Cork Jazz Festival and the Belfast Festival feature today.
Cork Jazz Festival
Various venues
Pianist Chick Corea has said: "It's one thing to play a tune or a programme of music, but it's another to create a new language of music, which is what Miles Davis did with Kind of Blue." Almost 50 years after the release of what many believe is the greatest of all jazz albums, Davis's musical language and personality still hover over jazz's global village. Nowhere was his spirit more keenly felt than at this year's Cork Jazz Festival, where the leading acts included a number of alumni of famous Davis bands across the decades: Corea himself, as well as John McLaughlin, Dave Liebman, Kenny Garrett, Rick Margitza and Lee Konitz, who first played with Davis more than 60 years ago.
The best of Cork this year were those musicians who embodied the progressive spirit of Kind of Blueand Davis's constant search for the new. Recent suggestions that the festival is superannuated have missed the mark: while some of the headliners disappointed, there was much to provide sustenance for even hardcore jazz fans, including artists visiting Ireland for the first time and old friends appearing in exciting new contexts.
Ornette Coleman famously said that the soul of African-Americans is expressed best through the tenor saxophone, and the most formidable, soulful tenor soloist of his generation is David Murray, who was back in Ireland for the first time since his memorable Cork appearance in 1994. Murray's Black Saint Quartet, who played at the Everyman Palace Theatre, was the highlight of the festival. Cry of Pain(with lyrics by poet Amiri Baraka) and Banished(a haunting, doleful remembrance of thousands of black families displaced from their homes in the American South in the early 20th century) were programmatic music of the highest order, deriving their force entirely from artistic expression rather than polemic. In contrast, Flowers for Albertand Hurried Stepsgave us Murray at his honking, screeching, baroque best, as he wrung every last ounce of emotion from these celebratory tunes.
And what a band. In Lafayette Gilchrist, Murray has a young pianist with a ton of technique and real soul. He likes big statements, especially late in solos, and will need to learn the shaping restraint of his great predecessor, John Hicks. But then Murray likes big statements himself.
As soon as Chick Corea and guitarist John McLaughlin took the stage at the Opera House for Friday night's festival-opening all-star concert, they referenced Miles Davis with a sensitive duo performance of the first movement of In a Silent Way. Unfortunately, the sensitivity was not sustained, and the concert went on to be dominated by the glib fusion that has marked much of McLaughlin's career since the stellar days with Davis. Though the musicianship was remarkable (bassist Christian McBride and altoist Kenny Garrett particularly), the band, like their support, Cindy Blackman, could have learned a lesson in feeling from Murray.
The geographical soul of the festival this year was certainly the Everyman, and the performances there by Cedar Walton and Steve Turre (who was awarded the Personality of the Festival) offered listeners excellent mainstream jazz from the US.
Turre's big trombone sound led an experienced quartet through a solid offering of blues and hard bop, while Walton, a frequent visitor to Cork, demonstrated that in his seventies he continues to be one of jazz's greatest composers and improvisers. His interpretation of My Romance, featuring tenor saxophonist Eric Alexander, was a high point, tasteful, sensitive and richly lyrical.
Supporting Walton was the Moutin Reunion Quartet, led by Parisian twins François and Louis Moutin (bass and drums respectively). Oozing Gallic charm, high energy and superb musicianship, the Moutins were joined by compatriot Pierre de Bethmann on piano and American Rick Margitza, a tenor saxophonist whose oblique tone and thoughtful soloing have established him as one of the best in the business. Something Like Now, the rousing, Joe Zawinul-esque original that closed out their set, showed Margitza and this fine group at their dynamic best.
The Moutins also provided a link to the European part of the festival programme, doubling up (in every sense) when they played at the Everyman behind the octogenerian award-winners, Martial Solal (Jazz in Europe Award) on piano and Lee Konitz (Jazz Legend) on alto sax. Konitz may not play with the assurance he used to, but it was good to hear him coolly working the changes to I've Got Rhythmand other standards. Solal's complex improvising power is undiminished, and he kept the audience on its toes with his mix of forceful emotion and canny reserve.
Unfortunately, trumpet master Enrico Rava fell ill and was unable to attend, but Europe was well represented by other stars, including the magnificent accordionist, Richard Galliano, back for a third year in a row, Austrian singer and educator Ines Rieger, and Italian trombonist Gianluca Petrella. There were plenty of Latin rhythms to be heard from Cuban pianists Gonzalo Rubalcaba and Elio Villafranca and the Puerto Rican altoist, Miguel Zenon, whose torrid set at the Half Moon Theatre showed why he won the festival's Rising Star Award.
