Bray Jazz 2016

By IAN PATTERSON 
Published: May 10, 2016

Bray Jazz 
Various venues 
Bray, Ireland 
April 29 -May 1, 2016 

With first-rate music festivals mushrooming all over Ireland, Bray Jazz remains a highlight in a crowded calendar. Now in its seventeenth year, Bray Jazz' tried and tested format strikes a pleasing balance musically, with jazz, folk and world musics in the afternoon and evenings catering for the traditionalists and modernists alike. The weekend program, whilst full, is not overly cluttered, and mornings are left free to either catch up on sleep, explore the oldest of Ireland's seaside towns, walk by the shore or venture into the heather-clad foothills of the Wicklow Mountains. 

The seventeenth Bray Jazz Festival served up a colourfully eclectic program, with a series of outstanding duo concerts in the Town Hall pointing to a more themed approach to programing this year. Enthusiastic crowds—the largest for some years—were treated to the contrasting strains of jazz from Europe and the Americas, with Magnus Ostrom and the Kenny Werner Trio presenting two very different sides of the same coin. 

And in this, the centenary of the Easter Rising, when Republicans raised arms against British rule in Ireland, Ronan Guilfoyle 's suite A Shy-Going Boy cast a highly personal light on events whose significance is still the source of fresh analysis and debate a hundred years on. 

As ever, high calibre local bands marked the Bray Jazz Trail, with the town's great pubs, hotels and eateries resonating to the sounds of vocal jazz standards, bebop, soul, funk, free-jazz and more bedsides, on this busy and memorable Bank Holiday weekend. 

Traditionally, the opening concert of Bray Jazz has kicked off in the Town Hall in the early evening, but with plans seemingly afoot to grow the festival, Bray Jazz 2016 got underway at one o'clock, and in a new venue to boot. 

The Well, a church with a long and convoluted history, had hosted workshops in past editions of Bray Jazz but this year was the first time that concerts were staged here as part of the festival's main program.

read more: http://www.allaboutjazz.com/bray-jazz-2016-by-ian-patterson.php