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CD Review: “Four Cups of Coffee” by Seamus Kelleher

Seamus Kelleher at Blackthorn's Wildwood bash.

Seamus Kelleher’s first solo CD is tailor-made for my demographic: the baby boomer with eclectic musical tastes. Before he went off to record it in Nashville a few months ago, a friend advised him, “Be yourself,” and Kelleher says he was. Clearly, he’s a baby boomer with eclectic musical tastes.

Because of that, “Four Cups of Coffee” defies pigeonholing. Though Kelleher comes from Galway, it’s not entirely Celtic. Though he plays a mean rock guitar, it’s not entirely rock. Though it was recorded in the birthplace of country music, it’s not country. Not entirely. But because he decided it would reflect who he is, it is entirely Seamus Kelleher, which makes listening to “Four Cups of Coffee” a strangely intimate experience. It’s not unusual for performers to reveal some hidden part of their personal lives in their work, but “Four Cups of Coffee” is like an autobiography set to music.

On this CD, you’ll quickly pick up on Kelleher’s own musical influences. He does a rocking blues cover of “What’s Going On” by the late Donegal songwriter and guitarist, Rory Gallagher, whom Kelleher met once, at the age of 15, as Gallagher was coming out of a concert hall. The brief encounter–Gallagher talked to the teen musician for about 20 minutes–led him to consider himself “somewhat keeper of the flame with Rory,” Kelleher told me a few weeks ago. “It was a kindness I’ll never forget–he was probably dying for a drink.” In 2005, Kelleher helped organize a tribute to Gallagher in New York. A film of the event was released on DVD.

On “Dust My Blues,” he channels a black blues guitarist from Mississippi, Elmore James, known as “king of the slide guitar” who was dead by the time Kelleher was nine but who nevertheless still exerts his influence on guitarists everywhere–like Rory Gallagher–who admire the way he electrified the moaning Delta blues sound. Kelleher came to James through an even older musician, Robert Johnson, who recorded “Dust My Blues” in 1936.

“Missing My Hometown” could have been written during any of the waves of the Irish diaspora–or by anyone of a certain age whose thoughts turn to years gone by and the people loved and left behind. An instrumental reprise at the end of the CD reveals a tune that’s just as poignant without lyrics. Kelleher also remembers two long-lost friends, one with a tune he wrote to memorialize a 35-year friendship (“My Friend Ben”) and the other, “Madame,” by his friend Kevin Garvey, which he and Garvey had recorded 30 years before in his apartment.

“September Skies,” which also appears on Blackthorn’s “Push and Pull” CD, is poignant to the point of painful. It’s a song Kelleher wrote after 9/11 about the effect of the tragedy on his town, Cranford, NJ, which lost six people that day. Kelleher, who was teaching at NYU at the time, found himself more a counselor than a teacher because so many of his students lived in dorms across from the World Trade Center. “This is definitely my story,” he says. “My wife and I worked in the World Trade Center back in the late ‘90s and we knew every inch of the towers. We knew some of the people who were killed there, six from our town. My neighbor across the street just got out of the towers before they fell. He said to me, ‘Seamus, I’ve seen things today no man should.’”

It’s the CD’s title tune, “Four Cups of Coffee”– a raunchy bluesy riff on personal demons, including but not limited to caffeine–that’s been getting the most requests at Blackthorn gigs. It’s funny, catchy, and feels uncomfortably like Kelleher’s stab at true confession. (He admits it is.)

But where I keep hitting the back button are on Kelleher’s instrumentals. “Spanish Lady,” which he wrote, is his first attempt at “finger-picking, Chet Atkins style.” I can’t get enough of it. He admits that he had to “stretch” for this one, and took a major risk putting a finger-picking piece on an album produced by a US finger-picking champion, Peter Huttlinger. It could have been a humbling experience–and in many ways, Kelleher says, it was. But if he wasn’t going to take some risks at this point in the game, when was he? It’s a great piece. It will be the track that wears out first on my CD.

