Cork Jazz Festival: abandoning its roots or bringing new ears to jazz?

Every October for the past 38 years, jazzers and jazzists descend on Cork City for a long weekend centred around improvised music and more. The Guinness Cork Jazz Festival has a long history in the city and its sponsor has been with them since 1982.

Bernard Casey has been there for all of them, as a member of Cork Jazz Committee. A teacher at the Cork School of Music, Casey has witnessed the most famous of the festival’s names play the city including Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, Chick Corea, Sonny Rollins, Dizzie Gillespie and the Marsalis Brothers.

The Guinness Cork Jazz Festival gives the city an autumnal boost with 1,000 musicians from 20 countries coming this week to play, along with thousands of visitors and a customer upswing for the city’s hotels, pubs, theatres, restaurants and venues.

Early years
The first festival was conceived by Casey's friend Jim Mountjoy, who was then marketing manager of the Metropole Hotel, He decided to schedule the festival with the October bank holiday to fill up the hotel. It worked.

The 1978 festival saw an extensive list of jazz heavy-hitters play including Wynton Marsalis, BB King, Carmen McRay, Wall Street Crash, Shorty Rogers, Blossom Dearie, Georgie Fame, Chris Barber Band and Louis Stewart among them.

“That was just the Opera House bill,” says Casey. “The early years had such an abundance of stars for each festival, it was quite impossible to hear them all.”

Casey has seen a city change and a festival grow beyond jazz and into a fringe programme. But some things have stayed the same, for the festival at least. “The Opera House is still the main theatre and The Everyman is a Victorian gem,” he says.

Casey was the Chairman of the Cork Jazz Festival Committee for nine years until 2015. He’s now the honorary secretary. The committee book acts for the Fringe part of the festival, which are all free and include outdoor concerts, the festival club, jazz camp and marching bands on the street.

Casey will spend much of the week managing the marching street bands, along with a dozen other tasks.

“It can be very stressful two weeks before,” Casey says. “I deal with it by working and promising myself I would not do it again!”

As an experienced festival organiser, “plan well ahead and clear the decks as you go,” is Casey’s advice to others.

Not everything goes according to plan. Casey remembers one festival show when The Blind Boys of Alabama were enthusiastically introduced by an MC. “’And now give a great Cork welcome to The Blind Boys of Mississippi’,” Casey remembers the MC saying. “The MC was not from Cork.”

The Cork Jazz Committee is the anchor of the festival’s programming. Guinness are involved in the booking of the main international acts along with programme director Jack McGouran, who has worked with the festival nearly since the beginning. McGouran liaises with individual venues, such as the Triskel Christchurch, which also books its own acts.

It can be hard because the acts mightn’t be touring and it can be hard to get them to Cork for one night, as it might not be on their schedule,” says festival manager Gemma Bell, who is also the sponsorship manager for Diageo Europe. “It can be more difficult to get artists who have a crossover appeal that link back to jazz as they might not be on tour.”

Bell is keen to make the distinction between a typical festival sponsorship and Guinness’ involvement in the Cork Jazz Festival. It goes beyond a mere title sponsorship.

“It’s not just a sponsorship for us,” says Bell. “It’s our festival. We work with the committee, we’re not just a title sponsor. We book the bands, we promote the bands, do the PR, the marketing.”

This year’s big names, as in the most recent years, move beyond the jazz tag. While jazz acts include Jason Marsalis, Robert Glasper Experiment, Jacob Collier, Lila Ammons and Sheryl Bailey are on the bill. There’s also room for pop and rock acts such as Picture This, BellX1, Rodrigo Y Gabriela, The Riptide Movement and Loudon Wainwright III.

Non-jazz criticism
The addition in recent years of non-jazz acts such as The Coronas last year has drawn criticism of the festival. Festival director Rory Sheridan told Irish Times journalist Tony Clayton-Lea last year in response that the tickets weren't selling as well as previous years.

While Casey didn’t address the non-jazz criticism due to the committee’s lack of involvement in booking the larger acts, Casey and Bell both spoke of a desire for expansion and bigger audiences for the festival.

Recent trends in music suggest jazz is finding new audiences via cross-genre pollination. Rapper Kendrick Lamar's second album To Pimp A Butterfly is teeming with jazz players, producer Floating Points brings a jazz sensibility to electronica, while Snarky Puppy and Badbadnotgood are live jazz bands raised on hip-hop. Whether expansion leaves room for the new generation of jazz musicians and their disciples remains to be seen.

“We want to grow the festival and jazz is a very niche audience and market,” says Bell. “If we want to grow it bigger and better for the people of the city, we’re not going to do it with just jazz acts at it. It’s a select group of people who come and watch jazz. Our idea is to bring mainstream bands that attract different audiences who will then see jazz while they’re there. If we could get 40,000 people down just to watch jazz then we would absolutely do it. It doesn’t have as big of an appeal as it used to.”