This year's Guinness Jazz Festival basked in the warm glow of an Indian summer - blue skies, the Lee like glass, temperatures milder than a raised eyebrow, no winds and not a drop of rain in sight. Whatever Sturm und Drang stirred the balmy Cork airs were more to be found indoors. There, a massive effort to put on a programme reflective of the diversity bursting out of the fractured envelope of today's jazz enjoyed success on that score without quite achieving the musical rewards it deserved.
Details could be argued over, but it's difficult to fault the thrust of a programme embracing an octogenarian trad/mainstream trumpeter and his band at one end, and an uncompromising melange of young, free spirits at the other. The test is how well they all deliver when they get on stage.
Certainly, Humphrey Lyttelton, 80 this year and just recovered from a mugging, knew how to stir the pulses. Looking cool as a mafia don in a pale suit - though no capo di tutti capi ever growled so effectively through Ellington's Creole Love Call - he led a mainstream group which, even at its most rough-edged and predictable, had a lived-in feel to its music.
Singer Nnenna Freelon, on the other hand, came in and crossed every "t" and dotted all the "i"s, with a sense of "this is how I did it yesterday and the day before, and this is how I will do it tomorrow". A pity. She's pitch-perfect, with a good voice, a precise range and enough frustrating hints to suggest that, if she let it all hang out vocally, all sorts of interesting things might ooze out. She had a quartet eminently capable of flourishing in such a creatively primeval bath, including a pianist, Takina Miyamoto, with the musical DNA to enrich the ensuing evolutionary changes.
Trumpeter Dave Douglas, however, enriches his artistic DNA from so many different sources that his musical genome has more twists than the longest double helix. Yet his trumpet remains grounded, no matter how remotely, in the fertile musical genes of Booker Little, a true original who died at 23 a generation ago. Like Little, Douglas is a truly majestic player whose lines have a pared-down logic and passion unduplicated by anyone else.
Douglas and his clarinettist/saxophonist Chris Speed, provided the superb core for the extraordinary rhythmic and aural electronic wash while the rest of his Witness septet swirled about their work. Despite its focus and intelligence, and the undeniable emotional wallop it packed, their comparatively brief concert must have left many in the audience bemused. Davis made no effort to explain the origin of the music, all of it based on material written by him.
Nor did he identify each piece, nor let it be known they were dedicated to people who have inspired him - all of them writers and activists across the world who have stood up and been counted for truth, freedom and human rights. The music was out there, and the audience could take it or leave it.
In contrast, one of the finest moments in the festival succeeded in communicating both musically and verbally. Pianist Richie Beirach, leading a beautiful group whose tightness and mutual awareness never strait-jacketed them, climaxed their concert with a ballad to honour the memory, as he put it, "of those who didn't make it on September 11th". Before he did, however, he insisted the doors were shut - the concert was in the Festival Club at the Gresham Metropole, where traditionally jazz is the curse of the drinking classes - to exclude the alcohol-fuelled rhubarbing outside. Then he chose the Bill Evans-Miles Davis classic Blue In Green for a quartet performance jewelled by one of the most moving piano solos I've ever heard; providing the setting for this gem were the great bassist, George Mraz, the equally gifted drummer, Jabali Billy Hart, and a fine young violinist, Gregor Huebner.
Much was expected of the Jim Hall Quartet and James Carter's Chasin' The Gypsy band. Hall, a veteran guitarist of surpassingly lovely tone and enviable harmonic subtlety, was paired with the provocatively intelligent, spiky alto saxophone of the much younger Greg Osby. It turned out a low-key affair, somehow unsurprising, given that they had flown from a festival above the Arctic Circle, to Stockholm, then to London and finally to Cork that day to make the concert.
The James Carter band had arrived the previous day - I caught them rigorously rehearsing in the Festival Club - but if their concert had more energy, it worked fully neither as homage to the gypsy guitarist, Django Reinhardt, nor as a launching pad for an exploration of it in more contemporary terms.
Also mildly disappointing that day was bassist Buster Williams's Trio. His deservedly much-admired pianist Geri Allen supplied the expected ideas and orchestral command; but the leader seemed to have pitching problems. The trio powered its way through the concert with a curiously uninvolving mechanical brio - unlike alto saxophonist Kenny Garrett, whose quartet shared the concert with them. Whatever the arguments about his own sometimes simplistic soloing, he did lead a group which didn't sound like it was on automatic pilot.
Fun allied to skill was offered by tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin and his quartet, standing in as a last-minute replacement for the Danilo Perez group. Griffin is a master at audience seduction. Surfing on the tsunami provided by a rhythm section which gelled from the start - Kirk Lightsey (piano), Gilles Naturel (bass) and Doug Sides (drums) - the tenor did find the faster pieces a trifle daunting, but delineated a compelling ballad, Lover Man, and a down-home blues, The Jamfs Are Coming, to match Lightsey, whose own piano threatened to steal the show.
Elsewhere, craftsmanship - rather than inspiration - was the order of the day or night. There were exceptions. At the Imperial's Guinness Jazz Pavilion, saxophonist Michael Buckley emerged as perhaps the most impressive solo voice in Dave Liebman's Dublin Project. Certainly the band, with Mike Nielsen (guitar), Ronan Guilfoyle (bass) and Conor Guilfoyle (drums) seemed more cogent when he got the opportunity to solo.
But both rooms of the new venue at the Imperial were undermined by a sound system which left something to be desired; only those at the very front could hear Liebman's group properly. This was underlined when that extraordinary trumpeter and flugelhorn player, Tom Harrell, followed Liebman with his crisp quintet in the larger of the two venues there. And the sound was even less satisfactory in the smaller room, where the groups of Hugh Buckley, Tommy Halferty and Jim Doherty had to struggle to hear each other properly on stage, and the audience was confronted by poor balance. It would be a pity to end on a negative, however. There were plenty of concerts where solidly played music entertained. Pianist Cyrus Chestnut may not have altogether conquered Cork, but both he and the blues-drenched Junior Mance (now 73, he says his colleagues are calling him "Senior") delivered plenty of expertly cooked soul food to the audience. Flautist Brian Dunning dominated his Puck Fair group with some superb improvising, which showed what can be done in the Celtic idiom. And although the veteran singer Sheila Jordan seemed caught in a 1960s time warp, she had a beautiful trio behind her in which the pianist Steve Kuhn was outstanding.