“Aran,” is another, an evocative, very Celtic piece that calls to mind the limestone cliffs and crumbled ruins of the islands Kelleher could see from his native Galway. “Corinna” is the only song which seems to absorbed the Nashville influence: It’s a little bit Celtic, a little bit country, very jaunty and lyrical. It’s named for his nephew’s girlfriend who liked the tune. Alas, that romance is no more, but a lovely little song lives on.

And “Nashville Ceili Band?” Imagine a bunch of top musicians who are used to backing the likes of Garth Brooks and The Dixie Chicks sitting in the pub, nursing frothy Guinnesses, playing a string of Irish trad tunes (which aren’t trad at all–Kelleher wrote them, and they’re the most Irish of all the tracks on the CD). You’ll be hitting the back button too.

To order the CD or download a track, go to www.seamuskelleher.com

October 23, 2007 by Denise Foley

Music

After the Fall

Seamus Kelleher on lead guitar.

He learned guitar at 14 and at 15 he was playing gigs around his native Galway. Then it was onto the local band circuit and eventually, to a 14-year stint with Sean Fleming in New York. In 1995, he joined the hot Philly-area Celtic rockers, Blackthorn, as lead guitarist.

He’s been in the music business since Nixon was president, so why, at the age of 53, is Seamus Kelleher just getting around to putting out his first solo CD? “I just wasn’t ready,” says Kelleher, whose independently produced “Four Cups of Coffee” is getting both critical claim and airplay.

“I just didn’t have all the tools to say what I wanted to say,” he tells me over his cellphone while he’s driving home to north Jersey after a Blackthorn gig a few weeks ago. “I didn’t feel my voice or my songwriting was in the right place. I’m highly developed as a lead guitar player. It took me a while to get the confidence in all the rest. I didn’t want to do a CD where there were five or six good songs and all the rest junk.”

And this is the spot in the story where you find out that he succeeded. There’s not a clunker in the dozen tunes on the CD, from Kelleher’s touching “My Friend Ben,” a tribute to his late friend, Brendan Glyn, to the direct-to-trad “Nashville Ceili Band” on which he’s accompanied by musicians who usually sit behind Garth Brooks, Vince Gill, or LeAnne Rimes. In fact, the CD was produced in the home of country music by Pete Huttlinger, 2000 national finger pick guitar champion who played with John Denver and can be seen and heard on YouTube backing up Rimes. Huttlinger also arranged some of Kelleher’s tracks.

“I was so intimidated having someone of that skill producing my CD, but I felt it was a chance to really open my eyes and it did,” he admits. “Pete elevated my playing and I came back a better musician, not just a guitar player.“

In fact, Kelleher was awestruck by the caliber of the musicians Huttlinger assembled, most of them Grammy winners. “And not one of them was ego-driven,” he says. “I was talking to one guy who never told me he plays with The Dixie Chicks. We talked about how he has this new house in the woods that he loves and oh, he goes out on tour every once in a while. ”

And he was totally blown away when Huttlinger invited him to a birthday party for one of Huttlinger’s friends, country megastar Vince Gill. “It was toward the end of the week and I put on my one remaining shirt, a silly Hawaiian thing, and we get to Vince’s house and this beautiful lady answers the door,” he says. It was singer Amy Grant, Gill’s wife. “She smiled and put her arms out and said, ‘Congratulations on finishing your CD!’ I was speechless.”

There was a tent set up in the Gills’ backyard and Kelleher mingled with people whose work he’d long admired from afar–songwriters whose credits included “The Gambler” and “Mr. Bojangles,” singers like Janis Ian. “One guy got up–he looked like a tramp–and started singing. I never heard a voice like it. He sounded like a 90-year-old blues guy. Then Vince and Amy sang together. I said to someone next to me, ‘If the Lord were to take me, this probably wouldn’t be a bad time.’ Six weeks later, he almost did take me.”

“Four Cups of Coffee” was just five days old when Kelleher, drinking with some friends at Kildare’s Irish Pub in King of Prussia, tumbled down a steep flight of stairs as he was leaving to go home. “Someone called me, I looked back, and the next thing I remember I was in a chopper. I had fractured my skull, several ribs, and hurt my back,” he recalls. He was taken in critical condition to the University of Pennsylvania Hospital where he remained in the intensive care unit for three days.

