Birth of The Cooler at MusicTown 2023

With an electrifying bill of local talent, IMC launch their new space - The Cooler at The Complex - at this year's MusicTown. A former Fyffes banana-ripening unit in The Complex building, amidst the fruit and vegetable market area of Dublin’s North inner city, The Cooler is being redeveloped as a new home for jazz and improvised music in the heart of Dublin 7. Open since January as a community-driven creative space for rehearsal, development and professional workshops, The Cooler is also being developed to be an intimate, small-capacity, club-style space

MusicTown in 2023 is a broad sweep of the infinite spectrum of music-makers resident in Ireland descending on The Complex in Dublin City for the last weekend of July. Originating in 2015, the festival was an initiative from Dublin City Council Arts Officer Ray Yeates to create a platform where all the different styles, tribes and genres of music performed in Dublin could exist side by side on one programme.

Saturday of MusicTown at The Cooler serves up an afternoon of the most exciting, groovy and adventurous sounds improvised music in Dublin has to offer, from feel-good funk with ZASKA, and electronic beats from H-ci to sweeping melodic improvisations from Izumi Kimura.

ZASKA serves up a feel-good blend of modern funk, neo-soul, and jazz. Max Zaska is the guitar-wielding songwriter at the helm of this supergroup of talent with a rotating roster of session players and rising stars from across genres in the Irish music scene.

H-ci (pronounced 'hah-chee') is an exciting electronic music project from jazz drummer Shane O'Donovan using an array of synthesisers and drums to create complex multilayers of rhythm, with a melodic content that is almost exclusively synthesiser based.

Japanese-born, Irish-based pianist Izumi Kimura has worked with many of the top names in contemporary and improvised music and performed all over the world, and is praised by the Irish Times for her “heroic level of technical fearlessness”.

Sunday at The Cooler for MusicTown is a rich Sunday afternoon of the best in classic Irish jazz, with Michael Buckley's hard-swinging quartet and Carole Nelson's soaring landscape-inspired piano trio sounds.

Regarded as one of the most influential musicians on the Irish jazz scene, saxophonist / flautist and composer Michael Buckley has collaborated with artists from Glen Hansard to Dave Liebman & John Abercrombie. His quartet brings some of the finest players in Ireland together in free-wheeling, high-flying, take-your-breath-away jazz.

London-born pianist, saxophonist and composer Carole Nelson has been based in Ireland since 1986, and currently lives between the River Barrow and the Blackstairs Mountains, a landscape which inspires her music. Her current piano trio project has released two albums of her compositions, to critical acclaim.

Seating at The Cooler: There is some but limited seating at The Cooler. Arrive early to be guaranteed a seat!