Browsing Category

Music

Air Force Celtic Band Takes Wing in Philadelphia

The Heritage Aire ensemble, performing on Father's Day in Chesthut Hill.

They’ve played all the big gigs—Iraq, Qatar, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Djibouti, and Kirghistan.

Now the Heritage Aire Celtic Ensemble can add Philly to their list of exotic locales. The U.S. Air Force’s nod to Celtic music played Tuesday night at at the Irish Center. But before that, shoppers in Chestnut Hill had the first chance to hear them locally when they played—clad in their clan Mitchell (after “Billy” Mitchell, father of the modern-day Air Force—tartans.

Members of the troupe are all full-time professional musicians who play other instruments as part of the USAF Heritage of America Band, based at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. The troupe has been together about four years.

“We’re all classical musicians,” explains the group’s leader Technical Sergeant Sherry Burt. “I the band, I play flute and piccolo. In the Celtic Ensemble, I play flute and whistle and I sing. Our whistle and our accordion player are both clarinetists. Our guitarist is a sax player. Our gentleman who plays the bodhran (the traditional Irish frame drum) and dulcimer is also the timpani player. We’re all really breaking out of the classical shell. It’s very liberating.”

Being professional musicians, learning to play a traditional folk instrument like the whistle is perhaps less of a challenge than it would be for someone who has never played an instrument of any kind. Still, Celtic music has a looser, far less scripted feel to it, so for help members of the group reached out to those who know their stuff. Burt, for example, took some workshop lessons from whistle whiz Joanie Madden of Cherish the Ladies. (Talk about your drill instructors. They play Michael Burke whistles, too … another nod to Joanie.)

Since Celtic music isn’t their job full-time, members of the troupe do something you won’t see traditional musicians do—read sheet music.

Still, the group does a pretty credible job, and they have the performance skills down pat, as Chestnut Hill concert-goers were able to hear for themselves as the ensemble blasted through reels and jigs.

“Our prep for this ensemble is limited,” says Burt. “We get about a week of rehearsals and then we’re on the road. We print out the sheet music and we read it. But as we go along, the group has really adapted to the correct style. We’re getting closer and closer to the real thing.”

Of course, the job is more than purely musical. The band, and the Celtic ensemble—as well as several other small offshoots of the main band—perform public outreach on behalf of the Air Force. The musicians also provide much-needed entertainment for the troops, as they did last fall on a tour of the Middle East.
“We did 60 performances in about 55 of those days,” says Burt. Getting to the performance site wasn’t always as easy as hopping on the band bus. In Baghdad, for example, the troupe took to the skies in Blackhawk helicopters. A bit on the scary side, yes—but well worth it.

”It was important for us to go out and give soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines a bit of entertainment,” says Burt. “They work really long hours. Often we’d do five gigs a day in their workplace, and sometimes a nightly performance.

“We were definitely in some of the areas considered to be dangerous. On Thanksgiving Day, for example, we played a combat outpost. Conditions people were living in were not ideal, of course, but it was a perfect place for us to be. It meant a lot to them to have new people to interact with and to have music.”

In Afghanistan, the ensemble performed for NATO forces. The pub songs, Burt says, went over particularly well there. “”All the Europeans knew our stuff,” she says.

June 12, 2008 by Jeff Meade

Music

The Best Unknown Band In Ireland

Fergus O'Farrell sings with passion during his Tower Theater performance.

Opening acts don’t get much respect. Audiences who paid good money for the main course tend to linger in the lobby, taking advantage of the hour to suck back a few more Michelob Lites or house Chardonnays till the unknowns clear the stage and the “real” show begins.

All the lobby lizards who missed the band that opened for Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova (stars of the little Irish jewel of a film, “Once,” performing as The Swell Season) on May 20 at Upper Darby’s Tower Theater will be adding that lapse to their “woulda coulda shoulda” list somewhere down the line.

The people who stayed were captivated, rapt, glued to their seats for the hour that Interference, one of Ireland’s most influential bands for the last two decades (say the musicians, like Hansard, whom they’ve influenced), commanded the stage. When I would occasionally glance down my row, I saw the ultimate compliment an audience can pay a performer. Not applause. Not a standing ovation. Smiles. A brightening of the eye. Body language that echoed the performers’—what experts call “kinesic communication.” Connection. These were the people who were out in the lobby at intermission, lined up at the Interference CD table like the band was selling $2-a-gallon gas.