Once he was weaned off morphine, the pain hit him with a vengeance. But that wasn’t his biggest concern. “The hard part was wondering if I would get better,” he says. “I had a brain injury and not everyone comes back from that. These were very tough days, to be honest with you. I even had trouble remembering my kids’ names. I covered it up because I didn’t want anyone to know. I knew I was fighting a battle.”

When he came home, he was besieged by constant headaches and excruciating back pain, and for a time was mostly bedridden, though he would force himself to get up and walk back and forth in a hallway with the aid of a cane. “I was determined to get better,” he says. He realized he had so much to live for — “four lovely kids, a wife, my CD and a great band” — that he just couldn’t quit. “It’s amazing what you can do when you want to do it,” he says.

One thing he did quit was drinking. The title track on his CD–a bluesy riff on addictions both harmless (coffee) and not (3 shots of gin and two Irish whiskies)– turned out to be a little more autobiographical than he intended. “I was poking fun at myself, my own demons, and I’ve battled alcohol to some degree, I don’t mind saying,” he admits. One line goes, “Lord I’m all alone, I don’t know where I’m going. Can you help me so I can see.” Kelleher now considers it an unwitting prayer.

“I haven’t taken a drink since my fall,” says Kelleher. “This was my ‘come to Jesus’ meeting, though,” he adds with a wry laugh, “I wish he’d put his arms out before I hit the concrete.”

Kelleher was back on stage with Blackthorn six weeks after his accident. The first gig, he admits, was a little shaky. “I was really scared driving up to the gate, petrified really. Was I going to be able to do this or that? Could I bend down to pick up my guitar? Would I remember the songs? I was still in a lot of pain and I knew it could be deadly if I moved the wrong way. And standing next to McGroary (button accordionist John McGroary) you never knew when you were subject to attack.” He laughs. “But after one song, I knew everything was going to be fine. I still had a ways to go, but I was back.”

October 23, 2007 by Denise Foley

Music

Local Pipe Bands Win With Amazing Grace

Emerald celebrates.

It’s a fair bet that each pipe band preparing to compete Saturday at the Anne Arundel Scottish Highland Games had hoped—possibly even believed—it was truly ready.

By “ready,” I mean that each band had methodically selected three to five tunes up to a year before. Each had played the same three to five tunes over and over again, for hours at a time, week in and week out, until fingers could remember the notes even when the mind forgot them. They had incurred the ire of abandoned spouses. They had willingly submitted to the searing criticism of petulant pipe majors.

All this, for a contest measured in moments. A solid year of focused effort, sacrifice and commitment—all of it riding on one all-too-brief performance in the fading Southern Maryland sunshine. Win, place, show—or crash and burn.

Fortunately, for three Delaware-area bagpipe bands, it was a day of happy endings. The Ulster Scottish Pipe Band of Devon placed first in grade 3; the Philadelphia Emerald Society Pipe Band racked up a first in grade 4; and the Cameron Highlanders Pipe Band of Lafayette Hill notched a second in grade 4. (Pipe bands are lumped into grades so that they’re more or less evenly matched with the bands against which they might compete. Grade 5 is entry-level; grades 4 and grade 3 are more advanced; and grades 2 and 1 are reserved for the scarily good pipe bands. Not surprisingly, there are lots and lots of grade 5 bands in the United States, but there are only a few grade 1 bands.)

For those whose interests do not include the trials of bagpipe band competition (what’s wrong with you, anyway?), there were lots of other activities to keep you occupied in a Celtic sort of way, including sheep dog trials, Highland athletics, haggis eating (thanks, I’ll pass), shortbread nibbling (I’m there), music, Scottish dancing and more.

The videos:

October 17, 2007 by Jeff Meade

Music

Anúna’s Lush Harmonies Come to Annenberg

The superb Irish choral group Anúna.

Picture long, flowing robes and long, flowing pre-Raphaelite hair. (Except for the guys.) Envision silken-voiced sopranos hitting notes so high, dogs two states away stop dead in their tracks and say, “Hey, what the heck was that?”

Yup. That’s Anúna.

Even though the group has been around 20 years—exactly the same age as its youngest member—it only just made its Philadelphia debut on Friday at Penn’s Annenberg Center.

