NOVEMBER 2005

 CORK JAZZ FESTIVAL 2005

Letter to Jack McGouran.
Artistic Director
(Drawings or illustrations will be inserted later this week.)

Dear Jack, thank you for the highly satisfying programme for Cork during this European City of the Year Festival. It was good, very very good and I am only sorry that I was unable to travel in the congested city centre during the excitement to more venues.

However the indefatigable Maureen O'Keefe gave me such a welcome in the Everyman Theatre as she does every year, that I became part of the house furniture and made some portraits there from the box listening to Gwyneth Herbert, Richard Galliano, David Weiss in" Night of the Cookers", ( "The Boiler" might be an alternative name for this group,he should consider , giving him poetic contexts with William ButlerYeats' poems "On the Boiler"; the Boiler having been an old giant heating pipe complex on a site in Kensington London where the museums are now,) Ron Carter, Roy Haynes Al Foster and the musician I personally love so much Joshua Redman. However listing names is not in it here because even if this is a blast from the recent past, I have to study not only why we excell in listening-attention here in Ireland, but why we need these musicians of the jazz world critically at this juncture in history. They are the only people who will truly set us free into the shared world of music that initself resembles the universe, and this year they even had to set us, here in Cork, free from the descending bureaucracy of the Diageo Corporation, descending on the actual festival itself.

Yes! In the name of cost-cutting itself this miserable bunch of misers(who are demanding Arts Council Grants next year to the level of this one special year for Cork City), have decided to allocate to each musician one single pass only for audience seats and what is incalculably worse for all of us: Musicians working in outside venues from the Guinness Festival Centre, Metropole Hotel, were not given free access to the Metropole and all other venues . So that great meetingplace, and now historic Hotel foyer, the Metropole, where the ordinary public could meet and mix with the greatest jazz players in the world was empty. My God what have we DONE ,IN ALLOWING THE BARRY BROTHERS, who created this Festival and ran it for so many years, RETIRE? By Jasus where are they? Not a sight or sound of them? Though if seeing one of them I would doubtless have flung my arms in the air and burst into tears. We have young fellows like this young journalist: unable to make chance interviews or conversational bites for the newspapers, and already I read the dullest report from a Dublin newspaper that I have ever seen. Now where are we?

On the last evening of all, Sunday, I could not bear to go in there, but then I was in a transport of joy after listening to Redman and a taxi-man and I sped across the city as in the body of a bird talking and laughing about the essences of music.

BARRY BROTHERS PLEASE COME BACK AND JOIN WITH MURPHY'S AND YOU JACK MCGOURAN, AND MAKE US A NEW FESTIVAL.

Here is the only drawing I successfully made in the Metropole, Steve Watts, double bass, where there was a great set with Louis Stewart, Kirk Lightsey and Dave Wickins, they were joined by Robin Eubanks, trombone and briefly also by our Colm O'Sullivan, flute.Kirk Lightsey, a lightning storm on the piano and Louis, gave us the great gift of a conversation with music itself. There is some magic way Louis always rules with this great gift of his as he plays with others, the music breathlessly arrives like a myth before us and dances, in the miasma of our clumsy brains, until complete strangers on the floor are glancing and acquiescing with one another that the greatest of illusions with all her rhythms has taken hold of the wavelength and is restoring each of us to our inner core.

In the Metropole I missed Acker Bilk on Friday, next day under the guidance of the guardian angel Maureen and her group of women friends, Lee Lucy among them, I was spirited into the box and there I remained for two days.On Saturday afternoon Richard Galliano, who I had feared cancelled, came in with his great gust of hospitable friendliness and egged on Alexis Cardenas into his gypsy magic of the violin that many equate with the Irish fiddleplayer, but that infact carries music from a different tribe of nomads, one that destroys any sentiment and introduces the sulphuric message of the individual.Galliano himself like a high-spirited boy finding that rhythm that makes the body dance, has the most incredible control of the breathing of his huge accordion and follows a phrase until it just gives up in subservience to his diabolical fingers and exhilarating temperament..

