Musician and composer Mary Halvorson: ‘I’m not trying to be weird. It’s just how I see things’
The American jazz guitarist, who is on her way to Ireland, may have the feel of a modern folk musician, but she can shred and distort like a death-metal band
The music of Makaya McCraven: Editing as composition, the studio as instrument
An innovator who pushes against received notions of jazz, the Chicago-based musician has been a key figure in a vibrant and revitalised international scene
Jazz trumpeter Eddie Henderson: ‘I didn’t register it was actually Louis Armstrong showing me how to play’
Bray Jazz Festival 2026: Maestro on being a doctor, an ice-skater and a musician whose latest project marks the centenary of the birth of Miles Davis
Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert: An epic journey into the unknown
The pianists Maki Namekawa and Thomas Enhco are re-creating the jazz star’s fabled improvisation at the National Concert Hall in Dublin
‘It was as if Louis Stewart and James Joyce were kindred spirits’
JoyceNotes was the great Irish guitarist’s only fully self-composed large-scale project. It’s finally being released, four decades after its first performance
Jazz pianist Kris Davis: ‘I remember feeling at 13 that this is what I want to do forever’
‘Risk-taking is a comfortable space’ for the Canadian ‘one-woman music industry’, who makes her Irish bandleader debut at the NCH in March
‘We feel like we’re in each other’s heads’: the Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis return
Deface the Currency, the second album by the post-punk trio and the jazz saxophonist, is out on Friday. So just how jazz are the Messthetics now?
2025 in music: The five best Irish jazz albums of the year
Including releases by Simon Jermyn, Snowpoet, Izumi Kimura, Ronan Guilfoyle and Nils Kavanagh
Cork Jazz Festival review: Dig deep and you’ll find this festival thriving at the fringes
One of the most joyous events was the Cork School of Music Jazz Big Band concert enthusiastically directed by Cormac McCarthy
What’s gone wrong at Guinness Cork Jazz Festival?
The 2025 line-up is one of the most disappointing for years. There’s no denying brisk ticket sales, but the festival needs to be more ambitious
Jazz musician Daniel Herskedal: ‘I wanted to feel those deep bass sounds. It was like a whole-body experience’
Herskedal makes a rare visit to Ireland this month, appearing with the pianist Helge Lien and the percussionist Helge Andreas Norbakken on a five-date tour
Big Band Evolution pianist Cormac McCarthy: ‘I’m still not able to understand how I played. It was painful to hit the keys’
The musician hit an unexpected barrier when tendonitis almost stopped him performing. But it also led to his noted career as a composer and arranger
Seamus Murphy took his camera from the Rust Belt to Russia. What he saw took him aback
The cold war was built on assumptions that Americans and Russians lived opposite lives. ‘What if that was a lie?’ the Irish photographer asks in his new book
Emma Rawicz: ‘I think jazz is made for people who don’t necessarily fit into life’s prescribed boxes’
Young saxophonist, composer and bandleader says she is a ‘massive perfectionist and complete workaholic’
Irish drummer Kevin Brady: ‘Most nights you’re able to hear great live jazz. But we need something like classical has in the NCH’
The musician, whose multinational Kevin Brady Electric Quartet embark on a rare tour in May, talks about teaching, his influences and the state of jazz in Ireland