Cork Jazz Festival

Executive summary by darmansjah

The Cork Jazz Festival is an annual music festival held in Cork City, Ireland in late October every year since 1978.

The festival is Ireland's biggest jazz event and attracts hundreds of musicians and thousands of music fans to the city each year.

Jim Mountjoy founded the festival in October 1978. Mountjoy was marketing manager of the Metropole Hotel in the city at the time, and, faced with filling his property for the weekend, scheduled the first jazz festival to coincide with the newly instituted October bank holiday.

A small committee was formed and obtained sponsorship from John Player & Sons.The festival was an instant success with thousands of jazz fans coming to Ireland's first jazz festival. Guinness became the major sponsor in 1982.

As festival director between 1978 and 1986, Mountjoy also introduced a Pub Trail, a Jazz Boat (from the UK) and a Jazz Train (from Dublin) to expand the size and appeal of the festival. He also travelled to the UK, mainland Europe, Canada and 27 states in the US giving radio and television interviews, and press conferences in New York and The Press Club of San Francisco to promote the festival.

Over 40,000 people now visit the festival each year from many parts of the world.

To date, over one million jazz fans have visited Corkto hear noted jazz musicians such as: Ella Fitzgerald, George Shearing, Mel Torme, Wynton Marsalis, Buddy Rich, Turk Murphy, Oscar Peterson, Billy Eckstine, Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, Cleo Laine, Dave Brubeck, Chick Corea, Gerry Mulligan, Stéphane Grappelli, Sonny Rollins, and others.