That evening Ron Carter and Night of the Cookers, a "blistering all-star group" kept it all on the boil and if my assistant had not been unavoidably absent in Germany he would have availed of this opportunity to analyse and compare these different musicians, which unfortunately as an illiterate in the actual musical background that comprises the history of jazz I am unable to achieve for either this magazine or anyone's satisfaction. Also I see I have not mentioned Gwynneth Herbert, but that is really on purpose, as I think few women understand that it is the music that they should be immersed in. Vocalisation in light and evanescent tones is all very well on occasion but not as a complete pose. She had a very good pianist whom she did not use. Next day Sunday I could have been helped here if I had taken some notes but I did not do that and now in my head I can only isolate for Sunday afternoon Roy Haynes on drums; what a drive and rythmic risk taker pursuing a maximum speed, but unlike a reckless driver, revealing the amazing control that is the true evocation of the ancient lineage of the African drums, the language they created that has carried down from the origins of man in that continent. His set finally became interrupted when Hayne's seat descended to floor level and a drum he had constantly to adjust shot forward half a metre - but without loosing a beat he rose to his feet and came walk around with two drumsticks on the beat to the microphone and his bandman signalled "rescue!!" to the scenemen gathered in a group by the sound desk. Simon Lea, the previous day, sitting on his box drum comes into mind and the moment when he took what looked like a large bunch of grapes into his hands and tumbled them into the rhythm, like a gust over brittle stems in a dimming landscape to surprise the unwary. Hayne's unseated, announced to the audience that this was his first visit ever, and certainly his last to Europe, without his own set of drums !! Al Foster played on Sunday, and his benign laughing face showed us his joy in his craft that seemed to leave him isolated within his group of players, who concentrated in an academic sombre manner around him.

Joshua Redmond's set: First of all I must refer once again to the mean bureaucracy of Diageo - in order to avoid paying the scene-men anything generous on Sunday they directed them to set out the instruments for the two evening sets simultaneously on the stage, so Al Foster and his group that used a piano as well as their own instruments were set on the front edge precipice of the stage and then in the dark preliminary moment afterwards we had to find Redman at the very back of the stage and his drummer, Jeff Ballard, thereafter remained almost indiscernible. Redman's keyboard player, Sam Yahel,sat with his back to the audience leaping between his three keyboards and electronic machines and pedals almost in the left wings, and Redman and his guitarist, Mike Marino, moved behind an impenetrable barricade of sound shoulders and the empty forestage.What incredible bad manners. And that description of Diageo, "bad mannered", I heard often from all I talked to even prior to this event, and that it was a disgrace on Cork hospitality.

Joshua Redman has such a great gift of delineating the structure of his unique set, that the birth of the music taken from a single phrase into a perfectly beautiful landscape of sound that mentally spreads its horizon before you, can surely be traced through each musical development in the text. His keyboard player with the spring of a small wild animal has hands like birds flickering over the repetitions and their spontaneous flights, and he thus impels Redman continually to walk back again into the entire theme with his innovations to build yet a new perspective. There is such a purity of sound needed in this combination, the vigour of the drums, the echo and breakthrough of the guitar, the keyboard electronics and Redman's sax or clarinet, that it was almost inevitable that Redman would have to explain and acknowledge that ; and in a final intro. he called on his drummer whom he said, under all the many touring conditions that they encountered internationally, under all environments, this drummer, Jeff Ballard, made the sound checks vital to such a performance. He has the ear for the slightest pure tone that Redman finds necessary for his work, and its projection to an audience. Jeff Ballard, insofar as we could glimpse him rear stage seemed even there to sit sideways to his shells that demanded he almost twist backwards to hit them, his white arm in the dark slashing sideways and around.Redman who played a long set till near midnight received a standing ovation ofcourse but this changed to the solid beat of clap and shout, "MORE MORE" that finally he came back and played again and this time his guitarist took off into a solo of personal idiosyncracy that had everyone roaring again. But it was the last piece of the night and that was it Jack. Also I owe you thanks for a pass that was not used except on an occasion for one of my sons, a scientist, who often says he made the wrong choice of career, as music would have given him the freedom he now so badly needs to do research and work in peace - yes indeed there is hardly any peace in the sciences and no money given for the individual scientific attributes that he happens to have.

Sincerely, Regards and always Thanks for supporting The Handstand, (whose photographer will be here next year or I shall hope to find someone else!!)
from Jocelyn
Martin Bejerano, pianist

Kirk Lightsey, pianist

John Donoghue,pianist