Sligo Jazz Festival Hawk’s Well Theatre/various venues★★★★★Sligo Jazz Project’s International Summer School and Jazz Festival, now in its 21st year, may only just be coming of age compared to the town’s venerable annual WB Yeats celebration. The event honouring the poet’s life and work has reached its 67th edition and is said to be “the longest-running literary summer school in the world”. In terms of the musicians it attracts, however, and the range of concerts, free performances and jam sessions it stages, the Sligo jazz gathering more than matches its poetic counterpart.Indeed, for six days in July, the town becomes not just “the jazz capital of Ireland”, but one of the most dynamic, friendly and inclusive jazz happenings anywhere in Europe, a lake isle of creative inspiration for jazz players and festival attendees alike. Cofounded and directed by the tenacious bass guitarist and former Those Nervous Animals band member Eddie Lee, the Sligo jazz summer school and festival has built a reputation that far exceeds the size of its host town. In the past the event has managed to attract such world-class jazz acts as The Bad Plus, Mike Stern, Christian Scott, Melissa Aldana and Soweto Kinch. This year’s line-up continued that tradition. The acclaimed US pianist Aaron Parks was 2026 artist-in-residence and on the Friday at the Hawk’s Well Theatre, where feature concerts and lobby jam sessions took place every night, he presented his own richly lyrical and eloquent music played by two new ensembles selected from his 29 fellow summer school tutors. It’s this community spirit that distinguishes Sligo from other Irish jazz festivals. At Sligo, the faculty is the festival and it often leads to new and impromptu collaborations – frequently multigenerational and involving Irish musicians – that you simply don’t get elsewhere. Audiences tend to be especially appreciative too, as they partly consist of students (up to 150 in recent years, aged 10 to mid-80s) who spend the day learning from musicians they hear on stage at night. Parks’s first group brought together the New York trumpet and flugelhorn virtuoso Freddie Hendrix, the extraordinary young English saxophonist Emma Rawicz, the versatile Swedish vocalist Liselotte Östblom, the agile English guitarist Tom Ollendorff, the master US bassist John Goldsby and the forward-thinking Belfast-based drummer Stephen Davis. All are bandleaders in their own right, yet it was a testimony to each musician’s keen sense of listening and generosity that the ensemble sounded so remarkably cohesive. As Parks said, “This is not easy music to pull off with only one rehearsal.” That same sense of spontaneity and discovery was evident in Parks’s second equally mind-expanding seven-piece, which included the Danish double bassist Jasper Høiby, whose trio 3Elements was the event’s band-in-residence; the singular Swiss vocalist Lucia Cadotsch; two leading British composers and improvisers, the flautist Gareth Lockrane and guitarist Rob Luft; and on drums and percussion, from Belfast and London respectively, the many-sided maestros Darren Beckett and Paul Clarvis. Playing music mostly from Parks’s three striking Little Big albums, the varied set seemed closer to a free-flowing suite, the music more textured and expansive than in the first half. (Two full and fascinating concerts for the price of one €25 ticket also represented exceptional value.)Eddie Lee, who is Sligo Jazz Summer School and Festival cofounder and director. Photograph: Lieve Boussauw The double-bill format was replicated the evening before, first in a set again featuring Parks, this time in an intimate duo with Cadotsch. The Berlin-based vocalist and songwriter has become one of the most original and distinctive voices in European jazz and beyond in recent years; she often reimagines jazz standards – Here’s That Rainy Day and Blame It on My Youth – through a kind of controlled interiority that accentuates both her playful theatricality and emotional clarity. Parks’s tender romanticism and mastery of touch provided the perfect foil.The second half spotlighted one of the 2026 programme’s undoubted coups: the extravagantly gifted and much in-demand 24-year-old Emma Rawicz. Leading a special Sligo festival quartet that presented the industrious Parks again on piano, plus the festival’s young artist-in-residence Sun-Mi Hong, a rising star South Korean drummer living in Amsterdam, and regular Rawicz bassist Freddie Jensen, the tenor and soprano saxophonist presented a range of original pieces – some new, some inspired by her love of authors such as Ian McEwan and Joseph Heller – that highlighted her already advanced skills as a writer of skilfully layered and harmonically sophisticated compositions.Saturday’s finale cranked the festival’s embarrassment-of-riches vibe up to 11 by featuring almost all of the 2026 faculty – in 11 different bands, none the same, almost all appearing without a rehearsal. It was a jazz profusion, a sampler of styles that ranged from mainstream to chamber and experimental, from a rousing interpretation of a 13th-century Arabic song performed by the expressive Albania-born vocalist Elina Duni to a captivating tribute by the Irish saxophonist Cathal Roche to Sonny Rollins, who died in May.The three-hour party ended with all the evening’s musicians, including Sligo-born guitarist and faculty head Mike Nielsen, on stage simultaneously for a joyous and carnival-like rendition of Freddie Hendrix’s A New Beginning, with various keyboardists, bassists and drummers athletically exchanging places mid-tune. “It’s like holy mayhem up here,” Hendrix cried at one point. Add the involvement of such emerging Irish talents as the pianists Nils Kavanagh and Rory Conneally, guitarist Joseph Leighton, and bassist Conor Murray and his saxophone-playing twin Micheál Murray, who are all products of the Sligo summer school youth academy, plus free afternoon sessions at Lillies Cocktail Bar showcasing such leading Irish players as pianist Scott Flanigan, trombonist Paul Dunlea and guitarist Joe O’Callaghan, and you have a vibrant advertisement for the rude health of jazz, both at home and abroad. At the start of the second half of Saturday’s extravaganza, Eddie Lee told the audience something similar and that the great US bassist and Sligo festival regular Rufus Reid had once taken him to one side and told him: “Eddie, you’ve created a monster.” He has: a big, bold and brilliantly benign one.