Guinness Cork Jazz Festival reviews: Brandee Younger, Ralph Towner, Jeff Parker
Brandee Younger at St Peter's, North Main Street. Picture: Darragh Kane
At its best, the Guinness Cork Jazz Festival is one long weekend celebration that, crucially, provides a wide variety of moods, experiences – and decibels. For every loud and electrifying Block Rockin’ Beats at the Opera House and carousing concert at the Metropole Festival Club, there are quieter corners, in smaller venues, where the focus is often on a single musician, in an intimate solo setting.
The latter was very much to the fore at St Peter’s Church on Friday evening. In something of a festival coup, 39-year-old American harpist Brandee Younger, one of New York’s most in-demand and consistently creative musicians, made her Irish debut in an absorbing performance that was by turns poetic, delicate, even dreamlike. The audience was becalmed and entranced; as I looked around people seemed to be barely breathing, let alone moving.
Playing a diverse programme that ranged from ‘Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise’ to Stevie Wonder’s ‘If It’s Magic’, from ‘Bésame Mucho’ to ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ – in the first in a series of six short (at around 30 minutes, too short for some I spoke to afterwards) concerts over the weekend – Younger elegantly blended elements of jazz, classical, soul, gospel and bolero into heavenly sounds that resonated around the historic building and flew up high to its vaulted ceiling.
The effect was much the same in the splendidly soaring surroundings of Triskel Christchurch the following evening for a solo recital by American guitarist Ralph Towner. At the age of 82, the acoustic maestro may sometimes appear, understandably, somewhat more wearied; as he himself admitted after playing his own challenging composition ‘Guitarra Picante’, “That’s a difficult piece – and it’s getting more difficult the older I get.”
Yet this was an object lesson in the fine art of experience and imagination; in the supremacy of such hard-won qualities as tone, texture, touch and dynamics; and in wonderfully visual music that transported you to Andalusian courtyards, English folk dances, Italian baroque piazzas, even, surprisingly, in places, Chicago blues clubs. Towner’s concert was an unassuming encapsulation of a lifetime dedicated to exploring the power and beauty of music.
A third deconsecrated church, St Luke’s, provided the Sunday afternoon venue for another beguiling solo guitar performance – by versatile 55-year-old American guitarist Jeff Parker. Perhaps best known for his work with innovative Chicago post-rock group Tortoise, Parker has also had a fascinating career in jazz and experimental music – his solo album Forfolks was one of last year’s most compelling releases.
Over a 45-minute set he took in jazz standards ‘My Ideal’ and Thelonious Monk’s ‘Ugly Beauty’, played faithfully on a sweet-toned Gibson semi-acoustic plugged straight into two amps. Elsewhere, however, Parker set up an array of bassline loops, ambient sustains, atonal drones and even the ebb and flow of recorded city traffic – layers and effects that created gentle soundscapes and unusual montages. It was meditative music that, as Pitchfork magazine suitably described it, “sounds like classic guitar jazz but often moves like a soft techno dream”.