It was not a full house (unfortunately), but director John McGlynn and his band of singers made the best of it.

Anúna is currently flacking a new CD and DVD, “Celtic Origins,” and PBS stations all over the country are promoting the heck out of that performance for fund-raising purposes. No complaints there. Anything that gets the local PBS programmers off the odious André Reieu can only be a good thing.

Anúna’s live performance turns out to as thrilling as what you see on the PBS special. It’s better, actually. In live performance, Anúna takes full advantage of the whole theatre. At the show’s beginning, voices come at the audience out of the dark from all directions, rising and falling, filling the hall with superb, complex harmonies. Eventually, after a bit of mystical meandering, all the singers do wind up on stage, and pretty much remain there for the duration of the show.

In Philadelphia, the group performed several cuts form the new CD and DVD, including “Greensleeves,” “Scarborough Fair” and “I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls,” the latter performed beautifully by the smoky alto Miriam Blennerhassett, the group’s choral mistress and a founding member of Anúna.

There were also some tunes from previous CDs, including the wonder “Winter Fire and Snow,” “Dúlamán,” “Riu Riu,” “Siuil A Ruin” and the haunting “Piè Jesu.”

Small though the audience was, it was hugely appreciative, rewarding the group with a standing ovation. Anúna returned the gesture with a blazing performance of the tongue-twisting “Fionnghuala.” (If you think saying it is hard, try singing it.) If you have no idea what “Fionnghuala” is or what it sounds like, head on over to our YouTube channel for a video I recorded (not a very good one, I’m afraid) during the group’s summer promotional tour at the Center City Borders.

And, if and when Anúna shows up in your neck of the woods again, catch this very polished and memorable act.

October 16, 2007 by Jeff Meade

Music

Happy Harpers Head for the Hills

It's a full house on Saturday night.

Who knew harpers needed an escape?

I mean, there they are, playing one of the most restful musical instruments on the planet (unless Harpo’s playing), and yet they need an escape? Why, your average Celtic harper could teach Perry Como to relax. (Yes, I know … given that the old crooner has been dead the past six years, it would be hard to be more relaxed.)

But I digress.

The point is, harpers from throughout the Delaware Valley (and probably beyond) are about to head to the Poconos for their 15th Annual Harpers Escape Weekend. It takes place Oct. 12-14 at The Country Place Retreat and Conference Center in White Haven.

It’s not actually an escape from anything other than the distractions of everyday life. It’s really more like a total-immersion retreat for people who love and play the Celtic harp, at all levels. In a series of small classes led by some of the world’s finest players and teachers, including Grainne Hambly, Bill Jackson, Kathy DeAngelo, Debbie Brewin-Wilson, and Sharon Knowles, harpers will get a chance to hone their skills—and just spend time with other people who are as passionate as they are about this lovely, ancient instrument.

DeAngelo and Brewin-Wilson hatched the idea.

“Debbie and I were sitting around playing harps one weekend in 1992 and trying to rehearse for a gig but we were constantly interrupted by various household events,” says Kathy. “We thought it would be a great idea to escape for a weekend where we’d only be playing harp. We figured if we could get a few other people to join us it would be a lot of fun. We initially convinced some of our students and some total strangers to trek down to Cape May.

“Little did I know that, when we did the first weekend in 1993 at a small B&B down in Cape May with nine other players, that it would turn into a regular tradition. The Harpers Escape was a pioneering event and the model for many other harp weekends.”

The Escape has had several venues over the years, including Spring Lake, N.J., and Ocean Grove, where until last year it was headquartered at the Manchester Inn. But the Escape keeps growing, so this year, the harpers head to the hills.

“We have more space this year and more teachers and hopefully we’ll get more people to come—but we’re still dedicated to having small classes,” says Kathy.

Almost 60 percent of the attendees are alumni, she adds. Pretty clearly, the experience resonates. “Our motto has been ‘harp till you drop,’ and we mean it,” Kathy says. “We try to get the ‘shy’ players to not feel so self-conscious about playing and just realize that they can have a good time playing. We have everybody from inexperienced players to really experienced players—all giving each other encouragement and taking joy in the instrument and the music. Everybody has something to contribute.”

