UK star Matthew Halsall on returning to Cork for the city's jazz festival
Matthew Halsall plays an afternoon gig and a night concert at the Everyman for Guinness Cork Jazz Festival.
Matthew Halsall isn’t one to blow his own trumpet. But ask a knowledgeable jazz fan, and they will tell you the Manchester-based artist is a pioneering figure in the genre today. He runs the influential label Gondwana Records, which has put out material by Mercury-nominated Portico Quartet and Polish composer Hania Rani.
He’s also a successful composer and band leader in his own right. Halsall has released a series of acclaimed albums, including the recent An Ever Changing View, praised by the UK’s Guardian for mixing “ambient percussion and yearning melodies”. “Just what the doctor ordered,” agreed All About Jazz.
It’s quite a distance from his formative years as a musician, when “jazz” was widely perceived as strange and obscure. “Growing up, I felt in a minority liking jazz and being a trumpet player. Especially growing up in a little mill town in Manchester,” says Halsall, who returns to the Guinness Cork Jazz Festival for performances at the Everyman on October 27 and 28.
Jazz has reached an increasingly diverse audience across the 15 years of Gondwana’s existence, he says. One driving factor is technology. Streaming lets the listener sample different kinds of music. It turns out that a lot of people you might never have previously got near jazz love it.
“There’s a younger generation. Through the evolution of how people listen to music – the ideas of playlists, if you like this you’ll like that… These have allowed people to discover things you might not discover if you went in a record shop,” he says.
“Traditionally you’d go to a record shop and go to a genre you like. Online, with streaming, you can listen to something and if you like it great and if you don’t it’s gone. I think that accessibility has allowed people find jazz that they really like. I’ve got to be honest. In jazz there’s a lot of stuff I don’t like. I have a beautiful record collection, thousands of records. But there’s plenty out there the would put me off jazz.”
In addition to steamers, he feels the vinyl boom and websites such as Bandcamp, where artists can sell vinyl and digital downloads as bundles, have contributed.
“It’s funny. Fifteen years ago, when I started the label, you’d sell a lot of CDs. Digital was coming in. In 2008, Spotify had just started. Bandcamp has become absolutely huge over the 15 years I’ve been releasing music. It’s platforms like that that have helped vinyl sales. The idea that you get a super high-quality digital download and this physical product... I also know loads of people who buy records and never open them. They like to collect them but don’t listen to them."
That jazz has come a long way in its mainstream appeal was confirmed recently when London’s Ezra Collective won the Mercury Prize for best British or Irish Album of the Year. They’ve also played several acclaimed Irish shows over the summer – including at the All Together Now festival in Waterford. It’s proof jazz is no longer niche or the preserve of obscurists and chin strokers, as used to be the cliche. Today, it’s squarely in the spotlight.
The success of Ezra Collective is an indication that people are more open-minded about what they listen to, feels Halsall. But it goes the other way, too – our definition of “jazz” has stretched to encompass many forms of music.
“I would say Ezra Collective are much more Afrobeat than jazz to me,” he says. “I can hear more [famed Afrobeat drummer] Tony Allen. My girlfriend was playing Ezra Collective, and I said to her, ‘Is that Tony Allen?’ And she said ‘no, it’s Ezra Collective. That crossover of African rhythm and reggae and all sorts of neo-soul and trip-hop has broadened what jazz is or what people in the industry want jazz to be.”
Decades of “sample” culture have fuelled jazz, too. A Tribe Called Quest, the Pharcyde and Nas are among the hip-hop artists who have woven jazz into their music. People have been soaking up jazz for decades. It’s just that they didn’t know it.
“When I was in my teens discovering the likes of Cinematic Orchestra. They were sampling loads of beautiful jazz records,” says Halsall. “Coltrane, all sorts of stuff was getting put in. Even in the 1990s and 2000, people were like, ‘Oh, I hate jazz, but I love hip hop, a Tribe Called Quest’. Nearly all of the samples are from classic jazz records. Sample culture has been a huge part. Even if you look at contemporary artists like Flying Lotus...Kendrick Lamar is one of the big ones – having [saxophone player] Kamasi Washington playing with him. That thing of two worlds colliding. At that point, the jazz world exploded a lot. Kamasi isn’t necessarily my favourite artist. Neither is Kendrick Lamar. I saw a huge shift in the younger generations going to jazz gigs."
He played Cork Jazz two years ago and had a blast. The festival has an eclectic programming philosophy and he’s all for it. Jazz can mean all sorts of things and Halsall feels a diverse bill is always a plus.
“It’s a funny thing isn’t it? In Europe when you played a jazz festival it was very jazz. When you look at Cork Jazz Festival or Love Supreme [a three day-er in Sussex], they’re a real mixture of soul, hip hop and r’ n b. All sorts going on. I don’t mind: I remember playing a jazz festival in Finland. It was Lauren Hill, Richard Ashcroft. And then Gregory Porter and myself – lots of jazz artists. I found it quite entertaining going around watching all the different artists. It’s fine – it’s making jazz a bit more open.”
- Matthew Halsall plays an evening show at Everyman Palace Cork, Friday, October 27, and a matinee at the same venue, on Saturday October 28, as part of the Guinness Cork Jazz Festival. An Ever Changing View is out now
Moses Boyd: Moving comfortably between jazz, soul and R&B, the London-born drummer and bandleader received a Mercury Prize nomination for his 2020 solo debut, Dark Matter.
GoGo Penguin: Contemporary classical, electronica and jazz collide in the music of the Manchester collective, whose latest album, Everything Is Going to be OK, was released in April. Their Cork gig was one of the highlights of the festival last year, and they play Dublin in early 2024.
Shabaka Hutchings: Best known of the projects, Sons of Kemet and Shabaka and the Ancestors, the London artist has also collaborated with Floating Points and the Sun Ra Arkestra.
Nubya Garcia: A saxophone player and composer, Garcia blends jazz and the Afrofuturism genre, which uses science fiction, history and fantasy to explore black identity, and in 2019 won the Jazz FM Breakthrough Act of the Year Award.
Emma-Jean Thackray: Leeds-born Thackray released one of 2021’s finest LPs in Yellow – nothing to do with Coldplay but a record that tapped into the brass band music with which she grew up in the North of England.
