• Brilliant Corners 2023: A Festival of Jazz in Belfast

    February 8, 2023 - By 

    Belfast’s finest annual jazz event is back this March for its eleventh outing, courtesy of the perennially-reliable Moving On Music. This year’s Brilliant Corners festival features thirteen concerts – and two free events – across nine days from March 2nd-11th set predominately in the Black Box and Accidental Theatre. As ever, the programming will appeal to all manner of audiences, from the pure experimentalism of Belfast’s monthly Handmade Music, to the futuristic, urgent eclecticism of Run Logan Run and Sarathy Korwar, to rising masters of pure jazz like Binker Golding and Fergus McCreadie. The full schedule for Brilliant Corners is as follows – with each concert set to begin within 20 minutes of door times: Thursday 2 March…

  • Brilliant Corners 2020

    February 20, 2020 - By 

    A remarkably consistent, ever-rewarding peak of the Irish festival calendar over the last eight years, Brilliant Corners can lay claim to being the island’s most carefully-curated jazz festival. Packing out (all being well) a mélange of Belfast’s finest venues and bars – both big and small – from February 27 to March 8, this year’s bill is a suitably essential affair. Curated, as ever, by the clued-in heads at Moving on Music, acts and events as mottled as the Mercury Prize-nominated Dinosaur, Athens, Georgia trailblazers Kenosha Kid, the always compelling Joseph Leighton Quartet, Wood River and the downright unmissable Parker/Niblock/Sanders will take over the likes…

  • Preview: Pauli Lyytinen Magnetia Orkesteri @ Brilliant Corners

    March 8, 2019 - By 

    On Friday, March 8, Belfast’s Black Box will play host to one of the outright highlights of this year’s Brilliant Corners Jazz Festival. Backed with his Magnetia Orkesteri – a masterfully mottled assembly of some of his country’s very best players – multi award-winning Finnish saxophonist Pauli Lyytinen will present a career-spanning performance. Renown for drawing on their individual soloistic strengths and nigh on psychic interplay, this project’s blend of free-jazz and western chamber music is implosive, triumphant and essential. Tickets are a measly £12 and can be snapped up here. Sitting on the fence? Delve into 2017’s Pauli Lyytinen Magnetia Orkesteri. Pauli…

  • Preview: Brian Irvine Ensemble @ Brilliant Corners Jazz Festival

    March 5, 2019 - By 

    It was at last year’s Brilliant Corners when the Brian Irvine Ensemble ended their 6-year hiatus, and for good reason. Irvine cuts a singular figure not just in Northern Irish music, but worldwide, as one who embodies the spirit of the perpetually open-minded Brilliant Corners and all that jazz music encompasses, by pushing ever forward, with only a slight glance at anything that preceded.  The ensemble comprises around a dozen in number, drawn from varying backgrounds of contemporary classical, jazz & improvised music in Europe & Russia. As with many of artists comprising the Brilliant Corners 2019 lineup, their performances give themselves entirely over to neither formless improvisation…

  • Brilliant Corners Announce 2019 Programme

    January 30, 2019 - By 

    Now in its seventh year, the tastemakers at Moving On Music have announced the programme for their annual highlight – and the country’s finest jazz festival – Brilliant Corners. The festival will take over various venues in Belfast across March 2-9, with a kickoff solo piano concert from Craig Taborn at SARC’s Sonic Lab on Saturday, February 16. As expected, it’s a wonderfully diverse patchwork of jazz and first-rate sonic digression in the spirit of MOM’s booking the year round. It’s appropriate then, that the two first-night offerings on March 2 are the Ulster Youth Jazz Orchestra Shabaka Hutchings’ unmissable apocalyptic synth-jazz project The Comet Is Coming, supported by…

  • Preview: Brilliant Corners 2018

    February 5, 2018 - By 

    Returning for its sixth year, the country’s finest jazz festival, Brilliant Corners will take over various venues in Belfast across March 3-10. Programmed by the ever tasteful team at Moving On Music, this year’s bill is a wonderfully diverse patchwork of jazz and first-rate sonic digression. As well as films including Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker being screened in association with Belfast Film Festival at the Bean Bag Cinema, this year’s programme boasts Belfast’s experimental rock masters Blue Whale, the singular guitar explorations of Jim Mullen alongside the Ronnie Greer Organ Band and a homegrown showcase featuring Joseph Leighton Trio, Sue Rynhart…

  • Brilliant Corners Announce 2017 Programme

    January 11, 2017 - By 

    One of the country’s most reliably consistent and forward-thinking jazz festivals, the line-up has been revealed for the fifth outing of Moving on Music’s Brilliant Corners. Set return to various venues in Belfast from March 7-11, the festival pays homage to the inimitable Charles Mingus with I Am Three, get experimental with Sirene 1009 and FAINT+, showcase some stellar local talent with Hands, Organ Failure, and Joseph Leighton, delve into full prog-rock mode with Belgian guitar trio Dans Dans and Norwegian guitar-bass-drum blasters Hedvig Mollestad Trio, before bowing out with Robocobra Quartet and Strobes. Elsewhere, Belfast Film Festival will once again be screening some…

  • Brilliant Corners 2016

    February 1, 2016 - By 

    One of the country’s most reliably consistent and forward-thinking jazz festivals, Brilliant Corners will return to various venues in Belfast from March 5 to March 12. As expected, the bill for this year’s festival – hosted by Moving on Music – is as delightfully idiosyncratic as expected; Vein Trio will bring Latin Rhythms to the Belfast Parge, recently-passed jazz legend Ornette Coleman will receive due tribute, the synth-soaked free jazz of OKO and Tim Berne will illuminate the Black Box, whilst Dinosaur and Alarmist will team up for what’s set to be a highlight of the festival. Elsewhere, artist-in-residence David Lyttle will co-ordinate…

  • Brilliant Corners Jazz Festival

    February 13, 2014 - By 

    After its successful first outing last year, Brilliant Corners Jazz Festival will return to Belfast for a four-day programme from Wednesday, March 26 to Saturday, March 29. Presented by the thoroughly forward-thinking Moving On Music team, the showcase will feature performances from the likes of the Jeremy Lyons Dectet, BDK (Bourne/Davis/Kane trio, pictured) and David Lyttle featuring Soweto Kinch and Duke Special amongst others. Tickets for each show, which vary in price, can be purchased from all participating venues including The Mac, Black Box and Crescent Arts Centre. Go here for more info.