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The Irish Way to Close Out a Weekend

Mick Conneely and David Munnelly

Mick Conneely and David Munnelly

OK, technically, it was not last weekend, but the weekend before. Fiddler Mick Conneely and button accordion player David Munnelly dazzled the crowd in an Irish Center concert sponsored by the Philadelphia Ceili Group.

It really was dazzling. No hyperbole. We were in the presence of greatness for a couple of hours. Hard to believe anyone could play that fast, and still with such precision. Lucky there weren’t any cops around, or these guys would have been arrested for speeding. Thanks, Ceili Group!

It was a pretty good-sized audience, and actually a good reminder, as if we need one, of how important the Irish Center is. It was some of the best Irish music you’ll ever hear, played by traditional music rock stars, and the Irish Center is home to so much of it.

So give this video a listen (and a look), and let it remind you how important the Irish Center is. And fork over a little cash to help the Irish Center keep the tunes coming: http://www.gofundme.com/save-the-irish-center

And don’t forget, much more musical greatness is on its way in a couple of weeks (September 11-13) with the arrival of the 2014 Philadelphia Ceili Group Festival. Check it out, buy tickets, and go.

 

August 22, 2014 by
Music

Singing to Save the Irish Center

Cahal Dunne

Cahal Dunne

Cahal Dunne has had his first name butchered in stage introductions all across the country. If he’s lucky, it’s pronounced “Ca-HAWL.” That’s how he pronounces it.

Actually, his last name has suffered at the hands of well-meaning Americans, too. He says that’s been pronounced “DOO-nee.” (It’s “DUNN.” The “e” is silent.)

Still, he says, it could be worse. “My first name translated from the Irish is “Charlie,” and “Dunne” means “brown.”

Whatever you call him, Cahal Dunne is a superb singer, pianist and raconteur, with a charming and witty stage presence, best known for ballads and old standards. He tours the country playing concerts to loyal crowds. They often see him again and again, and follow him to Ireland on the tours he operates.

He’s grateful for his success. Dunne has come a long way—from the Cork of his childhood to Pittsburgh, where he lives now, and from one very big hit in Ireland to living in near poverty as he tried to catch on in the United States.

If anyone can be called a natural talent, Cahal Dunne is, and the adults in his life took notice early on.

“My dad was a teacher, and he played piano he played piano accordion. He was a member of some of the better male voice choirs. When I was only 3, my grandmother on my dad’s side died, so he inherited the piano. It was the most important thing I’ve ever touched. I’ve been doing it all my life. Ka-plonking on that was magical. My dad played “Peg of my Heart,” and that was it for me.”

His musical career began not long after. One day, his teacher was playing an octave organ, and he corrected her. “She wanted to see my parents. I thought I was in trouble, but she said, ‘He’s got a good ear,’ and they sent me off to music school.”

Throughout his young life, he steadily improved, and ultimately, he graduated with a music degree from the University College of Cork.

He moved to Dublin to have a go at making it.

In 1979, he did. His song “Happy Man” won the Irish National Song Contest, qualifying him for the Eurovision Song Contest, where he came in fifth against 19 competitors. Fifth in Eurovision is still a very big deal. Eurovision, he says, “is like American Idol. People like Abba had won it a few years before. Had I won it for Ireland, I would not be here.”

“Happy Man” soared to No. 1 in Ireland and Europe.

It was all a dazzling turn of events. “One day I was giving piano lessons for 2 pounds an hour. I was living in a crummy, damp basemen efficiency in Dublin. The next day, I had won on television. You become sort of an overnight name. You’re known overnight. I was one of the beautiful people for a few months.”

His record company, CBS, sent him on tour throughout Europe. “One of the high points for me was, I’ve always been in love with Sophia Loren, and I was sitting next to her at dinner once.”

Then the Irish economy tanked, and along with it, Dunne’s hope for fame in Ireland. “All those little things that were very nice happened. It was a bitter pill to see it all going down the toilet. “

Dunne joined the emigrating masses, hoping to find more opportunities in the States.

He began on the bottom rung, living in a trailer. “I started out singing in Chicago in a pizza restaurant. Guys would yell out, ‘Couldja turn down the goddam music? I’m trying to eat a pizza!’ It was a toughening up experience. I think I’m the singer I am now because of it all.”

After a while, he moved to Pittsburgh. A comedian friend of his supposed to play in a big banqueting hall. The friend got sick. Dunne took his place, and that was the break he’d been looking for.

“The owner used to hire the likes of Hal Roach and The Wolfe Tones. He asked their agents to help me get up to New York, Philly and Boston. That was a a significant step, around 1982.”

Touring brought Dunne another stroke of good luck. It’s how he met his wife, who’s from Haddon Heights.