Irish performers included Louis Stewart at the Firkin Crane and singers Cormac Kenevey and Honor Heffernan. David Lyttle's True Story, which included tenor man Michael Buckley and pianist Myles Drennan, continued a Cork tradition by extending their session at the Metropole Club until they were forced off stage at five in the morning.
The new wave of Irish jazz talent was not as much in evidence as it could have been, though reed player Seán Óg, who won the Irish Jazz Award, and his progressive band Trihornophone drew a lively and diverse crowd to their set at the Metropole.
All in all, it was a fine festival, which found a good balance between tradition and innovation, local and global, swinging and cerebral. Miles would definitely have approved.
KEVIN STEVENS
Belfast Festival: Carnival
Spiegeltent
There are many elements surrounding Lucy Caldwell's new play for Kabosh, which would suggest that an intriguing piece of theatre is in the offing.
Begin with the venue. The louche, smoky atmosphere of the Spiegeltent is perfectly suited to a play about a circus troupe that enlists young girls desperate enough to put up with appalling living conditions while being forced to perform perilous acts with deadly fish and animals. Caldwell has enhanced the mix with a look at the agonising plight of the artistically gifted Roma people, who find themselves consigned to the gutter of Europe, derided, despised and cast out of their own country and every other country in which they try to settle. There is gypsy music, superbly played by violinist Oleg Ponomarev and guitarist Drazen Djerek, gorgeous design by Sabine Dargent and gravity-defying circus skills from aerial artist Kelsey Long as the spirit of carnival.
But - and this is a very big but - where is the play? Among the cast assembled by director Paula McFetridge, the standard is set by Liam McMahon's young pretender Ferka and Vincent Higgins as Phineaus, the leader of a Roma travelling carnival who, in fleeing the devastation of war in their country, find themselves struggling for survival. Only Phineaus possesses the insight to admit that the carnival is dying, while the young bucks, under the eagle eye of their far-seeing grandmother, Vadoma (Maggie Cronin), express their frustration and discontent with their fists.
Meanwhile, two sisters (Claire Lamont and Tanya Wilson), taken in by the family as homeless children and now an integral part of their seedy repertoire, try to figure out where or if they still fit in. Caldwell writes in a mixture of English and the Roma language and sets out to create exotic scenes of ritual and tradition from the old country.
But there must be more to a play than mere words. The storyline wavers unconvincingly between the present day and the 1990s, pointing to contrasting individual fortunes during those years.
While Paul Kennedy's Djordji and Patrick J O'Reilly's Baldo have stayed within the fold and attempted to make a go of the carnival, Ferka has sought refuge in the west, where he has made his pile out of sex trafficking.
Somewhere in this rich, socially significant material, narrative, characterisation and drama have gone walkabout. The formless repetition of the arguments makes for a long watch and a genuine regret for what might have been.
Until Sat
JANE COYLE
EnsembleCaméléon
Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
Cork-born oboist Aisling Casey, who recently assumed a principal's chair with the Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic, joined with four members of Dutch string septet EnsembleCaméléon for a programme that was, to say the least, unconventional.
The ensemble's mission, "to shake up the traditional approach to chamber music-making", was accomplished in an event more like a musicians' party than a concert. And since, instead of a printed programme, a TV screen announced each item, there was no way of knowing what would come next.
Of several Baroque pieces, only a cunning adaptation of Bach's Two-Part Invention in E, played with flattering persuasiveness on violin and viola, retained most of its fullness of sound. While Casey's phrasing of Marin Marais's variations on Les Folies d'Espagne(on oboe) and Purcell's Music for a While(on oboe d'amore) was pleasingly shapely, the accompaniment of cello alone left a frustrating gap in the texture.
In addition to the instrumental pieces were an abridged Clapping Music, by Steve Reich (deftly segued out of the preceding applause), readings of gently enigmatic Dutch folk tales about animals, and Dmitri Smirnov's satirical Trio Sacrum(1974), adapted as a music-theatre routine with two fur hats, two glasses, and a bottle of "vodka".
These diversions were offset by polished and communicative playing in three modern original works for paired instruments: Martinu's Duo No 1 for violin and viola (1950), Schnittke's Hymn No 2 for cello and double bass, and Theo Loevendie's Duello(2005) for violin and oboe.
In a sequence that had studiously avoided the obvious, it came as something of a surprise when all five players did the obvious thing and gave a tutti finale - an enterprising arrangement of Piazzolla's Libertango.
ANDREW JOHNSTONE
