Cork Jazz Festival review: Great sounds at Triskel from Paul Dunlea & Cormac McCarthy, and Marc Copland
Marc Copland and Paul Dunlea at Triskel for the Guinness Cork Jazz Festival. Pictures: John Cronin
There is a scene in famed 1950s concert film Jazz on a Summer’s Day, screened at Triskel on Friday and Saturday, in which the camera zooms in on jazz singer Anita O’Day. The consummate and supremely cool “song stylist” is in the middle of a swinging yet daring version of Sweet Georgia Brown, and the close-up captures all the artistry, originality and vivacity that made both O’Day and the jazz of the period so utterly irresistible.
The film was shot at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, around 60 years or so after jazz first emerged in New Orleans at the end of the nineteenth century. Sixty years or so on, in Cork in 2021, three musicians brilliantly continued that tradition of freedom and control, eloquence and restraint, proving once again that jazz has lost none of its power to captivate and transport.
