Choppy waters
Last year, I thought it was a bumper year for Irish jazz albums. This year, by contrast, has been the exact opposite. So much jazz is going undocumented that it is not an overstatement to say the Irish scene, as it stands, is one of Europe’s most under-known, especially when compared with the volume of new jazz released elsewhere.
Take 2025. I put together a list of my favourite albums, a useful aide-mémoire led by crossover trombonist and singer Matt Benson, who uses the singer-songwriter circuit as a springboard for building an audience.
Instead, the picture now is far slimmer. Just where do Irish jazz fans go to find new homegrown product?
If you have been looking for a deluge of new studio albums dropping month after month, you will have been met with tumbleweed. The reality of the modern Irish jazz scene is that new studio LPs are incredibly rare.
The reason is clear enough: new jazz recordings by Irish artists do not sell in significant numbers. Musicians typically have to finance their albums themselves, paying for recording, mixing, mastering, artwork and manufacturing before attempting to recoup the costs through sales. Faced with that risk, many are understandably reluctant to proceed. How do you even market releases when few fans buy physical product any more? A few thousand streams on Spotify isn’t going to be a game changer but let’s be real the streams aren’t ever going to be in the millions.
The fact that a scene can operate largely without putting out many records tells its own story.
The UK scene is much larger in population and benefits from a more substantial jazz infrastructure, including promoters, more music colleges, dedicated magazines and websites and funding bodies plus commercial specialist radio stations like Jazz FM. A better comparison, purely in population terms, might be with a smaller European country – although not one of the Nordic countries, which benefit from considerably stronger national and regional support – Serbia? Belgaria?
Musicians are not mugs. If the choice is between supporting a loss-making tour or a loss-making album, then touring will win almost every time. Only a small number of musicians make money from either activity, but a live performance at least offers an immediate fee and the possibility of several engagements around the same project.
Touring itself tends to be patchy and territorial, with a few gigs here and there rather than sustained national circuits. Meaningful grants to defray the costs remain limited, although the Irish Government’s 2026 grassroots-venue scheme does offer up to €1 million in support for live music venues. That is welcome, but it is primarily venue funding rather than a direct solution to the cost of recording albums.
A fallow release year
The few records that do appear are therefore the exceptions that prove the rule.
The dead end facing Irish jazz recordings comes down to infrastructure and economics. It may, however, be part of a cycle. Some years are simply more fallow than others, and the pool of significant artists who release albums is relatively small. Most issue a major statement only once every few years, rarely more frequently unless the project is a live recording, which tends to involve lower production costs.
Labels such as the once-busy Lyte Records have gone into hiatus. Diatribe Records remains active, but its principal focus is avant-garde and improvised music – a part of the Irish scene, though a relatively small one and not representative of the scene as a whole. Livia Records, meanwhile, which is more representative has concentrated largely on archival material, although it has also issued recent recordings by artists including Carole Nelson and Phil Robson.
The financial mountain involved in funding, recording, mixing and pressing a full-length acoustic album means that musicians, particularly those emerging from music college, may space their major statements three to five years apart, if they can make them at all. Rather than chasing the streaming-era algorithm through rapid-fire releases, Irish jazz musicians have largely doubled down on gigging.
The releases so far
Unlike Ireland’s large indie-pop and traditional-music sectors, jazz operates without significant commercial backing, particularly from major live promoters. Radio support is also limited. Stations across the country are more likely to play country, pop and rock than jazz, with occasional support from RTÉ. BBC Radio Ulster’s jazz provision is also less substantial than it was before the loss of its two weekly jazz programmes.
My favourite of what is out there is the new EP by talented new County Down pianist and keyboardist Zak Irvine. I am also looking forward to the latest from Ireland’s greatest living jazz singer, Christine Tobin.
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves so returning to the balmy heretofore for a while, several interesting releases deserve wider notice. The media is asleep at the wheel. Newspapers such as The Irish Times and the Irish Independent continue to give jazz far less regular prominence than pop, rock and classical music. Profile is flagging. Fans simply have no real big media supporters in the quality press to look to any more apart from a once in a blue moon small column inch here and there. Blink and you’d miss it. 3 page specials on some TV reality star who can sing a bit, however, but who you wouldn’t watch anyway, no problemo. Read all about it!
Chunk by Insufficient Funs, released by Diatribe Records, is a duo project from Dublin drummer Matthew Jacobson and saxophonist Sam Comerford.
Antes, Siempre (Before, Always) by Orlando Molina, released independently, reflects the globalised nature of contemporary Dublin. The Venezuela born guitarist interestingly strips the music down to a delicate nylon-string guitar-and-vocal format, reimagining traditional Latin American melodies through sophisticated contemporary-jazz harmonies. It is a quiet and deeply personal studio statement.
The Unpredictability of the Sea by the Levy/Robson Quartet, on Livia Records, finds Roscommon-based English guitar virtuoso Phil Robson and powerhouse American saxophonist Jed Levy sounding as impressive as ever. The album balances tradition and modernity through original compositions by both musicians, supported by bassist Mark Hodgson and drummer Roberto Gatto.
There are also signs that Livia Records is becoming more active as a contemporary label. Let’s hope that is the case as a central hub going forward. Archival material does not interest me half as much as releases by the next generation and established masters like Michael Buckley.
The music is still happening
Ultimately, looking at the Irish jazz landscape through the lens of recorded output risks missing the point. The true pulse of the music lives in the rooms and on the festival stages across the island.
While studio schedules are quiet, the live circuit is deafeningly loud. Rather than waiting for physical records, audiences are experiencing this music as it is being born, supported by a dedicated regional network of venues, promoters and annual events.
The problem is not a lack of creativity. It is that too little of that creativity is being documented, distributed and made discoverable beyond the venues where it happens.