Interference is that kind of band. In 1988, after they opened for The Hothouse Flowers, a reviewer at the Cork Tribune wrote, “The support act was so powerful you almost forgot who you were there for. . . .Interference positively bewitched the audience.”

At the center of the magic is Fergus O’Farrell, the 41-year-old singer-songwriter with a mesmerizing voice who founded the band with his schoolmate, James O’Leary, when they were at Clongowes College, a Jesuit boarding school in Kildare, from 1983 to 1986 (“James is a ludicrously tall guitar player with unfeasibly thick glasses so instead of sports we did music”). O’Farrell and O’Leary continue to be the mainstays of the band, though an astounding array of musicians cycle in and out. For example, these days on keyboard is Maurice Royscroft—known as Seezer—a Golden Globe-nominated arranger who has collaborated with Gavin Friday on scores for films such as Jim Sheridan’s “The Boxer,” starring Daniel Day-Lewis, and “In America.” Singing backup are Camilla Griehsel Vearncombe, a Swede trained in opera, her husband, Colin Vearncombe whose song, “Wonderful Life,” written when he was performing with the band, Black, was an international hit, and guitarist Paul Tiernan. Hansard, whom O’Farrell has known since their early hand-to-mouth days on the Dublin music scene, has recorded with the band, as have Maria Doyle Kennedy (of “The Commitments”) and her husband Keiran, a guitarist, songwriter, and producer, as well as many others.

If you were a statistician, you might be thinking that probability theory ought to be kicking in right about now. With all that talent, shouldn’t this band be better known? Better yet, shouldn’t they be, as they say in the music business, signed? They’re not. In fact, they’ve taken over the “best unsigned band in Ireland” award from The Hothouse Flowers, whose thunder they stole back in 1988.

Why this is, is complicated, which I discovered when I spent some time with Fergus O’Farrell. If you saw the movie, “Once,” you already know O’Farrell: He’s the dark-haired, bearded man with sky-blue eyes in the party scene, singing his haunting ballad, “Gold” with Hansard. What you really can’t see is that O’Farrell is in a wheelchair. He has a rare form of muscular dystrophy called Emery-Dreifuss, diagnosed when he was almost nine. Most people with MD are dead by the time they’re in their early 20s. O’Farrell’s condition is progressive. He’s been gradually losing the use of his body for 32 years.

Back in the 90s when the band was at the height of its cult popularity in Ireland, several record companies were interested, O’Farrell said. But the wheelchair was like water on a fire. “When they think you’re going to be dead in your 20s, record companies—they’re like venture capital banks. What venture capital bank is going to invest in a company with dodgy foundations?” he said. One friend reported that an enthusiastic executive, once he heard that O’Farrell was in a wheelchair, said, “Blindness works, a wheelchair don’t.”

“Another one told a friend of mine who signed a big deal was told they wouldn’t touch me with a 20-foot barge pole,” O’Farrell said. “Frankly, I think the wheelchair is my USP. My unique selling point. I’m the singing cripple.” He laughs—and it’s not bitterly. O’Farrell is, by his own description, “a half full” kind of guy. And the truth is, it wasn’t just the wheelchair.

“Anyone who has heard our stuff is blown away,” he said. “The problem is we don’t stick to one style. We do jazz, rock, classical. I do what I want to do. Having a limited range doesn’t make sense to me. The record companies want every song to sound similar.”

On the business side of music, eclectic apparently doesn’t work, no matter how great you sound and how slavishly devoted your little clique of fans is. Talent is good, but it’s size that matters. So O’Farrell was left with only a few choices. One was to set up his own recording studio, which he did. With money he got from his father, he created Interference Studio at his home in Schull in West Cork, where he lives with his wife, Li, a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine.

It was there, in 1994, where Interference recorded its eponymous CD, which was produced and engineered by DanDan Fitzgerald (who does the same for Mary Black). The ten songs included “Gold” and a song he co-wrote with Hansard, “Vinegar Girl.” Critically well-received, it sold well locally. But by 1996, the band had broken up and O’Farrell, while still writing music, took a job at the reception desk of The Eldon Hotel in Skibbereen, which his father owned and was the place where Michael Collins had his last meal before his assassination.

