Jazzlife Jam

Jazzlife Jam is back at The MAC this Saturday, 17 October, from 2:30pm. It's the weekly showcase and jam session of Jazz Juniors, the youth programme run by MOBO-nominated drummer David Lyttle, who opens the afternoon playing alongside promising up-and-coming talent. The session runs in the Crush cafe space upstairs, which looks out over St Anne's in the Cathedral Quarter.

Lyttle is an Arts Council of Northern Ireland Major Individual Artist Award recipient who's taken his projects to nearly 50 countries and collaborated with Joe Lovano, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Talib Kweli and Liam Neeson. He founded the Jazzlife Alliance charity in 2018 and launched Jazz Juniors in 2021, which now operates across three Northern Ireland hubs for young people aged 9-16. The jam is where that work comes out in public, with Lyttle leading the way and the younger players stepping up around him.

The venue itself is a proper cultural hub, open 363 days a year and housing two theatres, three art galleries, a rehearsal space, a dance studio, three education and workshop rooms, a restaurant and bar, and an artist-in-residence studio. Its only permanent artwork is The Permanent Present by Irish artist Mark Garry, which holds 400 metal wires in the main foyer.

It's a free session, so you can just drop in. It starts at 2:30pm in the Crush cafe space at The MAC, Cathedral Quarter, Belfast.