As a festival once proud of its jazz tradition there’s precious little jazz at this year’s Ulster Bank Belfast Festival at Queen’s, currently rolling out its programme online. Girls in Airports are appearing in a double bill with Oddarrang and both bands are certainly worth seeing. But you can’t call it “The New Scandi Sounds”, as the festival website has it, as one of the bands is from, yes, Finland! And that’s all there is so far although some more announcements are expected and other non-classical music-related programming of some appeal to jazz fans includes blues singer/songwriter Eric Bibb, fado star Carminho, and indie band Efterklang.

The Belfast festival at Queen’s new director Richard Wakely earlier in the year told The Stage following his appointment that it was his mission “to continue to bring the world’s best performers, known and unknown, to the stages of Belfast.” That presumably doesn’t extend to jazz as the programme has made little overtures towards it. Given that the festival is the only broadly-based arts festival in Northern Ireland with an international reputation and Belfast still lacks a full jazz festival of its own this is of serious concern to local audiences. It comes not long after the Arts Council of Northern Ireland published its new five-year music plan, a report that made plain there is a need in the province to make progress towards a “far more inclusive approach to the diversity of genres and distinctive music.” The lack of suitable programming applied to the genre at this year’s Belfast Festival only makes the findings in the report that bit more pertinent. Stephen Graham
Olavi Louhivuori of Oddarrang pictured Photo: Tero Ahonen