It was O’Farrell’s seven-year dark night of the soul. He had taken a couple of bad hits over the years. Vocal nodules kept him from touring as much as he feels he should have. “When we were first doing gigs in Dublin, I got vocal nodules in both cords and told I couldn’t sing for at least a year and the doctor told me he couldn’t even guarantee I could sing after that,” he explained. “I was really afraid of destroying my voice so I didn’t gig regularly. I would do seven gigs a year. Glen would be doing 200 gigs that same year.”

The same week he was diagnosed with nodules, his MD specialist told him it was time to buy a wheelchair. “He said once you get in it you’ll never get out of it.” Up till then, O’Farrell had been able to walk; he even played football and biked as a child, rode a moped till he was 16, played trumpet, tin whistle, and guitar, until one by one, he had to put them down as he became too weak to play. “It was,” he admitted, “the worst week of my life.”

But by the mid-90s, the MD had also started robbing him of his breath. “My singing style required more air. I sang from my chest with a lot of vibrato, but because of the MD I was getting weaker. I lost confidence,” he said. “Then, oddly enough, something happened at a party at my father’s house.” Someone he met at the party was doing a little beer-soaked singing at 3 AM “and he would break into falsetto when he was going for the high notes he couldn’t reach. And it was lovely. Neil Young sings the same way, so I started developing that and it worked great.”

But he credits Hansard and his Interference band mates with helping him get back into music fulltime again. “They never let me forget I was great,” he said, even when he allowed himself an occasional wallow over how little money there is in greatness. An Interference reunion in Schull led to an invitation for the band to appear on the RTE TV series, “Other Voices,” featuring lesser known Irish talents, and hosted at a deconsecrated church in Dingle by Hansard. Then came the phone call from Hansard. “He usually texts me, so when he calls I know it’s something wonderful,” said O’Farrell. It was about that unforgettable love song that O’Farrell wrote called “Gold.” Hansard’s old bandmate, John Carney, was making a movie about an Irish busker (Hansard) who meets a young woman from the Czech Republic (Marketa Irglova) on Grafton Street and the ambiguous relationship they develop. Could O’Farrell perform “Gold” in the movie? It was one of Hansard’s favorites.

O’Farrell could. He was over the moon. Though it was a low budget film (they did it for about the price of a down payment on a McMansion) and no one was prophesying that it would win a Grammy and an Oscar (which it did), and O’Farrell wasn’t going to make any money from it, “Jesus thank Christ I said I’d do it,” he said. “For that scene we went to Glen’s house, had dinner then a sing-song and they filmed it, pure drop.”

The rest isn’t history. There’s really no telling what it will all mean to Interference and O’Farrell. The music business is a strange thing. People with little talent and lots of marketing can make millions (and get their own regular segment on Access Hollywood); others with enviable ability can slog along for years making so little they need a day job.

Hansard and Irglova brought the band to the US to open for them at sold-out shows at Radio City Music Hall and at the Tower. It was the first time the band has performed in the US. “Imagine, my debut was at Radio City,” O’Farrell marveled. In July, they’ll return to participate in a presentation of “Peter and the Wolf,” updated by Maurice Royscroft at Bard College in New York’s Hudson River Valley. O’Farrell will record the narration and Interference will perform. There’s talk of a gig at World Café. Another CD is in the works.

But there’s something about Interference you need to know. The band doesn’t rehearse. Not really. At one gig, O’Farrell told me, “I just told them what key it was in and they improvised. “

So whatever happens, O’Farrell will probably improvise. It would be a shame if the group didn’t gain a wider audience. Not so much for O’Farrell—he’d get by—but for the millions who are being robbed of the experience of hearing the kind of music you can’t get out of your mind because it takes a foothold in your soul. There are already a few hundred people I know of who were glad they weren’t out in the lobby waiting for the main event. They wisely knew that it had already started.

May 30, 2008 by Denise Foley

Music

Famed Piper Paddy Keenan Comes to the Irish Center

Local piping student Tim Hill with piper Paddy Keenan.

If you were an actor, it would be like taking drama lessons from Robert DeNiro. If you were a cyclist, it would be like getting some pointers from Lance Armstrong. If you’re a piper or whistle player, getting some tips from Paddy Keenan is learning from the best.

