On the Town: The trio Fly stole the show at a reception to launch the Contemporaries Concert Series, Spring 2005, in Dublin this week.
This new series of concerts will run throughout the spring at venues in Cork and around the country, featuring a number of international artists, including Fly, a group of New York-based musicians, who cast a spell over music-lovers in Dublin's Morgan Hotel.
Bassist Larry Grenadier explained part of Fly's allure. "There's a certain sparseness to the instrumentation that leaves everything open," he said. Audiences "hear all three instruments very clearly . . . if they can let themselves listen, they can be lost within the music".
Pianist and organist JustiCarroll, enjoyed the group because when "you bring three characters who you wouldn't expect to hear and they play together, it creates new sounds". Fly is "pushing forward its art and it's generally all new and much more exciting because of that", said pianist and composer Sam Jackson.
The series is "Ireland's first dedicated touring programme for specialist music", said Mary McCarthy, deputy director of Cork 2005.
The new concert series is about gigs, which "are aimed at a fairly discerning audience from the mid-20s up, jazz followers, people who know their music", said Margaret O'Sullivan, Cork 2005's manager of music programmes. She is looking forward to the Brazilian musician, Vinicius Cantuária, especially because it's a "contemporary expression of a native voice, an ethnic style of music. You can hear the country, the warmth in his music. It's very beautiful".
A total of up to 5,000 people is expected to attend these concerts throughout the spring, according to Gary Sheehan, executive director of Note Productions, which is co-presenting the series with Cork 2005.
"It's a gateway to new music in Ireland," he says. "I grew up listening to punk and indie music... and then discovered noisy interesting jazz."
For more information, see www.note.ie