Cork: Jazz Free Zone

This post has been a draft for the best part of a year now, so it's well about time I published it. The picture to the left was snapped by me about 4 weeks before last years jazz festival kicked off, so I deem it unrelated to the festival. For some reason Long Island management thought it fit to proclaim their premises a "Jazz Free Zone". I found this kinda ironic. Except for the Jazz festival once a year, Cork is pretty much a city devoid  of jazz! Long Island seemed to think they were located on the main street of New Orleans or something!



The above pic above was taken on the just before The Bad Plus took to the stage. I hadn't heard them before, but tey were good stuff anyway. Mad drummer! But not the maddest I've seen :) Later that evening, The Sun Ra Arkestra took over. Totally cosmic! Part of the enjoyment came from seeing how many people got up and left confused before the show ended. They just couldn't handle the jazz! :)

I also went to see Al Di Meola which was excelent but the show was rather short. We were done out of two encore pieces aparently, as the group had to rush off to catch a plane to another country. The delay in initally getting the show off the ground which caused the timing problems was supossidly the blame of the organisers and not Al Di Meola. Anyway, before his act got underway, an Irish Balkin group called Yurodny performed. I was looking forward to this as I love a bit of Balkin :) The song embeded above (might need a mouse-over or mouse-click for it to appear; stole the player from MySpace) "Red Hora" was one song in particular I was looking forward to hearing and Yurodny didn't disappoint.

I wonder what the 2010 Jazz Festival will bring...