October 5, 2007 by Jeff Meade

Dance, Music

It Was a Grand Party

Lunasa's Kevin Crawford gets crazy with his bodhran.

At one point on Saturday night, Dennis Gormley, fiddling with the mike on the Fireside Stage at Philly’s Irish Center, leaned over and expressed his thanks to the Philadelphia Ceili Group and its Irish Music Festival director Frank Malley for “throwing this great party.”

“And inviting all our friends,” added his wife, Kathy DeAngelo, from behind her harp.

The duo, who have been performing as McDermott’s Handy for nearly three decades, could look out at the audience and see rows of familiar faces. But even if you didn’t know a soul, you would have thought you were among your closest friends at an intimate little party for hundreds. That’s the atmosphere of the Philadelphia Ceili Group’s annual Irish Festival, which ran for five days from September5-9.

You could have mingled with legends.

If you had stayed late on Friday night, for example, after the performance by the incredible Irish group, Lunasa, you could have shared a pizza with the band and piper Tim Britton, a former Delaware Valley resident, who opened for them.

On Saturday, you might have been in the food line behind the towering form of Breanndan Begley, the Kerryman who had just mesmerized the crowd with his emotional singing. Or struck up a conversation with Sligo-born Kevin Henry, a venerable flutist and piper, now of Chicago, who wasn’t going to have a bite until he found “herself”–his wife, who was somewhere in the crowd.

If you hadn’t brought your own dance partner for Irish radio personality Marianne MacDonald’s House Party on Saturday night, you didn’t have to worry about being a wallflower. Someone could be convinced to dance a set or two with you–or even teach you the steps in the hall. It might have been Ed Reavy, son of the legendary fiddler, who, with his wife, Mary, are the Fred and Ginger of Irish set dancing.

And you could have seen four-time all Ireland fiddler Brendan Callahan perform superhumanly, fiddling for the Irish dancers, playing with a trio, sitting in on sessions. . .admitting only once on Saturday night that he might be “a little tired.”

The 31st festival opened on Wednesday night with an evening of poetry and prose, read by local Irish literary lights including Father John McNamee, pastor of St. Malachy’s Parish in North Philadelphia and the author of four books, and his friend, Father Michael Doyle of Sacred Heart Parish in Camden, NJ, author of the book, “It’s a Terrible Day, Thanks Be to God.” On Thursday, local singers including Terry Kane, Rosaleen McGill, Eugenia Brennan, Sharon Sachs, and John Winward, joined Canadian sean nos singer Catherine Crow and, from the Midwest, Brian Hart, the 28-year-old singer and dancer who is the only American ever to win an All-Ireland title for singing at the Irish Fleadh Cheoil for the Circle of Song.

The festival ended with a set dance event on Sunday.

We were there for mostly everything, as these photos will prove. If you couldn’t make it this year, mark it on your calendar for next year. It’s a party, and everyone is invited.

Relive the festivities here:

September 10, 2007 by Jeff Meade

Music

The House I Was Reared In – Christy McNamara

By Frank Dalton

Christy McNamara’s new CD, “The House I Was Reared In,” took me by surprise. I’d known of his evocative photography since reading “The Living Note: the Heartbeat of Irish Music.” This 1996 book was a fictional narrative of a young traditional musician and his family. Accompanying and complementing the text by Peter Woods, your man Christy’s striking black-and-white images captured and displayed the essence of what Irish traditional music is all about—in session at the pub, at weddings and wakes, and in sundry other real-life circumstances. It’s great stuff and you should read the book if you can.

But I wasn’t hip to McNamara’s considerable prowess on the button accordion. Yes, Christy’s a musician, too. In the sleeve notes we read that “It’s always the music … sometimes it seems as if life happens between the notes of tunes”. Well, yeah, that’s true for you, Christy, I’m sure! Hailing from the parish of Crusheen in County Clare, as a kid he heard his grandfather Jim play the concertina. His father Joe and uncle Paddy played the accordion, while another uncle was the great fiddler P.J. Hayes, a founding member of the legendary and long-lived Tulla Ceili Band.