“Kathleen and I met at Carney’s in Cape May in 1989. (He played on the nights Ken McBride wasn’t performing.) I was playing in the piano bar section. She came up and gave me $2 tip to play a song. I didn’t know the song. She was gorgeous.”

Dunne walked up to her during a break and gave her the $2 back, and they began to chat. And that’s how they got together.

By that time firmly ensconced in Pittsburgh, Dunne had begun to find the audience that has kept him touring for years.

“I would describe myself more as a cabaret act, the kind you’d see in Branson or on a cruise ship, where I play to people 50 years old and up. That’s my market. In a normal show, I would sing Irish, Broadway, and country tunes, tell a few clean jokes, a little bit of doo-wop, and a patriotic end. It would be more a dinner show for seniors. They appreciate it. Over the years, I’ve worked myself out of the bars, which are very hard and very tough.

“My main work thrust of work is Florida. I play in the retirement communities January through March. I work every night of the week. I drive about 10,000 miles in three months. I also run a couple of tours. I love it. I love bringing them over to Ireland. I get a bit of commission. I’m not that busy in the summer, anyway, and it does Ireland good. I started it to help Ireland a bit. It’s a treat, to be honest.”

Dunne has played in Philadelphia a few times over the years, and this Sunday, he’s coming to the Philadelphia Irish Center. It’s a fund-raiser to help the Irish Center keep going.

Dunne’s very much aware of the importance of this particular concert.

“This is a nice one, and I hope it will be well attended. I’ve actually played there before, but it was maybe 15 years or so. I’m really hoping to get a nice crowd. It would be tough to see it go.”

The show starts at 7:30 at the Center, 6815 Emlen Street in Philadelphia’s Mount Airy neighborhood. Tickets are $20. For details, call 215-843-8051 or email Marianne MacDonald at rinceseit@msn.com

August 15, 2014 by
Dance, Music

Ragas Meet Airs at The Irish Memorial

Indian dance at The Irish Memorial

Indian dance at The Irish Memorial

Until the first chords of Burning Bridget Cleary’s “Saucy Sailor” began over the loud speaker at The Irish Memoral on Penn’s Landing on Saturday, the idea of marrying an 6,000-year-old form of Indian dance called Bharatanatym with Irish music seemed, well, like a stretch.

But it wasn’t. The rhythms of the Celtic folk song harkened to the ancient beat of Indian music. Ragas, as it turns out, are a lot like airs.

Shaily Dadaila, founder of Usiloquoy Dance Designs, saw her dream of performing her beloved Indian ballet to Celtic and Indo-Celtic tunes when she and her troupe of dancers performed twice at The Irish Memorial on Saturday afternoon and evening. Her dance production, Ragas and Airs, is partially funded by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and is still in development. But there was enough choreography to present a half-hour’s worth of the graceful and evocative dance, which tells its stories not only through footwork, but with hand movements and facial gestures.

This wasn’t the first time that music from both traditions came together. The troupe also performed to 17th century music that was British and Irish in origin, but with Sanskrit lyrics, and to tunes by modern-day Irish jazz musician Ronan Guilfoyle who wrote them to combine both Irish and Indian traditional music.

After an early morning rain, the weather broke into sunshine and heat—but with a breeze that kept the audience cool—as the troupe performed on a rented stage in front of the 60-ton bronze sculpture depicting Irish fleeing the famine and arriving in America.

In an interview before the performances, Dadiala said the monument resonated with her the moment she saw it a few years ago, just after arriving in the US from India to begin a master’s program in pharmacy.

“You see all the people descending from the ships, all leaving home and missing it for the rest of their lives. I understood that,” she said. Read more of that interview here.

View our photos of the performance of “Ragas and Airs.”

August 1, 2014 by
Arts, Music, News

Indian Dance and Irish Music Tell a Universal Story

"Ragas and Airs" debuts at The Irish Memorial on Saturday.

“Ragas and Airs” debuts at The Irish Memorial on Saturday.

When sculptor Glenna Goodacre created The Irish Memorial in Philadelphia, she intended to tell a specific immigrant story in bronze the color of anthracite, that of the Irish, fleeing starvation, and risking their lives to start over in a new land.

It was not Shaily Dadiala’s story. She arrived from India in 2000 to get her master’s degree in pharmacy. But when she saw the sculpture at Front and Chestnut a few years ago, it “gave me goosebumps when I saw what it was,” she says. “You see all the people descending from the ships, all leaving home and missing it for the rest of their lives. I understood that.”

And it sparked an idea. She’d long ago abandoned her study of pharmacy to follow her first love—dancing. Trained from the age of 4 in Bharatanatym, a classical dance developed as a devotional in the Hindu temples of Southern India, she founded Usiloquoy Dance Designs, a dance company that combines the percussive footwork and hand and facial gestures of what’s known as Indian ballet with cross-cultural music.

