SLIGO JAZZ PROJECT shows its support for the Irish jazz community in these troubled times, with its whopping 2021 Festival Lineup, with a programme of predominately Irish artists recorded on video and audio to the highest level.
Sligo Jazz Project (SJP) has announced its festival billing for next month’s virtual festival and summer school, with festival acts recorded exclusively for the event in Sligo, Dublin, Wicklow, London, Granada and New York. The festival will be a huge showcase of Irish jazz artists of all ages, North and South.
“We believe this will be the biggest showcase ever presented of Irish jazz artists online”, says SJP’s artistic director Eddie Lee. “We realise the past 16 months has been a terrible time for musicians everywhere, with many of our top musicians forced to look to other professions to make a living. It is a real tragedy for our arts community and despite the PUP payments, threatens our arts scene in a really serious way. Thanks to the support of the Arts Council and our other funders and patrons, we have recorded a great selection of Irish acts in June on the Hawks Well Theatre stage for broadcast at next month’s festival. Every artist will receive a broadcast-quality video of their performance as well as payment for the event, which we hope will help them come out of this pandemic and reembark on their music careers with the support of valuable, high quality promotional material.”
Headliners Snowpoet, with Irish vocalist Lauren Kinsella at the helm, perform an exclusive concert from London for the festival, with Northern Ireland bassist and composer Dermot McNeil’s DMQ quartet also swinging in, loud and clear, from London. Stunning New York based vocalist and rising star of the Big Apple’s jazz scene, Ashley Pezzotti, comes fresh from her Lincoln Centre appearance with Wynton Marsalis & Orchestra to perform at Sligo Jazz with her own group. Peruvian jazz is a genre not featured before at Sligo Jazz Festival and SJP has remedied this in 2021 with the addition of Granada-based Phisqa, featuring a one-time prominent member of the Irish jazz scene, Cote Calmet on drums. Phisqa perform a set from Granada, Spain especially for the festival. And that’s not the half of it, as a whole host of acts performing on the Hawk’s Well Theatre stage complete the biggest ever showcase of Irish jazz artists, including Umbra, Rhythm Method, Sankhara, Conor Gulilfoyle Octet performing The Birth of the Cool, Paul Frost’s Music of Mingus, David Lyttle and Phil Robson, Scott Flanigan Trio, Origin Story, Michael Buckley, Murray Brothers Trio, and the curiously titled NCT (Neilsen Cusack Trio), which has Sligo guitarist Mike Nielsen, his son Oskar on drums and veteran Wicklow pianist Andy Cusack, in a swinging trio
which has an age gap of 68 years between youngest and oldest member, surely an entry for the Guinness World records! The festival will also be accompanied by a mini virtual summer school with micro-lessons and zoom workshops, all between July 20 and 25. See sligojazz.ie and Sligo Jazz on Facebook and Youtube