Cork is a happening city on the jazz weekend
The Pharcyde: One of the big highlights of the weekend in Cork as they perform at the Guinness Cork Jazz Festival.
Many of the best shows are sold out but there’s many more with tickets still available and I’m just gonna highlight a few of my personal favourites this week. The Jazz festival reaches it’s 45th year in style and music has evolved a lot in those years too. The whole industry has changed and where once the masses bought records and tapes, we now live in a world where streaming is the principal method of accessing music. It’s much harder to make a living from music which is more widely available and accessible than ever before, but I’d also argue that people in Cork and elsewhere are probably more knowledgeable about music culture too.
At the end of the 70s there were music magazines and radio but now we have podcasts, playlists, talks, and even exhibitions. We probably have a deeper music culture now and we thankfully still have record shops too. I’m very honoured to have helped put together an exhibition in St Peter’s Cork this weekend, alongside ChoiceCuts, celebrating the special relationship between hip-hop and jazz. Many of us still buy records, and the cover art and design and whole creative process is important to celebrate too. I’ll speak of that momentarily, but first up let’s talk about some of the big shows this weekend!
The Pharcyde and Souls of Mischief show in Cork Opera House is sold out for ages and a big highlight. These two groups illustrate that jazz and hip-hop relationship better than most, and they both have great music catalogues packed with hits. In Cork clubs, tracks like “Runnin”, “93 till Infinity”, “Passin’ Me By” and more, were all huge anthems and still are, and they are both groups who always represented hip-hop culture with integrity and style. If you are lucky enough to have bagged some tickets, you are in for a treat!
This year’s jazz festival welcomes a lot of artists from the 90s and 2000s to Cork, but there is great contemporary jazz here too. Macy Gray, Corinne Bailey Rae, Morcheeba and even old school legends like Fred Wesley are in town, but we’ve also got Max Exodus, Cork’s Boolaboom, Five to Two, Amaro Freitas, Vieux Farka and lots lots more. DJ legends who have always had a special relationship with Cork will also visit, and it’s great to see Luke Unamomber, Mr Scruff, Giles Peterson and others on the bill.
All were influential in helping bring a more modern jazz dance sound to our ears and we can’t forget our own DJs too; Shane Johnson and Jamie Behan play Cork City Hall while Sunday Times do Aye. New school domestic acts include Negro Impacto, projective, Sam Healy, DeCarteret, QBanaa, Zaska, Melina Malone, 1000 Beasts, Fizzy Orange, Uly, JarJarJR, Kean Kavanagh and Yenkee, but this is only the tip of the iceberg.
In St Peter’s myself and ChoiceCuts have assembled an exhibition celebrating the relationship between hip-hop and jazz. Much of my generation got into jazz through hip-hop, and we got to love the old records as much as the newer ones we were buying in the 90s and beyond. But now there’s a new generation of jazz artists who grew up on hip-hop. Saxophonist Kamasi Washington says it best: “We’ve grown up alongside rappers and DJs, we’ve heard this music all our life. We are as fluent in J Dilla and Dr. Dre as we are in Mingus and Coltrane”.
This exhibition will feature hip-hop’s rich history from a jazz perspective, and it’s family friendly and free. It runs in St Peter’s all weekend and there will be DJ sets, performances, talks, workshops, breakdance jams, graffiti and lots more.
Overall, there’s loads on in Cork. The City will be jumping and hopefully we’ll all catch some memorable shows!
