Guinness Cork Jazz Festival

The Guinness Cork Jazz Festival is an iconic festival on the Irish cultural calendar, sending crowds flocking to the city every October bank holiday weekend.

The festival is Ireland’s biggest jazz event and attracts hundreds of musicians and thousands of music fans each year. The first festival began on Friday October 27, 1978 and has been held every year since. In 2019, The Guinness Cork Jazz Festival will take place from Thursday October 24 to Monday, October 28.

An average of €300 an hour was spent by the 50,000 fans who visited in 2018, as the Cork festival continued to rival landmark jazz events in Montreal and New Orleans. The festival offers a €35m boost to the Cork economy every year and more than 95% of the music sessions in 60 Cork pubs, hotels and clubs are free to the public.

Jim Mountjoy founded the festival in October 1978. Mountjoy was a marketing manager of the Metropole Hotel in the city at the time and he received a visit in from the organisers of a bridge event who had booked the premises for the new October holiday weekend that had only been introduced the year before, in 1977. The bridge club had decided to cancel.

He found himself with an upcoming bank holiday and a lot of empty rooms. Then came the lightbulb moment. The regular sessions at the hotel with Cork jazz stalwart Harry Connolly and other musicians had been doing quite well. What if they could be extended into a mini-festival?

Mountjoy bounced his plan off various other people and the idea soon snowballed into something much bigger. Others in the Metropole’s hierarchy saw how it might make sense and cigarette brand John Player agreed to put up £7,000 to become the festival’s sponsor. Guinness (and parent company Diagio) became the major sponsor in the 1980s.

It was a steep learning curve for all concerned, but for an inaugural event, they still managed to put together an impressive line-up that included three English jazz legends: Ronnie Scott, George Melly and Kenny Ball.

Mountjoy later recalled that Friday, October 27, 1978, was a red-letter day for Cork. “At around eight o’clock, in the evening, a dark, thin Londoner called Ronnie Scott sauntered on stage in the ballroom of the Metropole Hotel and told an audience of 300 people that it was the first time he’d seen dead people smoke.” Scott then picked up his saxophone and blew the first notes of Cork’s first ever jazz festival.

As festival director between 1978 and 1986, Mr Mountjoy also introduced a Pub Trail, a Jazz Boat (from the UK) and a Jazz Train (from Dublin) to expand the festival. He also travelled to the UK, mainland Europe, Canada and the United States to promote the festival.

To date, over one million jazz fans have visited Cork to hear noted jazz musicians such as Ella Fitzgerald, George Shearing, Oscar Peterson, Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, Buddy Rich, the Blind Boys of Alabama and The Maria Schneider Orchestra.

Non-jazz artists have also played at the festival over its long tenure - for example the 2015 line-up included Gary Numan, The Boomtown Rats and The Coronas. These acts, while always popular, did prompt claims that the festival was being watered down.

However, in 2018, a new festival director was appointed and Sinead Dunphy has kicked off what she calls “a renaissance of Cork jazz” with the focus very much being on bringing the biggest names in the business to the festival in 2019 and beyond.

“Jazz offers a myriad of options in terms of its contemporary offerings of playing and composition, and although it’s hard to fit in every genre and style, a festival is the best place in the world to be able to platform the established and legendary, side by side with the new and contemporary,” she said.

“We all know that Jazz isn’t something we love through just listening to recordings, it’s in our veins, and it pulses as a live art form through so many media, including films and television, dance and art.

“Jazz has so many synergies with so many of these different art forms and that’s why the Guinness Cork Jazz Festival is hoping to take things to new heights. Whether that’s with gigs, flash mobs, exhibitions, a Jazz Ball, Jazz DJ’s, Swing classes, major concerts, theatre shows or interactive street performances, jazz is about to find its way into the hearts of so many more people around the world.

“We’re on an upward trajectory of jazz, adrenalin-fuelled by the best vocalists, bassists, trumpeters, drummers, pianists, saxophonists and everyone in between!” She said.