Clarinet much better than this?

It’s jazz time again and Cork is raring to go with more than 100,000 visitors set to descend on Leeside bringing a huge economic boost over the long weekend.

Last year, businesses reported a 12% increase in sales compared to 2023’s festival with a reported €45 million injection to the local economy, and hopes are high that Cork will see an even bigger jolt to its system this year.

For Fiona Collins, Chair of the Cork Jazz Festival Committee, delivering an event on the scale of the Guinness Cork Jazz Festival is a year long process of capturing the essence of what makes it great and building upon it for each outing.

“Sometimes it's the luck of the draw in relation to artists who are touring and artists who aren't touring,” she explained.

“We're very fortunate that a lot of our street acts and a lot of the international acts just love coming back to Cork because they love the reception they get, and to be fair, it's the people of Cork that make the festival what it is.

“There's an atmosphere over the jazz weekend that you can't quite put your finger on.”

Kicking off today, Thursday, and running until Monday, the 47th Guinness Cork Jazz Festival will deliver that perfect blend of homegrown talent, new blood, and international heavyweights at venues all across the city, both ticketed and free.

Over five days, the festival will feature more than 500 musicians across 100 events in nearly 80 venues. Hotels in the city are already booked out with Cork’s many restaurants, pubs, and shops all gearing up for what is one of the busiest periods of the year as they look ahead to the coming festive season.

Ms Collins said: “We have such a great array of hospitality in the city, whether it's restaurants, bars, hotels, and we have so many individual ones as well. Everything is a bit different. You'll find so many different things to do over the weekend. The choice is endless.

“It’s a very short time to Christmas, even though we don't necessarily want to mention the word. It’s just about getting people out into and enjoying the city; getting people to say, ‘God, I haven't been out in the city in ages. We’ll have to come back again’.”

She added: “That's what you want as well, to bring people back out into the hospitality and get them to enjoy their night out.”

For the organisers, probably the most important aspect of the Guinness Cork Jazz Festival is to flaunt what Cork has to offer on all fronts and to nurture local talent on a massive scale while keeping it fun, exciting, and open to all.

“To me, the future of the festival is to keep it in Cork and to make sure that we can do everything to make it as accessible as possible,” continued Ms Collins.

“We're very lucky that we have the School of Music right here in the middle of the city. It's so amazing that a lot of those musicians who have trained in the School of Music actually get to play for the jazz festival. It just shows that there is an appetite for jazz and we get to showcase that within the city, so you do have that growth factor and that expansion factor and that's really important for me,” she concluded. For more info and tickets visit, guinnesscorkjazz.com.