A weekend of standing ovations

Cork's Guinness Jazz Festival had politics, emotion, skill and adventure - the stuff of memories, writes Ray Comiskey

The late Frank Zappa is supposed to have said that jazz wasn't dead; it just smelled funny. If he had been lucky enough to make it to the Guinness Jazz Festival in Cork at the weekend, he would have found no sign of rigor mortis and not a whiff of decay. Put simply, this was one of the finest festivals of recent years and arguably one of the best ever.

A weekend packed with good and sometimes memorable music was climaxed, appropriately enough, with the final night's concert, when Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra took the stage at the Opera House, the festival's headline venue. And the occasion, already highly charged emotionally by Haden's anti-Bush stance, which gave rise to the re-formation of the orchestra, got further unanticipated resonances by events of the past few days.

Introducing the band, the MC reminded the audience of the death, a few days ago, of Rosa Parks, the African-American who refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama, 50 years ago, and the fact that American soldiers' deaths in Iraq had passed the 2,000 mark. He could also have mentioned the countless tens of thousands of Iraqis killed or maimed in the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld misadventure and the indictment of vice-president Cheney's chief of staff, "Scooter" Libby.

But what has this to do with a jazz festival and the music of the Liberation Music Orchestra? Everything. The animating impulse behind the choice of material by Haden and his brilliant orchestrator, pianist and composer Carla Bley, is outrage at what the Bush administration is doing to their divided country, the lack of peace in the world and, crucially, to celebrate what is good and best about America.

It's a tall order for any art form, but Haden and Bley are too good as artists simply to let the politics take over. To be effective as protest and celebration, the music has to work as music. This it did, emphatically.

If the material - Not In Our Name, This Is Not America, Blue Anthem, America The Beautiful, Lift Every Voice And Sing, Skies Of America, Amazing Grace, Throughout and Barber's Adagio - had its own resonances, it was given subtle and complex emotional underpinnings by Bley's superb orchestrations.

By turns mordant, ironic, witty, sad, satirical and celebratory, often within the same piece, the writing encompassed a range of ideas, comment and analogy that was as charged politically and emotionally as it was immensely satisfying musically.

It was also performed with persuasive skill and insight by a marvellous band. Especially noteworthy were the two tenors, Chris Cheek and Tony Malaby, guitarist Steve Cardenas, trombonist Curtis Fowlkes, trumpeters Seneca Black and Michael Rodriguez, and drummer Matt Wilson.

And it offered a first chance to hear one of the emerging talents in America, in alto saxophonist Loren Stillman. Haden and Bley were just as good as might be expected.

On such a memorable night, when all the band's music was so brilliant and affecting, it's perhaps invidious to single out one performance. But, as on their CD, Not In Our Name, the most spellbinding piece was Bill Frisell's Throughout, on which the contrasting tenors of Cheek and Malaby, over a piano ostinato were utterly beautiful.

And, significantly, after the concert you could hear discussion and argument in the audience about the politics of the music and whether music should have politics at all. Haden would have been delighted with that.

Either way, it was a privilege and an emotionally absorbing experience. Any music to follow that was bound to be an anti-climax, but a visit to the Triskel to catch the Scots pair, tenor Tommy Smith and pianist Brian Kellock, reprise the beautiful duets from their Symbiosis album seemed less likely to than others to fail. Alas, they had finished their set and, in so doing, illustrated the biggest problem of the weekend - location, location, location. Or, more aptly, bi-location. The Triskel had one of its strongest rosters in years, a rich and varied programme with such as Mike Nielsen/ Benjamin Dwyer; Terje Rypdal/Kjetil Bjornstad; Jon Faddis/Richie Buckley; Louis Stewart/Kirk Lightsey; and David Berkman.

Unfortunately, it clashed with headline events elsewhere and it was possible to hear only two splendid concerts there.

They provided notable contrast. Pianist Simon Nabatov with the great cellist, Ernst Reijseger and the brilliant drummer, Michael Sarin, offered wildly adventurous music inhabiting an indeterminate area touching on both jazz and contemporary classical music. Despite the freedom they espoused - and Reijseger drew an astonishing range of sounds from his instrument - it was immensely disciplined music, virtuosically performed, with gripping interplay and seasoned with wit and humour.

After Nabatov's uninhibited use of the instrument, the venue's grand piano began to show the strain during Enrico Pieranunzi's concert.

The Italian pianist was revisiting the seductively attractive, highly melodic music of his lovely Racconti mediterranei album, with clarinettist Gabriele Mirabassi from that CD and Ronan Guilfoyle reprising the role initially taken by bassist Marc Johnson.

It failed to diminish the impact of the music on the audience, who were swept up in the charm and beauty of it all. Both Pieranunzi and Mirabassi showed why they are regarded as among the finest on their instruments in European jazz, and Guilfoyle, clearly delighted to be involved in the music he loves so much, has seldom played better.

Although by Sunday, Friday had begun to seem a distant memory, Chick Corea had given a solid portent of the delights to come at the Opera House by unveiling his Touchstone group to Irish audiences. It was, in a sense, a revisiting of his Spanish roots, with Carles Benavent (playing, at times, what was astonishing flamenco bass), Catalan Jorge Pardo (saxophones/ flutes), Ruben Dantas (percussion) and Tom Brechlein (drums).

Latin and North African elements, coupled with a hard American edge, characterised much of the music, which was rhythmically complex (and often so in terms of form), but carried off with immense skill, brio and invention. And Corea reminded us, especially on piano more than on the keyboard he also used, of his greatness as a player. His band completely overshadowed a competent but scarcely invigorating performance on the same bill by guitarist Philip Catherine's Trio.

The same thing happened the following afternoon at the Everyman, where the much-touted British singer, Gwyneth Herbert, had the memory of her performance blown away by the sheer Gallic charm and virtuosity of accordionist Richard Galliano. This was sensual, ingratiatingly melodic stuff delivered by a crisply together quartet which included a fine violinist, Alexis Cardenas. As with Corea and Haden, he got a standing ovation.

Herbert, by the way, is a good singer. But her material and the manner of its treatment and presentation show she is leaning away from jazz. And the band is reduced to being a backdrop for the vocals, with virtually no solos allocated.

At the Everyman, another standing ovation was accorded bassist Dave Holland's splendid quintet, with Chris Potter (tenor/soprano), Robin Eubanks (trombone), Steve Nelson (vibes/marimba) and Nate Smith (drums).

Holland said they were running in new music for a planned CD, but there was little sign of that in the swagger, imagination and precision of their playing.

Sharing the bill with them was a legend who also got a standing ovation. At 80, drummer Roy Haynes can look back on a career that includes sparking groups for Charlie Parker and all the greats of that era. With a good young band around him, he was still at it with undiminished vigour, drive and technique.

That's not a bad summary of the festival itself. There were changes, evident in the subtle de-emphasising of the Guinness Festival Club at the Gresham Metropole Hotel as the artistic core ofthe event, and also in a more restrictive attitude to free tickets or passes.

Partly due to a health and safety review of the festival, these restrictions caused considerable disquiet among the voluntary committee which does much to give Cork its deserved name as "the friendly festival" and it's clearly an issue which will have to be resolved for next year. Meanwhile, it's time to give thanks for one of the Guinness Jazz Festivals.