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.