Brilliant Corners 2025: Days 1-4

Brilliant Corners 2025
Black Box/Various Venues
Belfast, N. Ireland
February 28-March 8, 2025

Thirteen is young for most things, smartphones, cars and your average household pet aside. Thirteen is young for jazz festivals too, but as jazz festivals go, Brilliant Corners qualifies as a precocious youth. Its programming, whilst musically inclusive and respectful of tradition, has always been progressive, showcasing the latest trailblazers, and celebrating the fiercest improvisors and the fearless experimenters. Brilliant Corner's 13th edition was no exception, though there was perhaps more of an experimental edge than in previous years. A swathe of the acts easily side-stepped neat genre categorization, despite healthy doses of improvisation.

Brilliant Corners is the jewel in the year-round programming of promoter Moving On Music, founded by Brian Carson in 1995 (see the full story here ). It is, without a doubt, one of the most adventurous music festivals in Ireland. BC 2025, as in past years, drew healthy crowds for every gig over eight days. Newly commissioned music, an album launch, late-night jam and daytime workshop were part of the festivities. Several acts were appearing in Belfast for the first time. The first instalment of a two-part review covers days one to four.

Elliot Galvin: The Ruin

"Memories have huge staying power, but like dreams, they thrive in the dark, surviving for decades in the deep waters of our minds like shipwrecks on the seabed. " So wrote J.G. Ballard.

Pianist and composer Elliot Galvin, appearing at his third edition of Brilliant Corners, has a similar take on memories. Their unreliable nature, sometimes ghostly faint in detail, can render incidents and whole periods of time as little more than ruins of memory.

The origins of this extended suite, The Ruin, lay in Galvin's childhood growing up in The Medway Towns, England, an area he described as "quite bleak in a kind of beautiful way ..." That description served well for the hour and 25 minutes of music that unfolded before a rapt audience.

At 70 minutes in duration, this was a challenging compositional work, but the attention of those in attendance was striking; bar the odd ripple of applause, barely a sound leaked out from the audience. No glasses or bottles clinked, the famously creaking floor at the back of the room, and the noisy exit-door leading to the toilet, were both mute throughout. Nobody moved. That level of audience investment spoke volumes for the music's transfixing effect.

The suite was bookended by Galvin's solo-piano meditations—slowly worked patchworks of pulses, recurring motifs, minor-key embellishments and contrasts between brief accelerations and sparse, single-note splashes. The effect was like a Chopin nocturne given a dissonant, slightly gothic makeover. In the opening nine minutes of Galvin's unaccompanied intro notions of time (and loss of time), things concrete and abstract, things whole and things fractured, were all conjured with.

Electric bassist/vocalist Ruth Goller, drummer Sebastian Rochford and violinist Mandhira de Saram floated in and out of the lengthy suite, with drummer and bassist entering with punchy energy and striking up surefooted grooves that varied in volume and intensity. As for De Saram, the odd folksy, guttural gesture aside, her presence was more subtle. Her high-pitched, drone-like sustain flickering in and out ethereally.

For the album,The Ruin (Gearbox Records, 2025), released the same day as this concert, Galvin corralled the Ligeti Quartet, in whose ranks de Saram once belonged. Her playing this evening, minimalist by design, nevertheless impacted the music's moods greatly—as much, in fact, as Galvin's frequently sustained use of electronics and synthesizer to realize edgy ambient textures.

And for all her bass thunder, Goller's lyricism and deftness of touch, her dynamic range, all informed the feel of the music in equal measure, as did her wordless, choral-like vocals. (Check out her album Skyllumina International Anthem Recording Company, 2024), which AAJ's Chris May awarded a rare five-star review). Rochford and Goller, former bandmates in the explosive punk-jazz outfit Acoustic Ladyland, struck up a feast of heady grooves—guttural, raw and menacing.

Galvin bounced from piano to electronic keys, often juggling both simultaneously, as the music transitioned from quasi-pulseless passages of ambient sound, through spiky percussive dissonance, building towards collective statements of forceful intent.

Whether this project marks a point of departure in Galvin's trajectory into more experimental long-form terrain, or whether it will be a one-off, remains to be seen, but there is no denying his compositional ambition. This performance will live long in the memory... until the memories of this evening begin to recede, eventually to join all the other shipwrecks in the darkest depths of the mind's seabed.

Georgia Cécile

Saturday and Sunday afternoon gigs at Brilliant Corners tend to be mainstream, populist concerts showcasing jazz in its more accessible forms. This Saturday post-lunch gig followed in that tradition with Scottish singer Georgia Cecile gracing Black Box's stage.

