Nuala Kennedy
Flutist and singer Nuala Kennedy, whose energetic and inventive spin on traditional music has earned her fans around the world, seemed destined to become a musician.
Growing up in Dundalk in Ireland’s County Louth, Kennedy lived in a household where music was ever-present. While not everyone who is raised in a house full of singers necessarily goes on to sing or play or perform, Kennedy was bit by the bug, which would grow to become a successful career, at a very early age. She never had formal lessons, but her mother sang, all of her father’s family sang, and her brother and sister also sang.
“Apparently I commented on my mum’s singing more or less as soon as I could talk,” Kennedy says. “That’s when they thought, ‘we must have someone here who is interested in music,’ and they gave me a whistle, and there was a piano in the house. I’d pick out a few songs on those instruments myself, and later started lessons on whistle and piano around age 7.”
When she was 12, her parents encouraged her to join a local ceili band, Ceoltoiri Oga Oghrialla, playing piano and flute. In the early going, Kennedy admits, she couldn’t play flute all that well. That changed quickly.
“I was just teaching myself, learning by osmosis from the other musicians in the band. I can recall the moment I could feel the flute vibrating, and I knew I was playing it – it was very exciting to finally be able to play. I was quite addicted. As an older teenager I learned so many tunes, as well as all the ceili band tunes, I used to take home tapes from the library and learn every single tune on them.”
In the ’90s, Kennedy moved to Edinburgh to expand her range beyond Irish music, to absorb what Scottish traditional music had to offer. She found the experience exhilarating.
“The pub sessions in Edinburgh is where I first experienced Scottish music and musicians, and in the mid-nineties it seemed quite a liberating musical scene compared to the one I came from, though that perception could also have been due to the simultaneous change from living in a town to living in a cosmopolitan city. There were a lot of people of different ages all playing together, and there was a great spirit of fun and camaraderie. You’d get little bits of crossover with musicians from different musical backgrounds. There’s a performance style in Scotland which is quite driving and group-orientated; there are lots of musicians who are versatile and can adapt to enhance the music, so the sound is greater than the sum of its parts, and it’s exciting to be a part of it.”
Fast forward a few years. Kennedy was teaching in a local primary school, but by that point in her life she had become thoroughly immersed in the Irish musical tradition, with more eclectic influences picked up along the way. She had become a master of the wooden flute and whistles. She had studied classical piano at the Royal Academy of Music in Dublin. Her singing–once described as “high, clear and beautiful measured”–had matured into something exquisitely beautiful, a sound all her own. Her songbook had expanded dramatically to pull in both Irish and Scottish influences, as well as contemporary accents. Performing was starting to pay the bills, so she made a decision.
“It came to a crunch: Trying to combine all the music I wanted to do with a full time job was too challenging, so I thought I’d try going full-time at the music for a while. That was more than ten years ago now.”
Her musical career took off, once again, in Scotland, where she formed one-third of the trio Fine Friday, with singer-guitarist Kris Drever and Anna-Wendy Stevenson on fiddle. Two hugely admired albums followed. A year after Fine Friday disbanded, Kennedy went into the studio to record “The New Shoes,” a sparkling debut.
Kennedy had arrived–far from where she started out, and yet still not all that far distant from her roots.
You can hear Nuala Kennedy, together with Eamon O’Leary next Saturday night in the closing concert of the Philadelphia Ceili Group Festival. The concert starts at 7, with Tony DeMarco’s Atlantic on stage first. Tickets and other info here.
