Cork’s jazz legacy: Play on, rain or shine

CONGRATULATIONS to the organisers of this year’s Guinness Cork Jazz Festival; they have planned it for a weekend — October 27-30 — when the 10-day weather forecasts promise mere clouds and only a moderate risk of rain... the weather, then, as normal in our part of the world.

Down either to happenstance or extraordinary capability in the meteorology department, the event will be a much-needed tonic after Ophelia and Brian have done their worst.

The country’s largest annual jazz festival, and now one of Europe’s biggest, the Cork event owes its place to a city hotel’s marketing manager who back in 1978 was looking for an idea that would help to boost room bookings for the new October bank holiday. The first festival was sponsored by the then quite respectable cigarette manufacturer, John Player, whose sponsorship deals included car and motorcycle racing, tennis, English county cricket and lectures at London’s National Film Theatre.

Well, that was 1978, when no jazz club was complete without banks of smoke wafting from bar to stage.

The festival has grown each year, attracting since that first weekend more than 1m fans to Cork, and most of the headline artists in the genre: Dave Brubeck, Buddy Rich, Herbie Hancock, Oscar Peterson, Stéphane Grappelli, Cleo Laine and Ella Fitzgerald are some of the names with which younger readers might not be familiar. It’s to be hoped, though, that many of them will find out next weekend what jazz is about... come rain or shine.