You do not have to come from a big city, nor be signed to a major label, to make the big time. You do require undiminished self-belief, a ton of perseverance, and perhaps a touch of luck. Georgia Cécile is proof of all that. Raised in the small town of Uddingston, Lanarkshire, just south of Glasgow, her natural talent and determination steered her to Napier University, Edinburgh, where she earned a First-Class Honors in music in, 2014.

Half a dozen years of gigging later, and with a couple of hard-earned jazz-vocal awards in the bag, Cécile released her debut album,Only The Lover Sings (self released, 2021). The all-original music, co-written with pianist Euan Stephenson, cast the net fairly wide, revealing influences from Duke Ellington to Stevie Wonder, waltzes and tango. No sooner was the album released than Cécile got a supporting slot with Gregory Porter for a run of four nights at the Royal Albert Hall, London.

Black Box is a tad smaller than the Royal Albert Hall, but there is an intimacy in such cozy venues that suits vocal music—and the audience's appreciation—far better than cavernous arenas. For this performance Cécile was accompanied by Venezuelan guitarist Aleph Aguiar, the duo interacting warmly with the audience throughout its set.

From Cécile's upbeat signature opening, an Aretha Franklin-esque manifesto of intent, the singer's soul, jazz and blues influences shone through. Original material varied from breezy, r&b and soul-flavored tunes "In New York" and "Always Be Right," to introspective love songs of distinctive character, "He Knew How to Love" and "You Don't Notice." Whatever the mood, Cécile's commitment was total, while Aguiar's comping, nuanced and emotive, was pitch perfect.

Jazz and blues standards peppered the set. On chestnuts such as "Body and Soul," "I'm Old Fashioned" and "My One and Only Love"—the latter inspired by the Johnny Hartman/John Coltrane version of 1963—the chemistry between singer and guitarist was beautifully framed. Cécile is right at home in this territory, bossing Billie Holiday's "Fine and Mellow," which featured a wonderful solo from Aguiar. The guitarist displayed chops and comping taste in buckets throughout the set.

Cécile and Aguiar signed off with Elvis Presley's ballad "They Remind Me Too Much of You," leaving the stage to generous applause from a satisfied audience.

Niels Broos & Jamie Peet (Aftershow with Kaidi and Kwame)

You always know the younger crowd are coming to Brilliant Corner's Saturday night gigs when you enter Black Box to see the tables removed, and a standing-room floor greeting you. A few tables were shunted to the sides and the rear, and it is maybe no coincidence that the first through the door and making a hurried beeline for these oases of spinal repose were the grey hairs and the no hairs, sans dancing shoes.

DJs Kaidi Tatham and Kaidi Tatham warmed up the crowd with some bouncing feel-good tunes by the Isley Brothers, Chaka Khan, Omar Lye-Fook, Kokoroko, 4hero, Robert Glasper and Rickie Lee James.

The evening's serious business featured the duo of keyboardist Niels Broos and drummer Jamie Peet. Having played together in various bands in the Netherlands, the two first fused as a duo in 2017. Their music has evolved from a mutual grounding in jazz, hip-hop and electronics—no two improvised sets are the same.

With the DJ's soundboard taking up a battleship-sized chunk of the stage at the rear, there was just about enough space left for the Dutch duo's gear. There were more keyboards than at a Rick Wakeman-era Yes gig—electric piano and synthesizer, digital interface, patches, loop station and a jungle of wires and knobs; For Broos, packing before and after gigs can be no picnic. His swathes of electricity-hungry equipment contrasted with Peet's skin-and-metal drum kit, but their fusion of electric and acoustic felt totally organic.

From initial stirrings and rumblings, the two locked into a shared orbit remarkably quickly, establishing a vibe that lay somewhere between soul-jazz and early Weather Report jazz-funk. Gradually the music gathered steam, Broos hopping animatedly between keyboards, tweaking knobs and levers, and brewing feisty, intuitive solos. Peet, (also heard in the one-of-a-kind Tin Men & the Telephone) cites Tony Williams, Roy Haynes and Questlove as influences, and he was a fireball of energy for much of the set, his precision laser sharp.

At times, the music settled into an easy groove, even an easy-listening plateau, but when the duo was in the zone, pushing each other towards greater adventure, the rewards were magnified. In the music's best moments, Broos and Peet's improvised dialogs were exhilarating. Dancing broke out, which like the music, veered between a tame shuffle at one extreme and wildly uninhibited own-thinging that threatened injury to bystanders at the other.