That is why, on Saturday, at the Irish Memorial, you will see this uniquely Indian dance performed to “Saucy Sailor,” by local Celtic performers, Burning Bridget Cleary. It is part of an unfinished dance called “Ragas and Airs,” which Dadiala is choreographing, in part with the help of a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

As she did with the Irish Memorial, Dadiala found common ground with Celtic rhythms. “Five or six years ago I heard this most melodious music, so complex and so similar to Indian classical music and I didn’t know what it was,” she says. “When I looked into it—it was Irish music–I realized that the folklore and stories that went with Irish music had an intersection with my own culture. I live in Fishtown and I had an epiphany. Here I was living in a place that was very Irish but very like me, so different, but so much the same in our constant nostalgia for our homelands and our desire to hold on to our tradition and our stories. The Irish here are holding on to something from two centuries ago.”

For Indians, like Dadiala, the nostalgia goes back a little further. As a dance form, Bharatanatyam is about 4,000 to 6,000 years old. But it can easily tell the universal stories Diadala wants to share through dance.

“We chose the song, Saucy Sailor, which is about the element of teasing back and forth between a girl who flirts with him and then is put off by him, and he backs off, telling her that ‘many girls I can have.’ So she feels abandoned and she wants him back. This is an old story,” Dadiala says, laughing. “It appeals to a large section of humanity because it occurs over all oceans. So many of our songs are based on Krishna, the blue-eye god, and his many admirers—it was never clear who he really liked.”

Dadiala also uncovered the work of a 17th century poet from Tamil Nadu in Southern India who wrote lyrics in Sanskrit, an Indian language, to music he heard while living under the rule of the British East India Company—music that ranged from waltzes, polkas, to Celtic jigs and reels. In fact, it spawned a new genre of music called Nottuswara Sahitya reflecting the cultural interaction between the east and west in the 17th century.

“The choreography pays tribute to the historically rich textile industry run largely by Irish settlers in the Kensington section of Philadelphia while acknowledging the divine feminine represented in the lyrics,” says Dadiala.

Usiloquoy is also performing to the music of Irish jazz musician Ronan Guilfoyle, a piece called Khanda-5 Cities, which he wrote and was performed in collaboration with the South India-based Kamataka College of Percussion and traditional Irish musicians. There will also be another dance based on Guilfoyle’s piece inspired by the parallels between Sadhbh and Fionn mac Cumhail (Saba and Finn McCool) and Rama and Seeta from the Hindu scripture Ramayana (among other things, a deer plays a role in both stories).

Dadiala said the moment she saw The Irish Memorial, she knew that where she wanted to mount her production. “I prayed, please, please, please can we dance here!” she laughs. She said much the same thing to the Irish Memorial committee which quickly said yes.

Dadiala plans two performances 30 minutes in length, one at 4 PM and the other at 7 PM at the memorial, which overlooks Penn’s Landing. There will be time for a Q & A and a demonstration of the Indian dance style—with audience participation welcome. “You don’t have to feel committed—you can just peek for a few minutes,” she says.

But what she hopes you’ll take with you is that no matter where you’re from, our fundamental stories of love, fear, courage, and life, are the same. “We are taking some artistic licence, but we’re telling the same story basically of all of us,” she says. “That’s our mission: Let’s build consensus and unite the world!”

July 25, 2014 by
Music

To Galway and Back

Irish Thunder circling up in Galway (Photo courtesy, Irish Thunder Pipes and Drums)

Irish Thunder circling up in Galway (Photo courtesy, Irish Thunder Pipes and Drums)

Here’s how popular Irish Thunder Pipes and Drums was as they paraded through one of Ireland’s most picturesque cities for annual Galway Sessions Parade.

“Three times along the parade route, the band was asked to stop and play,” says Drum Major Pete Hand. “When we did that, the band was circled with onlookers. Each time, the Garda had to clear a path for the band to continue.”

The parade—the focal point of a trip planned by piper Joe Cassidy, with assistance from Frank Larkin—was just the beginning of a trip that will hold a place of prominence in the memories from a lot of pipers and drummers—along with a lot of other travelers who joined the band on the trip. Including band members and guests, there were 119 people.

The trip included some pretty great stops.

“All of the sites we saw were inspiring,” Hand recalls. “The Lady of Knock Shrine, The Great Causeway, the Aran Islands with its 300- foot incline to the top. The Rope Bridge, Titanic Museum, Trinity College, Book of Kells, Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, Cliffs of Moher—and let us not forget the Guinness and Tullamore Dew Tours!”

Of course, if an Irish pipe band is going to travel to Ireland, you’d expect them to play. And that they did. In addition to the parade, they played out in front of the famous Crane’s Pub, and along Shop Street, both in Galway.

