Wanted: a good home for jazz

Jazz is booming, and 2003 saw some sublime performances. The form still has no real home, however, writes Ray Comiskey

Despite the pressure of funding cuts, for jazz the year has been lively enough. A decent Guinness Jazz Festival in Cork, an imaginative effort on a shoestring for the ESB Dublin Jazz Festival and an equally imaginative approach to the impressively developing Bray Jazz Festival were all on the credit side.

And, notwithstanding the Arts Council's vital role, so too was the evidence of enlightened private sponsorship of these events; by Guinness, by the ESB and, in Bray, by a range of local businesses, added to the fact that Bray Town Council and Wicklow County Council also put their hands in their pockets.

But the most spectacular example of private support, in a way, was the coming together of various architectural practices to fund Trio 03, a superb series on the jazz piano trio organised by the Improvised Music Company at the National Concert Hall's John Field Room.

That brought in an array of international talent, some of which we would not have otherwise heard in performance. It occasionally touched the sublime; Bobo Stenson, Bojan Zulfikarpasic, Kenny Werner and John Taylor were particular favourites, but other regional accents were provided by The Bad Plus from America, Trio Töykeät from Finland and Tord Gustavsen, a gifted newcomer from Norway.

It also gave the capacity audiences a chance to hear what Irish-based talent could do. The pianist Greg Felton, part of Evidence with the bass guitarist Ronan Guilfoyle and the young drummer Sean Carpio, showed why many regard him, with the pianist Justin Carroll, as the most promising young keyboard performer here. And Phil Ware, supported by the bassist Dave Redmond and the drummer Kevin Brady, gave an impressive demonstration of the straight-ahead bop piano lineage in the same concert.

Music Network served jazz well by bringing in the working trio of the pianist Lynne Arriale for a tour and contrasting it with the great Italian clarinettist Gabriele Mirabassi's enchanting Latakia Blend, which brought its distinctive flavour of the Mediterranean cultural mix to its own tour for the organisation.

In Cork, among other things, Guinness provided the opportunity to hear live the great Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek, the South African pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, the saxophonist Charles Lloyd - the celebrated veteran of the flower-power 1960s and still playing well - and the eternal avant-gardist Pharoah Sanders.

A scaled-back ESB Dublin Jazz Festival nevertheless produced, among some idiosyncratic choices, the première of Ronan Guilfoyle's Simulacrum, the trumpeter Dave Douglas's talent-packed group and Vietnam's Dragonfly, with Nguyen Le and Houng Thanh. And among the young Irish groups featured in the festival was Dylan Rynhart's Fuzzy Logic.

In Bray George Jacobs continued to work miracles, this time headlining some major US names in the bands of the saxophonist Steve Coleman and the pianist George Colligan, as well as giving exposure to emerging Irish groups such as Orpheus. Both Orpheus and another young Irish group, Roy Carroll's Trouble Penetrator, also featured in Cork.

The debit side? Apart from the relatively inadequate support for jazz, compared with that for some other minority arts, by the Arts Council - and the council must surely acknowledge that the funding it provides for jazz has produced plenty of bang for each buck - there are other causes for concern.

The fundamental one is the continuing lack of an appropriate infrastructure for jazz musicians to perform in, most notably in Dublin.

Actors, when they are offered work, know that theatres and arts centres exist for them. Classical musicians, whatever the reservations, know the repertoire will be performed in some form of concert venue. But for jazz musicians these infrastructural supports don't exist to anything remotely like the same degree.

Does it matter? Yes. Newpark Music Centre, in south Dublin, has been turning out a remarkable number of young jazz musicians, male and female, for years. The result has been not merely a parade of talented and very promising players but also the emergence of fresh blood at a rate that is doing more than simply replacing the older generation. That, sadly, has been underlined by the passing of the much-loved and respected veterans John Wadham, the drummer, and Peter O'Brien, the stride pianist, during 2003.

But what is happening to these young musicians? They don't go round with a begging bowl to the Arts Council or anyone else. They, and those interested in helping them, form groups, then try to find places to practise and venues to perform in.

Where public performance is concerned, that basically means pubs, places whose raison d'être and function are radically different. And while it's possible to bring children to concert halls to hear classical music, the same is not true for jazz. The usual places to hear jazz performed are not family-friendly.

There are options, and jazz doesn't neglect them. The John Field Room is one, albeit expensive. Bank of Ireland Arts Centre is another, not expensive. Possibilities are being explored at Liberty Hall, and Project occasionally hosts jazz. But these are not the answer to the fact that there is no real home for the music, no musician- and family-friendly place with rehearsal space and flexible performance options, far removed from pubs and the whims of their landlords.

In the long run this situation is hardly conducive to seeing the music as anything more than a form that remains officially on the margins, "intellectual", perhaps, but not quite respectable; nobody we know, dear. It's just part of a dispiriting scenario where jazz musicians get committed and rigorous training, then find themselves in a world where the performance options are singularly deficient. Jazz, its resurgent practitioners and its audience deserve better.