This collection of 17 reels, jigs, waltzes, and slow airs showcases these and many other musical influences. Joined by fiddler Martin Hayes (also a cousin), guitarist Denis Cahill, flute player Eamonn Cotter, and fiddlers Liam Lewis and Peadar O’Loughlin, Christy expertly renders a selection of familiar tunes like the reels “My Love is in America,” “The Copperplates” and “Toss the Feathers,” and jigs like “Scatter the Mud,” “The Kesh” and “Old Man Dillon.” A few less familiar pieces stand out: “I Ne’er Shall Win Her” is a lovely jig I’d never heard before, from Mrs. Murphy of Ballydesmond in County Kerry; “John Naughton’s Reel” is from a Kilclaran concertina player (sure it’s about halfway between Gortnamearacaun and Cloonusker); while “John McHugh’s” was learned from that tune’s namesake who learned it from his grandfather in County Mayo. Christy also treats us to a pair of his own compositions, the waltz “Tae Pot Wood” and a reel, “The Maid’s Lake.”

I forgot to mention that as well as knowing his way around the two-row button accordion Christy is a fine concertina player too (on “The Bunch of Roses,” and “Molly Put The Kettle On”). To top it all off, he sings on the slow air “May Morning Dew,” a moving song of emigration, sorrow and loss.

The CD comes in one of those environmentally conscious ‘digi-packs’ (no plastic jewel box to drop and break and toss into the trash) and contains a 24 page booklet filled mostly with some lovely photographs from the McNamara family archives and some of Christy’s own shots of other musicians, young and old. This is a very worthwhile addition to your collection, especially if you have a fondness for the lovely and unhurried music of County Clare, as I myself do.

Frank Dalton is the organizer of the Coatesville Traditional Irish Music Series.

September 8, 2007 by Guest

Music

How Lúnasa Makes Music

There’s an old saying attributed to that funny old German dude Otto Von Bismarck which he used as a way of explaining the often ugly process of governing: “Laws are like sausages. It’s better not to see them being made.” (The “Iron Chancellor” was always coming out with knee-slappers like that.)

Unless you are unnaturally patient (or musically masochistic), you might say much the same thing about how the top Irish band Lúnasa makes music. It’s a painstaking process indeed, according to Lúnasa flutist Kevin Crawford.

Speaking by phone from his home outside the town of Ennis in County Clare, Crawford says that, before the band began recording their most recent CD, Sé, they began with what he calls a “short list” of tunes. By “short,” Crawford means about 90 or so.

“We brought that list to the table a good six to eight months before we even went in to record the tunes,” Crawford says. “We offered the list to (guitarist) Paul (Meehan) and to (bass player) Trevor (Hutchinson). Generally, Paul and Trevor troll through the tunes we give them, keeping the ones that work and throwing out the rest. They come back with at least half of them. From there we just start whittling it down. We get that list down to about 30 tunes and before you know it you have an album.”

If you’ve heard Sé—pronounced “shay,” it’s Irish for “six”—or any of the five other Lúnasa recordings, you’d have to agree that all the fuss is worth it. The music of Lúnasa is brilliantly melodic, but what really sets it apart is its boundless rhythmic adventurousness. Crawford and colleagues have an affinity for mind-bending time signatures. They have a rare talent for bending and blending tunes together in ways that they really weren’t meant to go.

Developing that unique sound was always the plan, says Crawford: “It was always the case that we wanted it to be slightly different. We had all done different things. We decided that, when we came together, we wanted to try out a new approach. It was to give an equal share to both melody and rhythm.”

Maintaining that balance translates into an awful lot of work.

“We do spend an awful lot of time sourcing tunes and trying to figure out whether they’re going to fit the jigsaw,” Crawford says. “A lot gets discarded. We do actually drive ourselves crazy looking for the correct tunes. We’ve gotten more skilled at it over the last 10 years we’ve been working.”

“Skilled” doesn’t half describe Lúnasa’s virtuosity.

Find out yourself at the 33rd Annual Philadelphia Ceili Group Festival Friday, Sept. 7, starting at 7:30 p.m., at the Philadelphia Irish Center, Carpenter and Emlen Streets, in the Mount Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia. Tim Britton will open. Tickets are $25 ($27 at the door).

September 6, 2007 by Jeff Meade

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