A jam featuring DJs Kaidi and Kwame with Broos and Peet was on the cards, but the 45-minute wait before it got underway saw many of the crowd drift away. Ever resourceful, the Moving On Music team left the doors open, and when the jam did finally crank up and find its feet, the heady vibes drew curious late-night revelers in off the street. A banging time was had by all.

Ulster Youth Jazz Orchestra

Youth is wasted on the young, or so the saying goes. Not this bunch. The Ulster Youth Jazz Orchestra has been a regular afternoon feature at Brilliant Corners since 2019, though the orchestra has been in existence for well over 30 years. Every year Black Box is packed to the rafters, with a scramble for seats the norm. In recognition of the extent of the UYJO's popularity, the venue for 2025 was the larger auditorium of The Metropolitan Arts Centre (The MAC).

The 32-piece orchestra (12 saxophones, four trombones, nine trumpets, rhythm section, plus three singers ) kicked off in regal style with the theme to Joaquin Rodrigo's "Concierto de Aranjuez" bleeding into Chick Corea's "Spain." The arrangement was splendid—multilayered, contrapuntally vibrant and perfectly executed; close your eyes, and you could have been forgiven for believing this was a professional orchestra, rather than a group of amateurs in their early to late teens.

There were plenty of polished staples from the orchestra's repertoire, including a brace from Jaco Pastorius, "The Chicken" and "Come On, Come Over," Astor Piazzolla's "Libertango," Quincy Jones's "Soul Bossa Nova," and "A Cup of Joe"—all delivered with panache.

The introduction of sisters Rebecca and Sarah brought vocal sparkle to "The Very Thought of You" and the uber-catchy "Mr. Zoot Suit." In matching black evening dresses of the sort that only jazz divas can carry off convincingly, the siblings looked the part, with syncopated moves to boot. More importantly, they sounded terrific, particularly when harmonizing.

Kenny Dorham's "Blue Bossa" and Benny Golson's "Along Came Betty" injected some bebop and hard bop swagger into the set. On these trusty warhorses the collective UYJO voice sounded big and confident, a reflection perhaps of conductor Paul O'Reilly's passion; his encouragement throughout was constant.

The solos, inevitably, varied in quality, but it takes some guts to put yourself out there in front of the public, and it said much for the trust these musicians must have in O'Reilly that he coaxed solos from every member, no matter how brief. Special mention must go to tenor saxophonist Josh Baker and drummer Aaron Teeny, both of whom impressed.

A couple of weeks prior, Baker had interpreted the compositions of Wayne Shorter at Bangor Courthouse, backed by Stephen Davis, and former UYJO alumni, Phil Acheson and Zak Irvine. Baker is one to keep an eye on, but the beauty of the UYJO is that practically any of these talented young musicians, given the encouragement and the opportunities, could be making names for themselves in the not-so-distant future.

One such contender is singer Yasmine Fitzpatrick—a regular in the UYJO ranks these past couple of years—who is coming on in leaps and bounds. Her classy renditions of "Fever" and Nina Simone's "Feeling Good," with the orchestra in full swing, were excellent. From Black Box to The MAC. Next stop for the UYJO is the Ulster Hall.

Ed Bennet's Decibel Ensemble

Each year, funds permitting, Moving On Music commissions new music, a valuable stimulus to creativity. In 2024, drummer/composer Stephen Davis was the recipient. The resulting music, billed as The Gleaming World, premiered at Brilliant Corners 2024 to a rapturous reception. Since then, Davis has signed with New York label 577 Records, who released The Gleaming World internationally in February.

Another artist whose singular musical identity was deserving of MOM's support is composer Ed Bennet. The Bangor man has been pulling the reins of the moveable beast that is Decibel Ensemble since 2003, creating unclassifiable music—documented in four albums—and interpreting the music of outlier composers. To say that Bennet's range is vast would be an understatement; orchestral, electronic, opera—Bennet's appetite knows no bounds.

Fronting a new version of Decibel Ensemble, the ten members hailing from Ireland and the British Isles, Bennet was premiering his commissioned work, "All Earth Once Drowned," based on texts by London-based Irish poet Cherry Smyth. This was Smyth's first appearance at Brilliant Corners, at least in person. In 2023 her poetry aired at Brilliant Corners, interpreted then by singer Lauren Kinsella with the band Roamer. The fruits of that collaboration—dating back to 2017—were immortalized in the beautifully conceived album Lost Bees (Diatribe Records, 2022).

The words and music of Bennet's 70-minute suite were a response to the environmental crises of this epoch, an emergency felt globally.

