Saturday 30
Dirty Jazz Club
Arthurs, Dublin, 8.30, €7, arthurspub.ie
In jazz, long-running sessions and long-standing collaborations have a special energy. This is where you will find the core jazz principles of communication and interaction writ large, with musicians comfortable enough to take risks and familiar enough to anticipate each other’s next move. By any standards the Dirty Jazz Club qualifies: drummer Conor Brady’s anarcho-syndicalist commune of a jam band – with keyboardist Darragh O’Kelly, trumpeter Bill Blackmore, bassist Derek Whyte, and others – has been convening on a more or less weekly basis for the last decade and the trust and empathy evident on stage is what improvisation is all about.
Tuesday 2
Lounge Quintet
Leeson Lounge, Dublin, 9pm, No CC (donation)
Jazz musicians tend to disperse during the holiday season, driven indoors by a dearth of paying gigs and glut of good telly (these two facts are not unrelated). So jazz junkies who need their regular fix will fall hungrily on events like Dirty Jazz Club (see Saturday) and the Lounge Quintet. The latter group is descended directly from the band that once made Sunday afternoons in Dublin worth it with their long-running Globe residency. Now installed at the excellent Leeson Lounge, saxophonist Peter Dobai, trumpeter Bill Blackmore, guitarist Tom Harte, bassist Paid MacConnailóg and drummer Tom Dunne give the classic hard-bop repertoire a good airing every Tuesday.
Friday 5
Melanie O’Reilly
Bagots Hutton, Dublin, 8.30pm, €49 (incl. meal), bagotshutton.com
Dublin-born, California-based vocalist Melanie O'Reilly reprises her tribute to the life and music of Anita O'Day with Let Me Off Uptown, a mix of song and spoken word. The same show caused a stir a couple of years ago at the Pavilion Theatre, and O'Reilly, a popular radio presenter in the San Franscisco area, reunites with pianist Myles Drennan for a supper-and-music celebration of one of jazz's most respected and colourful vocalists.
Rorke Hennessy Doherty Dunlop
Arthurs, Dublin, 8.30pm, €10, arthurspub.ie
Australian saxophonist Daniel Rorke has blazed his own trail since arriving
in Dublin two year ago, leading the unique and atmospheric Wednesday night
sessions in the ceiling of the Dwarf Jar café on Wellington Quay. Here’s an
opportunity to hear the talented Rorke’s take on Monk, Coltrane and more, in the company of three rising next generation talents, pianist Darragh Hennessy,
bassist Jacob Dunlop and drummer Brendan Doherty.
