Cork Jazz Festival review: Kit Downes offered a pleasing mix of jazz and classical

The final concert in Triskel's offerings for the Guinness Cork Jazz Festival had the British musician making use of the venue's 19th century pipe organ 

Kit Downes at Triskel Christchurch for the Guinness Cork Jazz Festival. Picture: John Cronin

Jazz and classical music have long been intimate if sometimes uneasy bedfellows. From the 1920s onwards, during which stride piano innovator James P Johnson also wrote symphonies and concertos and pianist and popular songwriter George Gershwin composed the revolutionary jazz-influenced Rhapsody in Blue, there have been countless examples of jazz musicians being drawn to the beauty of formal notation and extended structure, and contemporary classical composers integrating such inexact elements as blues, swing and improvisation.

Yet for some the fusion has proved problematic. Blending the two genres may be intriguing, even illuminating, but too often, it’s been argued, something is compromised, diluted or lost.