John Dolan: ‘Sinful, near-nudity, indecency’ - when jazz was all rage in Cork |
If I were to suggest that the Guinness Cork Jazz Festival this weekend would include scenes of near-nudity, indecency, rampant promiscuity, and sinful passion, many of you might take it as an endorsement.
Such lurid descriptions are normally more suited to a wild week in Ibiza - the type of hedonistic fun which, alas, my creaking back (and cruel wife) prevent me from currently pursuing.
If I were to tell you that such words were being flung around in relation to your grandparents and great-grandparents in Cork, a century ago, you might feel I have taken leave of my senses.
But that’s the truth of it.
Let me start by spelling out that this weekend’s Guinness Cork Jazz Festival will be filled with the usual decorum, musical flair, and social buzz that befits the biggest annual event in the city’s social calendar.
The musical genre has endured for well over 100 years, and gained a modern reputation for being mellow, cool, if perhaps occasionally on the sassy side.
But in the early decades of the 20th century, jazz arrived in Ireland with a giddy bang - and in an Ireland that was a very different place...
Invented in the African-American communities of the southern U.S states in the early 1900s, it found its way to Ireland after the wars of the 1920s.
Commercial dance halls had started to spring up and the new jazz scene was an integral part of them. Young people adored this modern and sexy music, compared to their own parents’ staid times. No dancing at the crossroads for them!
It was assumed - hoped, in some conservative quarters - that it would be a fleeting craze, but by 1925 jazz dancing had almost eclipsed cinema in popularity, and the fears were illustrated by a poem in the Longford Leader that year.
When the devil came to Erin
from his chambers down in hell.
Where the........