's Early Depar- ture, though uneasily performed, is a lovely chart and a moving tribute to one of the band's youngest members, who died not long ago. The orchestra has considerable solo strength; besides Ronan, there are also such as tenor Brendan Doyle, trumpeter Linley Hamilton, pianist Brian Connor among the younger players, with veteran Jim Farley on alto.
Performing in a quintet with Jim Doherty, Dave Fleming and John Wadham, Hampton and Fraser provided another of the festival's major pluses. Using material mainly derived from the old book of twin trombonists J J Johnson and Kai Winding, they showed that the jazz equivalent of old time religion can be fun if the right pastors are using the hymn book.
From it they took Blue Monk, in which their unaccompanied duet was magical, a hilarious Side By Side and a beautifully busked In A Sentimental Mood on which Hampton did things with the slide trombone that should be illegal, or at the very least an occasion of sin.
Fire and brimstone, albeit well controlled, were dispensed by pianist Fintan O'Neill's quintet. Featuring the great James Spaulding on alto and Bill Mobley, a trumpeter and flugelhorn player who should be much more widely celebrated than he is, the quintet was completed by bassist Billy Johnson and a wonderful drummer, Mark Johnson. It's basically a Messenger-type band, with frontrank soloists, in which it was good to hear unmistakable signs of the benefits New York has conferred on the pianist's playing.
The festival had the usual frustrations. Hearing everything was impossible, while some performers didn't quite come up to expectations. Benny Green, formidably equipped technically, with marvellous time and dynamics, was enjoyable but unsatisfying, his playing too often an amalgam of effects derived from Phineas Newborn, or Oscar Peterson via Monty Alexander. Two good groups, The Young Lions and the Adams/Barnes Quintet, were in the inappropriate Met Tavern.
Other groups, such as the very interesting Chicago Underground Orchestra, led by trumpeter and flugelhorn player, Rob Mazurek, or the all-female Swinging Ladies, similarly led by Stacy Rowles, could be heard only in snatches because they clashed with other bands worth hearing. Most frustrating of all, the venue for the Barron/Bartz Sphere, with the great Buster Williams on bass and Ben Riley on drums, was just too crowded to listen to them effectively.
Much attention has focused on the trouble which erupted on Cork's streets in the early hours of Sunday morning - windows were smashed, cars vandalised, and between 40 and 50 arrests made. The violence is new to the festival, but the crushing of so many people into sometimes inappropriate venues has for years caused more minor problems for festival-goers.
This is now one of the problems of the festival's success. The Festival Club cannot, in its present form, handle the numbers now coming and provide the devotees with the sort of experience that draws them there. Other temples will have to be found and one is next door in the Everyman, a fine venue capable of being used throughout the day. That said, being too popular is a good problem to have.
