Ray Comiskeylaments the steadily diminishing artistic returns offered by the outdated and commercialised Guinness Jazz Festival, which starts in Cork today
AS A natural-born pessimist, you wait all year for a dispiriting event and then three come along together: first the global financial crisis, then the Budget, and now the Guinness Jazz Festival (GJF).
A glance at the Incredible Shrinking Entity that is this year's core GJF programme reinforces the belief that it has been trundling along with an approach unchanged in decades and steadily diminishing artistic returns. It is a dinosaur in an environment where other, livelier species now rule.
There is now a year-round landscape of international events, including a festival in Bray doing wonders on a minuscule budget and the unique Douze Points festival for young European jazz musicians. Run on a relative shoestring, Douze Points is typical of the innovative thinking that seems to elude the GJF. And in Sligo, a jazz summer school and festival has grown with astonishing speed to become a happening of genuine international stature.
Visiting players and bands also come here independently of the festival circuit, among them Ferenc Snetberger's Nomad and the Elio Villafranca Quartet, both toured by Music Network this year. There's a web of venues to help this, including Cork's Triskel, omitted yet again from the GJF. And organisations such as The Improvised Music Company and Note Productions are experts in booking jazz acts.
To top it up, there's a generation of energetic, well-trained young local musicians pooling their efforts to form collectives. They're developing their own contacts abroad to perform with them, both here and internationally, on an ongoing basis.
Against that background, the GJF's approach - get a few big-name headliners, however superannuated, and shove some infill around them for bulk - is ad hoc and irrelevant. It fails to recognise what the jazz audience here has grown accustomed to and shows little acknowledgement of what local musicians are doing. And cares even less.
Apart from the 2005 festival, which was exceptional, the programme has shown little awareness of the great vitality of jazz performers in Europe. But 2005 was energised by the injection of €100,000 from the Cork European Capital of Culture programme, and the way it was used to create a vintage festival suggests, to be fair, that the event's steadily diminishing quality isn't entirely due to lack of imagination. It could possibly be better with a bigger budget.
That might also help to create a more substantial festival. What was once a four-day event has been effectively a two-day affair for years. Although 2008's star names (Chick Corea and John McLaughlin) will be at the Opera House tonight, the core headliners usually appear on Saturday and Sunday. Anything on Friday and Monday is normally, in jazz terms, inconsequential.
Furthermore, this year's programme includes some acts who might have been playing with or without the Guinness Jazz Festival, and others who were booked with the involvement of third parties. Both the Elio Villafranca Quartet and Paco Peña's Flamenco Dance Company (in a jazz festival?) are already in Ireland on tour. Villafranca comes courtesy of Music Network; Peña's company is a Pat Egan presentation subsumed under the festival banner.
Nor is the Festival Club at the Gresham Metropole the venue it used to be. It was once the core of the festival, where, amid the boozy rhubarbing of a mob largely uninterested in anything remotely resembling jazz, you could hear some good stuff if you got near enough. But it has been, in quality terms, a musical desert for years.
Then there's the lack of surprise. Of the two big stars, McLaughlin already has played in Ireland this year with his own band, and Corea headlined in the vintage 2005 festival; this year will be at least the third time he has played Cork. Other returnees include Cedar Walton and Richard Galliano (for the third time in as many years), fine players but hardly exciting or innovative choices. Dave Liebman is in Cork, too; great and adventurous player that he is, he has been in Ireland so often that he's almost part of the furniture.
It is good to have Martial Solal and Enrico Rava in Cork. Solal joins another previous visitor to Ireland, the veteran Lee Konitz, and recruits the two Moutin brothers to make it a quartet, while Rava leads an excellent quartet of his own. Great players all, but, again, hardly imaginative choices.
However, look at other headliners. In a jazz world with many mansions, Acker Bilk and Kenny Ball, a collective blast of jazz ephemera from the past, constitute uninspiring programming.
In my view, the festival has no raison d'etre other than what the sponsor Diageo wants from it commercially. Diageo's primary aim is to sell booze, and presumably it also wishes to maintain a presence in a city which is home to rival brewers.
Pity the programmer, then, who has to compile a festival against that background. Wherever you look it seems like death by a thousand cuts. A bit like the Budget we've all just been given, except the GJF is slightly more entertaining - and the hangover only lasts the weekend.
Cork's Guinness Jazz Festival begins today and continues until Monday.
For more, see www.corkjazzfestival.com
Cork: the headliners
CORK OPERA HOUSE
Tonight:Chick Corea & John McLaughlin All Star Band/Cindy Blackman Quartet
Acker Bilk/Kenny Ball
Tonight:Vocal Sampling/Elio Villafranca Quartet
David Murray Quartet/Steve Turre: Cedar Walton Quartet/Moutin Reunion Quartet
Sunday:Martial Solal-Lee Konitz/Enrico Rava: Yellowjackets/Richard Galliano
HALF MOON
Tonight:Liane Carroll Trio/Dave Stapleton Quartet
Saturday: Cindy Blackman Quartet/Miguel
Zenon Quartet
Sunday: Dave Liebman Quartet/Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey
FIRKIN CRANE
Saturday:Georgie Fame/Louis Stewart
FESTIVAL CLUB
Tonight: Len McCarthy Band. Dave Barry Big Band (also Sat/Sun)
Saturday:David Lyttle. Trihornophone. Zrazy.
John Moriarty/ Amy Matthews.
Des Hopkins.