Bennet, perched on the edge of an extended stage, back to the audience, raised his arms to cue the first notes. Almost from the offing the dectet sounded as one; rumblings from Damien Harron on xylophone, Stephen Davis on drums, Xenia Pestova Bennett on piano, Kate Ellis on cello and Barry Halpin on guitar, underpinned the murmuring and low growling of the three horns—grouped centre-stage—of tenor saxophonist Tom Challenger, alto saxophonist Xenia Pestova Bennett and trombonist Marty Sanderson.

"We go to the sea to remember how to forget... eyes stretching the three-mile emptiness," intoned Smyth, positioned front and left of stage centre. Smyth's personification of the sea ("it leans in like family; it bends back like a lover set the scene for the scale of the abuse and treachery by human hand to come. " No-one owns the high seas," her voice admonished.

The ensemble voice stirred restlessly, gaining in potency and wildness like an angry ocean, Davis' cymbals crashing like waves. In the eye of Decibel's storm, horns, cello and piano riffed menacingly, drums and percussion rattled like lashing rainstorm, as tenor saxophone peeled off in freewheeling release. Intense, manic, and hypnotic, Bennet's opus was minutely choreographed, the players following their scores closely.

The cacophony receded, minimalist piano pulse and lulling cello drone taking its place, horns lowing gently, as Smyth's words painted pictures of the sea's grandeur, its beauty and the harmony of its rhythms. Her image of seabirds playing in the crest of high waves, timing their departure just as the waves teetered and threatened to crash, would return later with greater significance.

Short pauses marked the transitions between segments. Heavy riffing erupted, sustaining like a mad Philip Glass score. Saxophones squealed and cried. Against such a powerful wall of sound, it was not always easy to make out Smyth's poetry. The tension, the urgency, on the other hand, were impossible to misinterpret—this was a clarion call for determined action... or face destruction. Quiet resurfaced, a piano scale rose steadily, punctuated by ominous unison blasts—a juxtaposition that chimed with Smyth's warnings of rising ocean temperatures.

Smyth's poetry worked its magic best in the quieter passages, the "coastal keening" (of worship? of lament?) to the sea echoed by the gently droning musical backdrop. There was a nod to Samuel Beckett, that bravest witness of the human condition—the frailties, the tragedy, the farce and the curse of being alive. " I'm down in the hole the centuries have dug, centuries of filthy weather ... ." The bleakness, so central to Beckett, seemed an apt reference for our cruel times. Here the music followed an abstract course, meditative and oddly serene, as though inviting reflection, or a way out.

Mantra-like rhythms arose again with foreboding urgency. "A notice on the summer beach: 'The sea is closed.' The sea is closed. A sentence never uttered: the sea is shot, the fish are floating, the muscles glow... " Angry pulses, crashing percussion, cello siren and frenzied, free-blowing saxophones converged in howling outrage. "Grief opens its black box," Smyth observed, ushering in another go round of hyper-intense riffing, stormy percussion and leashless skronk.

To everyone's dismay the house alarm went off, its shrill ringing about as welcome as an oil spill on coral reefs. The five-minute intrusion had the effect of breaking the spell, but once Bennet had settled the dectet and signalled the recommencement, it was remarkable just how quickly the haunting ambiance reasserted itself.

The final segment, serene from minimalist first note to last felt like a long sigh, punctuated by Smyth, whose words contained kernels of hope, but reminders, at the same time, of what is at stake. This time, it was humans before the high waves, confronted by the teetering crest, waiting passively beneath the inevitable crash.

Ed Bennet's Decibel and Cherry Smyth were rewarded with a rousing reception for a remarkable performance. Bennet's parting words acknowledged Moving On Music, and in particular Paula McColl, who managed Decibel's Irish and British tour dates. He also thanked the Arts Council Northern Ireland for its investment and, in a by now familiar war cry, urged people to support the arts.

Xenia Pestova Bennet & Franziska Schroeder

The Harty Room in Queens University Belfast's (QUB) Music Department was the attractive host venue for an evening of untethered sonic adventure. The Tudor-style edifice, with a magnificent, vaulted oak-beam ceiling like the ribs of an old galleon, was built in 1932-33. In the decades since, The Harty Room has witnessed a lot of music but perhaps none quite as avant-garde as that experienced by around 100 attentive concert goers this Tuesday evening. First up, however, was a local musician with something to say.