Keenan, fresh from a performance on Wednesday night, May 21, at the World Café in Philadelphia, spent several hours Thursday night at the Irish Center, where he taught two workshops to about a dozen—some awestruck—students.

Paddy Keenan, born into a Travelling (Pavee) family from County Meath, comes by his musical talent genetically. Both his father and grandfather were uilleann pipers and Keenan began piping when he was 10. He’s been called “the King of the Pipers,” and “the Jimi Hendrix of pipers.” A founding member of the famed Bothy Band, he plays like most virtuosos: seemingly effortlessly, as though his instrument has always been a natural part of him. When he lifts the flute to his mouth or fixes his long, thin fingers on the chanter of his pipes, he almost seems to be releasing the music rather than making it.

Tall and flute-like in build, the soft-spoken Keenan gently coaxed the neophyte whistle players and pipers at the Irish Center into solo performances of the tunes and techniques he taught them. When, at one point, he admitted that at least some of the vibrato he produces on his flute comes not from his fingers but his breath, one student gasped. “Oh!’ she said. “My flute teacher told me that you never do that!” Then she grinned. In fact, they all grinned, including Keenan. If the best tell you to break the rules, you break them.

May 22, 2008 by Denise Foley

Music

A Musical Two-Fer

Glen Hansard and Fergus O'Farrell in a duet at the Tower Theater in Upper Darby.

About a year ago, you could have seen Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova at the Tin Angel, a tiny 100-seat venue upstairs from the Serrano Restaurant on Second Street in Philadelphia. You could have spoken to them after the show. Maybe bought Glen a drink. (At 19, Marketa is too young to drink here.)

That was before the two won an Oscar for their passionate ballad, “Falling Slowly,” from the low-budget Irish movie, “Once,” an almost-love story that, in the parlance of Hollywood, captured America’s heart. The fact that the two stars captured each other’s hearts hasn’t hurt either. They are the proverbial unlikely and cute couple.

In the last few months, as The Swell Season, Hansard and Irglova and their band played to sold-out crowds all across the country, including Radio City Music Hall and, this week, the Tower Theater in Upper Darby. This time, there was no mingling and when the two were out on the wet streets this Delco town, Hansard kept his hat pulled down low over his curly red hair so he wouldn’t be recognized. Fat chance.

Today, they not only attract attention, they inspire adulation. At the Tower, I met two young men who spent the last three weeks following the duo around the country, paying scalper prices for tickets and saving some bucks on lodging by couch surfing—flopping on the livingroom sofas of people who sign up to host visitors from far-off lands or the city next door. Kind of like what crashing was in the 60s and 70s, only incorporated.

The guys weren’t disappointed. Hansard, who hits notes only reachable by choir boys and eunuchs, is such an intense performer that he has strummed a giant ragged hole in the soundboard of his acoustic guitar. (At first, I thought it was a pick guard. Instead, it’s a testament to the importance of a pick guard.) The moment he walked out on stage—the very edge of the stage, alone, strumming that same guitar—he engaged the audience as if he were still a busker, playing for loose change. He’s charming and boyish, funny and passionate. After years of playing with the band, The Frames, his rocker’s wildness is tempered by Irglova, who has a calming presence and an angelic voice. Their duets are so poignant and sweet they almost hurt.

Hansard, a dues-paying, 20-year “overnight” sensation, did a little payback while giving fans in New York and Philly a bonus: A chance to hear a group called Interference, which opened for The Swell Season in the two cities. Presided over by Hansard’s friend, singer-songwriter Fergus O’Farrell, Interference is a collection of European musicians, many classically trained, who are virtually unknown in the US but enormously influential in Ireland and Europe, although they’ve never had a record contract. Hansard calls O’Farrell one of his major influences and once told an interviewer that “we used to go to the attic where they played and just watch in awe. We were always learning from them.”

O’Farrell’s haunting voice, unforgettable melodies, and poetic lyrics caught the crowd’s attention, especially when he reprised his performance of the song, “Gold,” from the movie, “Once,” with Hansard and Interference guitarist Paul Tiernan providing tight harmony.

I spent some time with O’Farrell this week—he’s a remarkable man as well as a major talent—and I’ll post that story next week, with photos from his performance.

