“I don’t know where jazz is going,” the great Thelonious Monk once said. “Maybe it’s going to hell. You can’t make anything go anywhere. It just happens.” 

Now, far be it from me to disagree outright with anything the legend that is Monk has ever said, but there are always exceptions to the rule. Case in point: the Guinness Cork Jazz Festival.

From its humble, and accidental, beginnings back in 1979, when a scheduled bridge conference at Cork’s Metropole Hotel was cancelled, leading the manager of the time to make a decision to fill the vacant rooms and seats by putting on a few jazz acts for 300 people, the Cork Jazz Festival has quickly grown to become a four-day extravaganza that regularly draws in excess of 40,000 music fans to the city generating some €25 million for the local economy in the process. This didn’t just happen. This festival was made to go somewhere!

Jack McGouran has been at the forefront of the festivals transformation from last-minute room filler to world-renowned music and arts festival. As the Artistic Director of the Guinness Jazz Festival the Dubliner has been responsible for bringing some of the most legendary names in music to Cork stages, from Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson and Dizzy Gillespie to Buddy Rich, Wynton Marsalis and Chick Corea.

“I’ve been in marketing and advertising since I was a nipper,” he says, “and I’ve worked with some major corporate clients in that capacity over the years, one of whom was Guinness. I was part of a team that recommended sponsorship of the festival, when we presented the concept to Guinness, following John Player’s relinquishment in 1982. They went for it and I was subsequently appointed as a programmer and marketing director.”

It was a move that would subsequently paid dividends for all parties concerned, particularly Jack, a life-long jazz fan. “I’ve been a jazz fan since I was 13. I got into it through listening to American radio stations based in Germany. There was a terrific jazz programme aired every night for three years. The DJ was a Willis Conover. He would do these nightly broadcasts during the cold war when jazz was banned by most of the communist governments. He wasn’t particularly well known in America, even by serious jazz aficionados, but he was a real legend behind the Iron Curtain. From there I started to go out buying records.”

With his appointment as Programme Director Jack immediately set about re-branding the Cork Jazz Festival as a serious fixture on the Irish and international festival circuit. “We looked to really establish the festival that first year. We wanted to make a bang at the beginning and continue on from there. We booked Wynton Marsalis and BB King as the headliners and followed that by creating the jazz trail. From there we built the festival up.”