Music

Take yourself to church: This week’s jazz highlights

Mass in Blue at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral; Kind of Blue orchestrated at the NCH

US saxophonist Meilana Gillard of the RBG Trio plays the Clew Bay Hotel in Westport on Wednesday 29th

Cormac Larkin's face
Cormac Larkin
Sat May 25 2019 - 05:00

Saturday 25

Will Todd: Mass in Blue
Saint Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin 8pm €25 stpatrickscathedral.ie

Some of jazz’s greatest heroes took their first musical steps in church, but the connection between the blue and the sacred has grown more tenuous over the years, and nowadays there’s not that much for Christian jazz fans to get excited about. Respected UK composer and conductor Will Todd arrives in town this weekend to give them something to sing about with his Mass in Blue, a jazz setting of the Latin mass, featuring the Goethe Choir and Saint Patrick’s Cathedral Choir Choristers, soprano Hilary Cronin, saxophonist Patrice Brun and bassist Damian Evans.

Rynx Laneran/Haunted Beast
Workman's Club, Dublin 7.30pm €10 facebook.com/dublinjazzcoop

Curated concert series are a perfect way for the open of mind and the adventurous of ear to expand their musical horizons and check in with what’s happening at the frayed edges of the creative music scene. The curating baton at the weekly Dublin Jazz Co-Op series passes to Shy Mascot and Claritas vocalist Fiadh Rua Gregg for the next six weeks, and first on her radar is a double bill of new bands, featuring guitarist Evin O’Brien’s filmic quartet Rynx Laneran and a first-ever performance from Haunted Beast, featuring drummer Andy O’Farrell and guitarist Dylan Tonge Jones.

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Tuesday 28

Signal Series: Paul Dunlea Quintet/Cormac Kenevey Quartet
Wild Duck, Temple Bar, Dublin 8pm €12 improvisedmusic.ie

The Improvised Music Company’s Signal Series salon at the Wild Duck presents a monthly double bill of domestic bands on the up, and this month’s two-for-one will be music to mainstream ears. Cork trombonist Paul Dunlea – a talented arranger and big band leader, and this year’s artist-in-residence at the Cork Jazz Festival – leads a muscular quintet featuring in-demand UK saxophonist Ben Castle, and a quartet led by soft-spoken vocalist Cormac Kenevey, who continues his return to the spotlight following the release of his excellent new album, Turning Skies.

Wednesday 29

RBG Trio
Clew Bay Hotel, Wesport, Co Mayo 8.30pm Adm free facebook.com/jazzwestport

Westport Jazz is a new non-profit group started earlier this year to raise a flag for creative music in the picturesque Mayo town. Following their presentation of the David Lyttle Trio in March, Westport’s second concert features a new cross-border trio with Belfast-based US saxophonist Meilana Gillard and the first-call Dublin rhythm section of bassist Dave Redmond and drummer Kevin Brady. Gillard is a big-hearted tenorist in the classic tradition of Sonny Rollins and Joe Henderson, and in Redmond and Brady she’s got a vastly experienced, hard-swinging rhythm team with whom to explore the wide open spaces of the saxophone trio format.

Thursday 30

Kind of Blue Orchestrated
National Concert Hall, Dublin 8pm €39.50/€33/€27/€22/€12 nch.ie

Arranging Miles Davis’s masterpiece Kind of Blue for an orchestra might sound like an exercise in lily-gilding, but trumpeter and arranger Guy Barker has form when it comes to turning that small-group masterpiece into a large-ensemble experience. The talented British-born trumpeter, a fixture on pop records in the 1980s, toured with Miles’s great friend and collaborator Gil Evans in the 1990s, and it was while performing Evans’s own arrangement of the album’s classic opener, So What, that Barker first realised the orchestral potential of those modal masterpieces, recorded 60 years ago. Barker leaves his trumpet at home and picks up the conductor’s baton for this hotly anticipated performance with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra and special guests.

Sunday Jun 2

F-Job
Venue 35, Dublin Adm free facebook.com/FJoBmusic

Funky, forward-looking piano trio F-Job have been quiet of late, but fans of the rhythmically intrepid Dublin trio can put Sunday evenings in their diary for the foreseeable as they embark on a new residency in 35 Dawson Street. Pianist Greg Felton, bassist Cormac O’Brien and drummer Matthew Jacobson, all tutors on the DCU jazz performance programme, are three of the busiest and most creative musicians on the Dublin scene, and it will be interesting to see what new ways they have discovered to recast and subvert the standard repertoire. This first concert in the series, with bassist Derek Whyte subbing for O’Brien, is free of charge.