To describe Orion Courtney Lee as a guitarist does not do him justice. The guitar just happens to be his tool. The way he bent it to his will during a dramatic 25-minute set of industrial noise, tailored feedback and ambient soundscapes suggested the epithet 'sound sculptor' suits him better. The 21-year-old musician from Bangor is studying Music and Sound Design at QUB, whose Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC) makes it one of the best places anywhere for a young musician to let their imagination fly.

And imagination is something that Courtney-Lee has in spades. His guitar is a fairly rudimentary Epiphone Nighthawk. When he first clapped eyes on it in a music shop he noticed it had two holes by the bridge and a wonky pickup. For most people these imperfections would have been cause for rejection. For Courtney-Lee, these imperfections signalled originality and possibilities.

Running his guitar through a MIDI controller, the Bangor musician began, not so much with a power chord as with an eruption of feedback and surging fuzz riffs of industrial intensity. His soundboard, festooned with multiple fuzz boxes and an oscillator facilitated all manner of sounds, though broadly falling between noise and harshly psychedelic. Switching to lap-steel guitar, Courtney-Lee whipped up a storm of savage sounds. Softer ambient waves provided contrast—and maybe for some in the audience a little relief—but these lighter interludes were fleeting.

No Wave experimentalist Arto Lindsay was an obvious reference point, but when Courtney-Lee was suddenly inspired to gyrate guitar and body in a spontaneous dance of sorts, laced with controlled feedback, it was impossible not to think of Jimi Hendrix. After the gig, Courtney-Lee acknowledged the influence: "The Star-Spangled Banner? I could sing that like a strangled cat, back to front, noises and all" he quipped, referring to Hendrix' famous Woodstock performance .

Courtney-Lee, however, is neither an imitator nor a nostalgist, just an artist who seems remarkably sure of the sounds in this world that intrigue and excite him.

After a 15-minute decompression the second act began. With balloons. From the rear of The Harty Room, on either flank, the sounds of inflating and deflating balloons caused heads to turn. As balloonists Xenia Pestova Bennet and Franziska Schroeder moved forwards towards the stage, further farting, squeaking, huffing and exhalations arose from secret balloonists planted in the audience. These were no amateurs, as it turned out, but members of Belfast music collective QUbe—no wonder the farting, squeaking, huffing and exhaling sounded so technically proficient.

It was no to be the last of the evening's ballooning. The ears were grabbed next, not by the sounds of prepared piano and saxophones resting on the stage, but by the toys in which Pestova Bennet and Schroeder immersed themselves. Several miniature wind-up mouths, half a dozen ping-pong balls, set loose on a mic-ed wooden board, their distinctive percussive characteristics amplified. The objects were then tossed inside the Steinway grand piano to run amok on its strings. When Schroeder began to draw sounds from her alto saxophone it was an invitation for Pestova Bennet to drop the ping-pong balls into its bell, whether out of pure mischief or whether in the name of sonic experimentation only she knew. A rogue tennis ball, a small electric drill and a water-filled balloon placed inside the saxophone bell produced sounds ranging from the familiar to the outré.

The second piece squared piano and saxophone off in a fascinating dialog where Pestova Bennet mined the wondrous timbres of the Magnetic Resonator Piano (MRP) while Schroeder explored the sonic world of her saxophone. The MRP had 88 electromagnets installed above the piano's strings, controlled from the keyboard via a scanner. Xavia Bennet likened the effect to having 88 e-bows at her fingertips. Their exchange was an ethereal one, the combination of sustained synthesizer-like MRP waves and lowing saxophone creating a sound both meditative and transporting.

The concluding composition saw Schroeder imbibe a mouthful of water which she then used to manipulate the sound of her soprano saxophone. Sounds both known and unusual, lulling and coarse, arose through her instrument's bell, against the dreamy sci-fi backdrop, drone-like, of the MRP, and more earthy, jangling keys. Just as the performance began, the duo left the stage with balloons, emitting noises as they passed through the audience. The last sound, and a perfect note it was too, was that of the door closing behind them.

The slightly comedic musical theatre of the absurd that rippled through this performance conjured South Korean experimentalist Nam June Paik, whose shows in '60s and '70s New York saw him throw beans at the audience and drink out of his shoe. Such performance art prompted Leonard Bernstein to quip mockingly that it was like "dropping a herring down into a tuba and calling it a musical happening... or conceivably, a sonata for tuba and herring."

There were no beans or fish in Xavia Bennet and Schroeder's performance, but the same exploratory instincts were prominent. All sounds may not be music to the ears, but all music is sound. Where the one ends, and where the other starts is a matter of context, interpretation and personal sensibility.

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