Guinness Cork Jazz 2026 review: Jason Moran’s extraordinary solo show a glimmer of hope for festival’s future

Guinness Cork Jazz Festival

Various venues, Cork★★★★☆

Cork Jazz Festival has been reset and redirected many times in its near 50-year history.

Ever since the early 1980s, when Guinness became its lead sponsor, there has been a seesawing tension between the commercial imperatives of staging “the largest music-centred city celebration in Ireland” and the responsibility of honouring the proud legacy and contemporary energy of the music proclaimed in its title.

Too often, especially over the past decade or so, big business has won out and, creatively at least, the festival has failed.

The inclusion of acts such as Gary Numan, Aslan and The Coronas – and, this year, Boney M, The Boomtown Rats and Masters at Work – makes sense if the overriding concern is to sell tickets and shift pints.

As a reflection of the music the festival purports to promote, however, it is not just disappointing. To jazz fans who range from the casually curious to the deeply dedicated, it is openly insulting, a jazz festival in name only.

Many music-heads vote with their ears and feet and stay away, leaving the impression that the festival is little more than an Irish Oktoberfest with a swing beat.

This year the task of squaring the jazz circle fell to the festival’s new programmer, Eoin Cregan – and, after last year’s nadir, the official line-up fared marginally better.

[ What’s gone wrong at Guinness Cork Jazz Festival 2025?Opens in new window ]

If you looked beyond most of the headline acts, which also included the DJs Annie Mac and Skin on Skin, and ventured into the line-up’s lower reaches, there were some unequivocally jazz and jazz-related acts, some staged at venues, such as Triskel Christchurch, with a long tradition of presenting the music in all its compelling diversity and unconventional allure.

For one thing, women instrumentalists were far better represented. The horn section of the trumpeter and flugelhornist Sheila Maurice-Grey and the trombonist Noushy Nanguy were out front in the London collective Kokoroko, whose late-night show at the Everyman thrillingly fused west African highlife, Afrobeat, jazz, soul and funk.

There were also high-profile performances from the 29-year-old Leeds-born alto saxophonist and composer Jasmine Myra, who led a septet at Triskel working at the intersection of jazz harmony, orchestral writing, film music and ambient sounds, and the 19-year-old Donegal guitarist and singer Muireann Bradley, who made her festival debut at St Luke’s. Bradley is rightly celebrated for her remarkable fingerpicking technique and interpretations of early American country blues – and, increasingly, for her own songs.

That’s not to say Cregan didn’t largely play it safe. Myra has built a following through three meditative albums on Gondwana Records, Matthew Halsall’s “contemporary spiritual jazz” label, and her young group included such winningly astral elements as Alice Roberts on harp and Joel Stedman on flutes.

Yet much of her set, drawn largely from Where Light Settles, her 2026 album, seemed simply too polished and polite. Her music is about tone and colour; often those shades were overly watery and washed out.

The group who followed Myra at Triskel on Saturday night suffered from a similar fate. Okonski is a relatively little-known American piano trio led by the titular Steve Okonski, a classically trained pianist based in Asheville, North Carolina. Its music similarly explores mood, much of it calm and introspective.

The leader described the concert as “more a gig than a recital” and seemed in more ebullient form than on Okonski’s two restrained and “ethereal” albums. Yet his tame compositions and repeated block-chord improvisations still leaned towards the predictable. The trio looked the part but sounded like The Bad Plus lite.

The programming at the Everyman was equally timid, particularly compared with some of the peerless jazz acts the venue has hosted over the years, from Elvin Jones and the Sun Ra Arkestra to Herbie Hancock and Jimmy Scott.

It’s true that the engaging English saxophonist Courtney Pine returned for another of his many festival appearances over the past 40 years, but both Saturday shows were given over to Ireland’s “king of swing”, Luke Thomas, and his band The Swing Cats, “celebrating 100 years of swing, jazz, big band and vintage pop”.

Still, there were glimmers of hope, on and off the official line-up. As well as the four club-style Green Room concerts expertly programmed by the trombonist Paul Dunlea at Cork Opera House, Triskel hosted a Sunday devoted to the venerable German record label ECM, curated by the centre’s artistic director, Tony Sheehan.

I caught two acts that perfectly embodied the independent imprint’s singular aesthetic and appeal.

In the afternoon, the inimitable Greek duo of Sokratis Sinopoulos on lyra – a small bowed string instrument – and Yann Keerim on piano presented Topos, a suite incorporating new interpretations of Bela Bartok’s Six Romanian Folk Dances that made room for further folk, chamber music and improvisatory extensions.

Later that evening, a quintet led by the leading Polish alto saxophonist and composer Maciej Obara, featuring the lyrical Norwegian trumpeter Mathias Eick, offered a compelling masterclass in the art of expressive and collaborative modern European jazz. The transporting 75-minute set combined calmness and intensity – and flew by in an instant.

The undoubted festival highlight, however, was the pair of concerts at Triskel on Friday night.

Performing compositions mostly drawn from his latest album, Riversphere, the English saxophonist Iain Ballamy and his highly interactive quartet – Rob Luft on guitar, Nick Pini on double bass and Corrie Dick on drums – played music that lived up to its fluid title: sounds that flowed, eddied and often caught you by surprise. It was a wonderful world to live in for an hour or more.

So, too, was the extraordinary solo show by Jason Moran, one of the pre-eminent pianists of his generation. Presenting his Music of Duke Ellington project, which features on a stunning album released earlier this year, Moran was equal parts respectful, audacious and educational.

He wore black slippers and often leaned back on a regular chair rather than a traditional piano stool, presenting the concert almost as if it were a casual Sunday-afternoon gathering in his New York apartment. Except that it was utterly and theatrically compelling, one of the most memorable concerts I have seen at Guinness Cork Jazz Festival. (Moran reprises his Ellington homage at the National Concert Hall, in Dublin, on March 21st, 2027.)

At one point Moran spoke movingly about how much Cork’s Rising Star award had meant to him in 2002, back when the festival’s jazz forces were clearly in the ascendant. “I hope they’re still giving out that award,” he said. They’re not. And they should be.

[ Jason Moran: ‘I have a lot of gratitude for Cork Jazz Festival. And I still have that wonderful crystal vase’Opens in new window ]