One notable unscheduled appearance: what Hand refers to as “an Irish pipe band flash mob at The Temple Bar in Dublin. And there were other moments, some inspirational, like the time Cassidy and fellow piper Mike Brown played “Amazing Grace” on Inis Mor.

And yet one more moment, Hand thinks, that no one in the band will forget. It came on a visit to Ancient Order of Hibernians Division 1 in Derry.

“There was a ceili going on, and when the band went on break it was our turn to play. After playing some tunes that everyone really enjoyed,  the people in the hall were asked to rise for the “Anthem Set.”  When we played the “Soldiers Song,” everyone sung at attention.  It was a very moving moment.”

The band shared some of their photos. Here they are.

July 3, 2014 by
Music, News, People

RUNA Debuts Its New CD–and a Surprise

Karen and Jim: She said yes!

Karen and Jim: She said yes!

RUNA, winner of the top Irish group in the Irish Music Awards last year, debuted its brand new CD, “Current Affairs,” on Friday, June 20, at the Sellersville Theatre. Gene Shay, the grand old man of Philly folk, introduced the group along with opening act, singer-songwriter Michael Braunfeld.

And one audience member used the occasion—with the collusion of the group—to propose. Karen said yes to Jim!

We were there and caught it all on camera!

 

June 27, 2014 by
Music

Blackthorn In the Park

John Boyce gets all rock 'n roll.

John Boyce gets all rock ‘n roll.

It was a beautiful night for a free Blackthorn concert on Thursday at Park Square in Prospect Park, part of the community’s free summer concert series.

If you missed it, you can catch Blackthorn again on Saturday at Tom n Jerry’s Sports Pub, 1006 McDade Boulevard in Milmont Park start at 4 PM or on Sunday, June 29, at the City of Wildwood, NJ’s Fox Park at Ocean and Burke Avenues in Wildwood.

They’ll be down the shore in July and back in Delco in August.

Or, you can pop in a CD and check out Brian Mengini’s excellent photographs of this week’s concert, below, and pretend you were there.

[flickr_set id=”72157645315791573″]

June 20, 2014 by
Music, News, People

Duffy’s Cut Fundraiser a Huge Success

The Duffy’s Cut Fundraiser on Sunday in Lansdowne not only hit its goal of $15,000 to pay for fees related to retrieving the last 50 bodies of Irish immigrants who died while working on the railroad in 1832, it exceeded it—by at least double that.

“We’ll be able to do the work and finish up the DNA testing,” said the Rev. Frank Watson who, with his brother, Bill, a history professor at Immaculata University in Malvern first brought to light the hidden graves of the 57 immigrants who died during a cholera epidemic.

Frank and Bill Watson

Frank and Bill Watson

Their work revealed that at least some of those 57 had likely been murdered, probably by a vigilante group worried that they would spread the disease through the wider community. Seven bodies have already been recovered; six were interred at West Laurel Hill Cemetery and the seventh, tentatively identified (via a dental anomaly) as John Ruddy, was buried in a donated plot in Ardara, County Donegal, last year. Ruddy came as a teenager from Inishowen Peninsula in Donegal to work on the railroad.

For more information about this phase of the Duffy’s Cut Project, click here.

A diverse group of individuals and organizations planned and sponsored the event at the Twentieth Century Club on Sunday afternoon. One sponsor was Kris Higgins, a former nun and a public school teacher, who donated $10,000 in the memory of her partner, Mary Pat Bradley, who died last year of ovarian cancer. When asked why, she responded simply, “Because I can. I’m no Lewis Katz [the late philanthropist] but I can do something.”

Other donors included The Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, Bringhurst Funeral Home and West Laurel Hill Cemetery, Wilbraham, Lawler & Buba, The Irish Memorial, Kathy McGee Burns, Peter Burns on behalf of his children, the Delaware Valley Irish Hall of Fame, Infrastructure Solutions Services, Chris Flanagan and Brian McGarrity of Mid-Ulster Construction, the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 542, the Irish American Business Chamber and Network, the Philadelphia Ceili Group, the Ladies Ancient Order of Hiberians, Trinity Div. 4, Vince Gallagher of Loughros Point Landscaping and the Vince Gallagher Radio Hour, Marianne MacDonald’s “Come West Along the Road” radio show, Ann Baiada, AOH Notre Dame Div.1, Simple Clean, Curragh LLC Newbridge Silverware, Brian Mengini Photography, The Plough and the Stars, Maggie O’Neill’s Irish Pub and Restaurant, Con Murphy’s Irish Pub, Twentieth Century Club, Conrad Obrien, and Tir na Nog Bar & Grill.

Check out the photos below.

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June 20, 2014 by