French trio NOUT tour as part of Better Live

CONCERTS

Thursday 7th March, The Cooler, Dublin: Tickets
Friday 8th March, Triskel Arts, Cork: Tickets
Saturday 9th March, The Black Box, Belfast: Tickets

Improvisation workshop with NOUT, Thursday 7th March, The Cooler, Dublin: Booking

French noise-jazz trio NOUT hit Ireland for the first time in the days around International Women’s Day this year, bringing their particular brand of punk-ish, metal-influenced improvisation to venues in Dublin, Cork and Belfast.

An unusual combination of flute/effects, electric harp, and drums, Delphine Joussein, Rafaëlle Rinaudo and Blanche Lafuente aim at pushing their instruments beyond their limits, with the enthusiasm of a mad scientist in front of his vials.

The trio were winners in 2023 of the Europe Jazz Network’s prestigious Zenith Award for rising stars of the jazz scene. Audiences can expect an intense, immersive experience, somewhere between Nirvana and Sun Ra, in the wake of John Zorn's experiences on the borders of jazz and noise.

The group imagine their music cinematically, as an adventure with surprising twists. “We believe to be the characters of Alien and we find ourselves in Indiana Jones; we start with our eyes shut on a red movie theatre seat and we end up rocking on the dancefloor."

With their adaptive and improvisatory powers, the tour will showcase NOUT to the extent of their skills in strikingly different venues. Audiences in Dublin can expect a close-up, intimate encounter with the group in the industrial, Berlin-style vibes of Improvised Music Company’s former fruit warehouse venue, The Cooler at The Complex. In Cork - to contrast - the eighteenth-century arches of Triskel Christchurch will ring out with NOUT’s entirely modern sound, while in Belfast, NOUT are the closer of Moving On Music’s highly regarded jazz festival, Brilliant Corners. Irish musicians will also take some inspiration from the tour, with NOUT leading an improvisation workshop for musicians at The Cooler during the tour.

The tour is part of a European Cooperation project entitled ‘Better Live’, of which resource organisation and promoter Improvised Music Company is a part.

Building on some recent work around collaboration across the Irish jazz sector, the Irish section of Better Live involves a number of organisations from across the country working together to build more sustainable jazz tours for international artists in Ireland. Measuring carbon footprints across a number of areas relating to concerts, one of the project’s aims is to address the tendency for artists to fly in and out of a country for just one performance, by coordinating slower tours with more stops.

With representation from the smallest grassroots organisers to larger-scale multi-artform venues, Better Live is also facilitating education and knowledge-sharing for organisations to develop more sustainable day-to-day practices.

Research has shown that travel of artists and audiences has the highest carbon-equivalent impact for events in general. Focusing specifically on the day-to-day jazz sector, Better Live’s work measuring the carbon footprint of real and realistic tours for ordinary musicians and promoters will allow us to develop practical approaches to reduce the ecological impact of the sector. The implications arising for artists and promoters are huge, from the cost of longer times taken for travel to the place of traditional exclusivity clauses, forbidding artists from performing too close to a venue within a certain frame of time. Artists and organisations are developing creative new models, bringing together strands of work like residencies and international collaborations with touring, for a jazz sector that remains vibrant.

Work around sustainability in jazz isn’t new - the last edition of the lamented Galway Jazz Festival in 2019 worked with NUIG to measure their entire carbon footprint, and encouraged a variety of initiatives around sustainability, from audience travel to food. The final Galway Jazz Festival also memorably featured a new climate-focused work by Donal O’Kelly entitled ‘Roxy’s Head is Melted’ - a reference to climate activist Greta Thunberg’s dog.

However, with difficulties in recapturing audiences post-COVID, and the sky-rocketing prices of many elements of production, it’s unsurprising that many artists and promoters are between a rock and a hard place when it comes to choosing sustainable options.

The work of Better Live will be key in bringing the jazz sector together to create a greener future where artists and audiences can continue to enjoy the best of jazz music.

Read more about Better Live’s work at betterlivemusic.com

Better Live is led by project partners Le Périscope Lyon, Bimhuis Amsterdam, and International Jazz Platform Łodź. The project partners also include Victoria Nasjonal Jazzscene in Oslo, Improvised Music Company in Dublin, Plataforma Jazz España in Cádiz, The Cluster in Athens, G Livelab in Tampere, and Zavod Sploh in Ljubljana.

Research and analysis of the project is undertaken by EMEE, the European Music Exporters Exchange.

Jazz trade fair Jazzahead from Bremen is the dissemination partner on the project