May 22, 2008 by Denise Foley

Music

CD Review: Lunasa’s “The Story So Far”

The Lunasa retrospective “The Story So Far” showed up in the mail the other day, and I thought: Great … what can I say about a compilation? How do you review tunes that already have been released and reviewed years before?

The answer is: You mostly don’t.

I say “mostly” because, even though all the tunes have been previously released on Lunasa’s previous six CDs, there are, as it happens, two brand-new recordings to reflect the band’s current lineup.

“Morning Nightcap” and “Aibreann” have been dusted off and given not remarkably new treatments—but they are still lovely to hear again, anyway. all the same.

“Aibreann” actually sounded better, I think, the first time I heard it, on the band’s 1998 debut album. The new version, produced at Compass Records in Nashville, does sound much cleaner—you can really hear guitarist Paul Meehan’s lush chordwork, and that’s unquestionably a good thing—but the more recent effort lacks the energy of the original.

“Morning Nightcap,” on the other hand, definitely sounds fresher and crisper, and, if anything, tighter than the already pretty fantastic version recorded in 2002 on “The Merry Sisters of Fate” (Green Linnet). Again, it’s not remarkably different from the original, but it’s a fuller, more complete and more vibrant performance.

As for all the rest, if you are a Lunasa fan, you’ll be happy to note that most of your favorites are there—”Eanair,” “The Miller of Drohan,” “Casu,” “Punch,” “The Floating Crowbar” (I just love that title) and more. (There are 16 tracks in all.)

If, like me, you already have all of the previous recordings, is there any reason to have this new CD? I would say yes, if only to have the benefit of a much more polished sound. And if, also like me, you keep your CDs in the car, they are caked with french fry grease and Coke syrup. It’s about time for a new one, anyway.

I’d recommend “The Story So Far” for newbies. If you haven’t heard Lunasa—and weren’t they great at the 2007 Ceili Group Festival?—this is surely a terrific introduction.

And it’s not as if all the rest of their stuff is merely passable. It’s all pretty phenomenal. So let this new CD be your first, and you’ll see what all the rest of their fans are raving about.

May 12, 2008 by Jeff Meade

Music

Inside the Heart of a Dreamer

I would fly from the woods’ low rustle
And the meadows’ kindly page.
Let me dream as of old by the river,
And be loved for the dream alway;
For a dreamer lives forever,
And a toiler dies in a day.

—John Boyle O’Reilly

Sean Tyrrell, the singer-songwriter from the West of Ireland, has performed in Philadelphia twice—including a memorable set with fiddler Tommy Peoples at the 2001 Philadelphia Ceili Group Festival. (You can hear it on the group’s commemorative festival CD, “Toss the Fiddles.”)

I’ve missed his local appearances, but I ran into him a few years ago on a trip to Ballyvaughan, County Clare. He was playing his regular weekly session at Green’s, a pub roughly the size of a confessional booth in the center of town.

After a strong set of the traditional stuff, Sean started noodling around on the guitar, getting set to play something soft and slow. It took me a few notes before I recognized the tune: “South of the Border (Down Mexico Way),” the peppy 1939 standard written by Jimmy Kennedy and Michael Carr, and a big hit for singers as diverse as Gene Autry and Frank Sinatra.

Tyrrell’s version was a different tune altogether. Gone was the hokey Latin syncopation. And that mental image of Dorothy Lamour with a bowl of fruit on her head? Forget that. This was a far more wistful treatment than ever I’d ever heard.

Tyrell’s great gift lies in his ability to interpret songs—even those, and perhaps especially those, that have otherwise been done until you’re sick of hearing them.

“I have often said that I don’t regard myself as having the greatest voice,” Tyrrell said in a phone interview from Seattle, “but that (his interpretive skill) is something that I do have. There aren’t that many bad songs, really, but there are a lot of bad singers. What I mean by that is, people who just don’t care about the lyric. You can take a song like “The Black Velvet Band” or “The Wild Rover,” and if you really read those lyrics, you’ll find that they’re great songs, but they’ve just been done to death.”

One example is Tyrrell’s take on the standard “Coast of Malabar.” It could be a cheesy or sentimental tune, he admits. It has certainly been performed in that way. But, he said, “If you really look at the lyrics, it’s about a man who has fallen in love with a woman who’s a different color. And he can’t bring her back to England, because she’s the wrong color. I just wanted to get that across.”

