Finbar Furey, performing a couple of years back at the Shanachie Pub in Ambler.
If you want a review of Finbar Furey’s brilliant new banjo-centric recording, “Colours,” you might start with a very enthusiastic Finbar Furey.
“Its the best thing I’ve ever done in my life. I’m flying again,” says Furey, who is also renowned as one of the foremost practitioners or uilleann pipes in the world. “I haven’t played Appalachian banjo since my mother died. I found out I was playing the wrong instrument all me life. I have notes in me head that the pipes don’t play, but the banjo has it. It’s like second nature to me.”
Of course, it’s hardly as if Furey has never played banjo before, but this time around it just feels different to him, and it takes him back to the days when he learned the instrument from his mother Nora.
“I learned to play the banjo and sing from my mother. My mother played the melodeon and the concertina, and she could sing with it, but the banjo was her instrument. She taught me that music was like a wheel—there’s no end to it, and no beginning.”
There is one other notable influence, as well. Furey plays a five-string Framus banjo given him by Derroll Adams. Adams taught him a classic Appalachian style of play—thumb and forefinger. Furey blends his mother’s upbeat “breakdown” style with Adams’s “frailing” style, tosses in a bit of bluegrass … and that’s his sound. “It’s a whole new beautiful mixture,” he explains. “Its Irish music and pure soul.”
You’ll hear Furey’s distinctive banjo playing all through “Colours,” from the opening track, “After Sunday Mass,” to “The Ballad for George Best.” It also pops up in two classic folk numbers, “Blowing in the Wind” and “Waltzing Matilda.”
It’s not all banjo plucking of course. There are two delicious duets, the touching “Walking With My Love,” with Mary Black, and a bittersweet ballad “Rivers of Steel,” in which he pairs up with English X Factor winner Shayne Ward.
And fear not … Furey dusts off the pipes for the final tune, “Up By Christchurch And Down By St Patrick’s And Home,” inspired by the legendary piper Johnny Doran. Doran was crippled when a factory wall fell on him near Christchurch in Dublin.
“Doran was probably the greatest exponent of uilleann pipes ever. I went down to Clare a few weeks ago, and they still talk about him like he’s still alive.”
The tune never would have been written written, were it not for the timely intervention of Furey’s son Martin (of the High Kings).
“I was in my son’s house, and I turned the tape deck on and just played. I just played it as I wrote it, thinking of Johnny. I wanted to create a Mass for Johnny. Martin taped it as I played it, or I would have lost it.”
“Colours” reflects Furey’s lifelong interest in many kinds of music, an interest about which he feels not one bit proprietary, a point of view advanced by his father Ted.
“He used to say, ‘You wrote the music, but you don’t own it. I gave my music to you, and you moved the music forward. It just becomes part of the wheel.’
“You never put that heritage in a box and claim that it belongs to you on stage.”
You’ll get a chance to hear the tunes from “Colours” when Furey appears Thursday, May 31, at World Cafe Live. Also on the bill is Philly’s very own John Byrne.
For tickets:
http://tickets.worldcafelive.com/eventperformances.asp?evt=4448
