The Guinness Jazz Weekend was a mini-festival within the main Belfast Festival at Queen's, and a first-time experiment for the organisers. Less lunatic than Cork it was a wonderful three days of eclectic, and occasionally electric, jazz that blew away the autumnal blues.
Just more than 100 people heard the Art Ensemble of Chicago - a lateish replacement for Ornette Coleman who had to pull out of the festival - in the Ulster Hall on Friday night. That minority, I suspect, will carry the most lingering memories of the weekend. The Ensemble goes back more than 30 years, a free jazz quartet whose experimental music, rooted in the African and wider black experience, was nurtured and developed during the 1960s civil rights period of Mayor Daly's Chicago.
The feature of Friday night's concert was a 50-minute suite, People In Sorrow, written in 1969 by reedsman Roscoe Mitchell - another Belfast absentee due to illness. It was a testing, troubling series of compositions that conjured images of slavery, of torment, of a people beaten down, and also of a risen people.
Ari Brown on saxes, flute and piano and Lester Bowie on trumpet, whether combining or soloing, powered the music along, one moment delivering dissonant angry brass sounds, the next bluesily sombre and mournful, and just occasionally, with a Caribbean touch, cheerful and free.
Don Moye on drums and African percussion and Malachi Favors on double bass completed the cathartic and emotional impact with wave after wave of rhythmical intensity. It was altogether disturbing and special, and left one wondering what parallel effect a good jazz composer could achieve with a similar suite on the Irish Famine.
Later, Ricky Ford in the Guinness Spot beside Queen's was less demanding, straight-ahead jazz with a hard bop kick. While Ricky could speedily permutate notes with the best of them, sometimes his technique masked a lack of invention; lively piano, though, from Ziegfried Kessler, and rich, resonant double bass from James Lewis.
Riotous and joyful, that was the Jesus Alemany Group from Cuba. Jesus, a vigorous trumpeter, led an 11-piece outfit in two celebratory sets of passionate Cuban and Latin rhythms which in the hallowed Ulster Hall, scene of many an austere unionist convocation, had almost everybody dancing. Carson must be spinning.
Why a two-hand combination of Joey Baron on drums and Bill Frisell on guitar should work perhaps just proves that Louis Armstrong was right: jazz is indefinable, mysterious and open to all sorts of experimentation.
Here we had Baron employing the drums as a main instrument cooperating unobtrusively with a gifted guitarist. Frissel is mainly a lyrical player, delivering lovely, loose gentle lines. Whether on a pop classic like My Guy (honest!) or Hank Williams's I'm So Lone- some I Could Die, or The Rain In Spain, he wove subtle, evocative - and funny - jazz. A catholic mix indeed.
Sunday night was Canadian night with the Irish Jazz Orchestra led by Hugh Fraser from Vancouver and later pianist Oliver Jones from Montreal fronting a classy trio of Andrew Cleyndert on bass and Vincent Clifford on drums. Both outfits won high praise in the Cork Jazz Festival, and this weekend that acclaim was reinforced.
No room for detail but the orchestra maintained its reputation for big-band exuberance and high spirits, matched to control and invention. Great solos from the likes of saxist Jim Farrelly, drummer Darren Beckett, and trumpeter Mark Bradley, to mention only a few.
Jones is a warmer version of his compatriot Oscar Petersen; less notes but more tender expression - almost a gospel hall feel at times. He wrapped up the weekend in a cocoon of righteous, swinging jazz.