Tyrrell’s other great passion, for some time, has been poetry, including the works of the well-known—Oscar Wilde, for example—as well as some other poets who are not as well known, such as Louis MacNeice.

The poet with whom Tyrrell is most closely identified is John Boyle O’Reilly. O’Reilly was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, captured and jailed, and subsequently transported to Australia. He escaped to Boston, where he became editor of the Irish newspaper, The Pilot.

Tyrrell’s interest in setting poetry to music stems from a chance encounter in New York City with a book called “100 Years of Irish Poetry,” edited by Kathleen Hoagland. “It’s still available, actually,” he said. “About 50 percent of my repertoire for years has been from poems from that book that I set to music. One of the poems was was John Boyle O’Reilly, ‘Cry of a Dreamer.’ I recorded it on my first album, and gave it (the album) that title.”

Tyrrell now performs five of O’Reilly’s poems set to music in a one-man show, also entitled “Cry of a Dreamer.” The show also includes music and poetry from a number of other diverse sources, including Wilde, as well as Bob Dylan and John Lennon. The show is meant to document O’Boyle’s life.

“He was an amazing human being,” said Tyrrell. “The magnitude of his soul just amazes me.”

You’ll get a chance to see the show here in Philadelphia on Saturday, May 17, at 8 p.m. at the Philadelphia Irish Center. The show is sponsored by the Philadelphia Ceili Group. The show has earned standing ovations in just about every city on the current tour where Tyrrell has performed it.

May 9, 2008 by Jeff Meade

Music

Review: Capercaillie’s “Roses and Tears”

Twenty years together, and Capercaillie is still solidly Celtic … and, yet, still defiantly hard to pigeonhole.

With “Roses and Tears,” the Scottish band’s latest release on the Compass label, it’s clear the band has lost none of its creative energy. On the contrary, they’ve continued to advance the strongly percussive, polyrhythmic approach that had landed them pretty squarely in the “World” section of the CD sale racks since, um … forever.

Karen Matheson is, well, Karen Matheson. I first heard her years ago, before I even knew what a Capercaillie was, on a 1995 Putamayo “Celtic Women of the World” compilation. She was singing Dark Alan (from “Rob Roy”). Even then, her voice reminded me of single malt. Smoky, velvety, sweet, with a bit of an edge. (Bonus: No hangover!)

On “Rose and Tears,” Matheson’s voice seems to have entered a new level of maturity. I’ll admit that my judgment in this regard is colored somewhat by her performance on one particular tune, John Martyn’s anti-war song “Don’t You Go.”

This is the second CD from Compass in a year to include in-your-face ant-war material—the last being Michael Black’s eponymous debut album. In the ’60s, the airwaves were full of the stuff. You don’t hear it now much, except in the folk genre.

But back to the point … “Don’t You Go” is just a lovely song to begin with. Anyone could sing it. But when Karen Matheson sings it, you can truly feel the mother’s heartbreak that underlies the lyrics, especially in the wrenching last line.

Matheson is clearly the band’s anchor, but even without her, you’d recognize the sound as distinctively Capercaillie: Michael McGoldrick on pipes and flute, Donald Shaw on accordion, Charlie McKerron on fiddle and Manus Lunny on bouzouki. Propelling the band along, of course, is Capercaillie’s very own version of the fabulous Funk Brothers, the rhythm section: Che Beresford on drums; David Robertson on just about anything else percussive, and Ewen Vernal on the bass. I judge rhythm sections by how much they make me want to bang on the steering wheel. Let’s just say I bang … a whole lot.

It all comes together in several places on the CD, but probably my favorite is the fourth track, entitled “Aphrodesiac,” a wild collection of jigs, with McGoldrick just wailing away like a, I don’t know, wild wailing kind of thing.

The album, all too short at just 12 tracks, features many newly discovered traditional songs culled from the Gaelic song archive at the School of Scottish Studies. Capercaillie applies the good old reliable Capercaillie touch, and suddenly even old tunes sound fresh and vibrant.

All of which sums up what you get on “Roses and Tears.” It’s more of the same.

Ain’t it great?

May 1, 2008 by Jeff Meade

Music

Local Singer Releases New CD

Growing up as the youngest of 11 kids in rural upstate New York, Terry Kane recalls bumping along in the family’s station wagon, her mother at the wheel, she, her mom, and siblings all singing at the top of their lungs.

