Kenny Dope and Louie Vega have not shared an Irish stage in over twenty years. They have never played Cork together. When Masters At Work take the floor at Cork Opera House this October, that is not a jazz booking, it is a house music event of the kind that Cork has not seen before, dropped into the middle of a festival that has carried the word “jazz” in its name since 1978. That single act tells you almost everything you need to know about what new programmer Eoin Cregan has done to the 48th Guinness Cork Jazz Festival.
Cregan takes over from Mark Murphy for the 2026 edition, which runs Thursday 22 October to Monday 26 October across the October bank holiday weekend, and his first programme reads less like a jazz festival with crossover acts than a city-wide music event that happens to have jazz at its core. Berlioz, the London project built from jazz, soul and funk, is on the bill. So is Yussef Dayes. Annie Mac, making a rare Irish appearance, is there. So is Boney M featuring Maizie Williams, celebrating fifty years of the act. The City Hall series runs 23 to 25 October and gives you Bob Geldof and The Boomtown Rats on the Friday, their first Cork appearance in 49 years, followed by a Rory Gallagher tribute on the Saturday at the exact venue where Irish Tour ’74 was recorded, marking 31 years since his death. KOKOROKO round out a headline sheet that would raise eyebrows at a general music festival, let alone one that built its reputation on bebop.
It would be easy to call this drift. One reading of the 2026 programme is that jazz has been pushed to the smaller rooms while pop and rock sell the tickets. That reading is not entirely wrong. But it ignores what Cregan has kept. Courtney Pine delivers a career retrospective at The Everyman on the Sunday. Keyon Harrold and Marcus Strickland perform the music of John Coltrane and Miles Davis at the same venue. Triskel Christchurch hosts pianist Jason Moran, Bill Laurance of Snarky Puppy, and an ECM label showcase headlined by Trygve Seim and Tord Gustavsen.
Away from the ticketed shows, the Guinness Music Trail puts more than 500 musicians across 100 events in nearly 80 venues, pubs, clubs and rooms across the city and beyond, all free, all walk-in. You could spend the whole weekend without buying a single ticket and still hear something worth remembering. Move fastest on Masters At Work and the Everyman shows; headline tickets are in high demand on general sale via guinnesscorkjazzfestival.com.
After midnight, the festival has always lived somewhere specific. The Metropole Hotel on MacCurtain Street has been that place since 1978, the room where musicians end up when the ticketed shows are done, playing for each other until the small hours.