“We sang in 10-part harmony which we made up, back when cars didn’t have child seats,” she says with a laugh. “I didn’t actually sit on a seat till I was about 12. No, I’m kidding, but I sat on people’s laps for a long time.”

The Kane family “loved music and dancing,” she recalls. “It was a part of our lives. My Mom is the one that pretty much taught us to sing, and her mom taught her to sing. Her Dad was a big dancer and his father was as well. My great-great grandfather bought a farm out there in the middle of nowhere, near the Finger Lakes, and he built a stage in the woods where they could do their Irish dancing. Apparently his second wife didn’t like when they danced in the house so they danced outside.”

So it’s no surprise that for the last decade, Kane, who lives with her husband Todd Daniel in a converted cigar warehouse near Quakertown, has been performing Irish music in the Delaware Valley, New York, and Washington, DC, sometimes solo, often with singer John Beatty as Kane & Beatty. She also anchors the monthly sessions at Granny McCarthy’s in Bethlehem and McCoole’s in Quakertown. But on Saturday, April 19, she’s launching her second CD as part of the group, Trad Linn, with New Yorkers Will Collins and Doug Lammer who play whistle and uillean pipes.

“Will is from a traditional family. His mother is from County Clare. His aunt, Kathleen Collins, is a traditional fiddle player. His father is a well-known accordion player,” says Kane. “I’ve played with Will and Doug at the East Durham Irish Festival in the summer. I don’t get a chance to play with them that often. But they stopped into the studio when I was recording and put down some tracks for me.” Also featured on the CD, called “The Roads of Clare,” are George Fairchild on bodhrán and his daughter Audrey Fairchild on cello.

And anyone who knows Terry Kane will expect to hear some of her unaccompanied sean nos singing, and she doesn’t disappoint. Kane has been studying this traditional form of Irish singing for more than 10 years. As a classically trained singer, it’s been quite a education. Sean nos (meaning “old style”) has many interpreters, but it is largely the antithesis of classical music with its emphasis on fluidity, sweetness, and vibrato. Sean nos can be fierce, almost unmelodic. “It’s also very nasal,” says Kane, who doesn’t think she’s yet achieved the sound.

“I don’t really truly sing in sean nos, though I’m getting very close to it now,” she says. “I have a masters degree in musical education so I sing in a more traditionally classic way. But I’ve been spending a lot of time with singers from Connemara. I’ve been taking workshops with Aine Meenaghan, a well-known sean nos singer who now lives in Chicago. I’ve taken classes with others too, including singers from the Aran islands. Any time I go to Ireland I’m always listening and picking up songs.”

She first became interested in Irish music when one of her older brothers came back from studying in Europe with a raft of recordings from Ireland. “He came back singing all kinds of rover and rebel songs,”” she laughed. “My brother, Pat, also got into the traditional stuff, so we found trad music again.”

Actually, it was for the first time. Though her mother came from a musical family, Kane says, her early ancestors tried to erase most vestiges of their culture, including their music—a familiar story in many families who arrived in America when the Irish were still the victims of strong and sometimes violent prejudice. “My mother’s mother used to sing sean nos type songs, but her husband didn’t like it. He wanted her to sing American,” Kane explains. “So that was the end of the sean nos stuff. My grandmother did teach her to sing the songs of the day. In fact, they used to sing while they were working. On a farm, there’s a lot of manual labor, so they would sing together while they worked. I know it sounds like a musical, but that’s the way it was.”

Today, she and her brother, Pat, who is also a professional musician, carry on the ancient and yet newfound family tradition. “Now,” she says, “this is not just my job but my passion.”

A CD release party is being held on Saturday, April 19, from 5:30 to 11 PM at McCoole’s Arts and Events Place, 10 S. Main Street, Quakertown. Tickets are $25 and come with a free CD. You can meet Terry and the band before the concert, and enjoy food and drink. The concert, which also features John Beatty, George and Audrey Fairchild, will start at 7 PM with a post-concert session at 8:30 PM.

You can contact Terry at 215-541-0282 or email tkane@netcarrier.com for tickets or purchase them at the door.

To listen to the CD, click here.

April 18, 2008 by Denise Foley

Older Posts

Newer Posts