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No Rivalry Here: A Chat With Trad’s Top Sister Act

The Kane Sisters

The Kane Sisters

Seamless. Synchronized. Fluid. Flowing. Liz and Yvonne Kane are well used to hearing adjectives like these bestowed upon their beautifully matched fiddle playing. So it’s no mystery where The Kane Sisters got the name for their new CD, “Side By Side.”

“We get that all the time,” Yvonne laughed. “It’s a sibling thing, like. I think it happens for any siblings at all when they play together. Seamus and Manus McGuire are like that when they play. It’s nothing you could plan, it just happens naturally.”

The Kane Sisters, along with concertina player Edel Fox, are playing a Philadelphia Ceili Group concert at The Irish Center this Sunday, August 1, as part of their summer tour of the United States. It’s a routine that has become an anticipated annual follow-up to their presence at The Catskills Irish Arts Week.

“This was our fifth year in The Catskills, Paul Keating has kept asking us back,” Yvonne said. “It’s been great. And for the last three years, we’ve been down in Elkins, West Virginia, [for Irish/Celtic Week]. And then we do a few gigs.”

And this year, they launched “Side By Side,” their third CD, in The Catskills. It’s been six years since the release of their last CD, “Under the Diamond.”

“It didn’t feel like that long…but when we left the Catskills last year, we said, ‘We need to get to work on a new album.’ And we’ve gotten to know Edel through playing at CIAW. She was working on her first CD, ‘Chords & Beryls,’ so we also said, ‘We have to tour together next summer.’”

“It feels weird to have launched the album over here first… it hasn’t launched at home yet. We were supposed to launch it at Miltown Malbay, but we didn’t get the CDs until the day before we left for the States. But once we’re back home, we’ve got a good list of gigs beginning August 11th.”

Home for The Kane Sisters is their birthplace of Letterfrack in North Connemara.

“We love living there. We both lived away for a number of years. I was in Galway for 11 years, and Liz was in Cork for six years, then Galway for five. We’ve been back for nearly four years.”

“During the school year, we both teach… we love it. We have about 180 students, both kids and adults, and we travel all around Connemara. Liz commutes throughout South Connemara, and I have students in North Connemara… Clifden, Letterfrack, Inishbofin.”

Inishbofin? The island about five miles off the coast of Connemara?

“Yes,” Yvonne laughed. “I’ve got 10 amazing students out there… there’s only 18 kids in the entire school. I love going out there, and although I do now draw the line at taking the ferry in the bad weather, I have gotten on it before on bad days!”

Their musical heritage is steeped in the rich sounds of Ireland’s West. Their first instrument was the whistle because “everybody starts off playing tin whistles in school, whether you want to or not.”

They then moved on to the fiddle, being taught by musician Mary Finn as well as their grandfather, local fiddle player Jimmy Mullen.

“He would have us listening to all kinds of tunes. He just loved great tunes, flowing tunes. Like Michael Coleman from County Sligo, and Finbarr Dwyer.”

And they are much influenced by Paddy Fahey.

“He’s got great rhythm in his tunes… the East Galway fiddle style has got a good lift to it, similar to East Clare. The style’s not necessarily a slower one, I don’t know why people say that.”

The new CD, in addition to having tunes composed by Paddy Fahey, Finbarr Dwyer, Paddy O’Brien and Martin Mulhaire, also has three tunes composed by Liz.

“She’s the one who writes,” Yvonne explained. “I haven’t taken to it yet, but you never know…”

“When we make an album, we usually like to root and find new tunes, or tunes that haven’t been recorded. We’re always on the lookout for new tunes. We don’t work well unless we’re under pressure,” Yvonne acknowledged. “We’d be gone during the day teaching, and then we’d practice the tunes starting at 11 at night for about a week before we began recording, so the tunes were fresh in our minds.”

“We keep changing up the tunes all the time… we like changing the key of tunes, it makes them brighter, more enjoyable to play.”

And this time, esteemed musician and producer (and grandson of songbird Delia Murphy) Ronan Browne brought the recording studio to them.

“Ronan has a mobile recording studio, so we were able to sit at Liz’s house and record the tunes. We had great fun recording this CD… it probably has a different sound from the others, more of a live sound.”

And they are not alone; they are joined on “Side By Side” by Patsy Broderick on piano, Mick Conneely on Bouzouki, Dáith Sproule on Guitar and Ottawa Valley Step Dancer Nathan Pilatzke.

In fact, Nathan Pilatzke will be joining Liz and Yvonne and Edel onstage for some of the PCG concert, and his footwork is not to be missed. Seeing him dance last year in The Catskills was a thoroughly memorable experience.

And one last thing not to be missed: the notable and distinctive fashion style of these three brilliant women of Irish music.

“We’re all about our style,” Yvonne laughed when I couldn’t resist bringing it up at the end of the interview. “We love our style. When we get a day off, we go out and do some mini shopping. We love the fashion in New York, but it doesn’t compare to the fashion in Ireland—it’s too good.”

July 30, 2010 by
Music

A Little Lunch Music

Kathleen Murtagh enjoys the music.

Kathleen Murtagh enjoys the music.

It takes a lot to quiet down the regulars at Wednesday’s Senior Lunch at the Irish Immigration Center of Philadelphia, but this week the usual chatter din dimmed as Dublin-born musician John Byrne and bandmate Chris Buchanan serenaded the ladies—and gents—who lunch.

There was some singing along too, though the many song requests caused Byrne at one point to retort, “Ladies, you need a jukebox.”

Videos:

July 23, 2010 by
Music

Don Stiffe in Concert

Don Stiffe

Don Stiffe in concert at the Philadelphia Irish Center.

He’d already sold dozens at the Catskills Irish Arts Week in East Durham, NY last week. Arts Week organizer, Paul Keating, writing about the “magical” week when the best and brightest of Irish trad come together, noted that “Galwegian singer Don Stiffe made a big impact right away with his booming voice that sent listeners scurrying to the CD booth to take away more of his music.”

Stiffe has that effect on his audiences. Nancy Pidliski of Warminster said she came to the Irish Center after many years’ absence to hear Stiffe, whose CD she’s been listening to since her sister met Stiffe in Ireland a year ago. “Even my 17-year-old nephew listens to it all the time,” she said. She bought one for herself to take on her trip back to Canada, where she has a summer home.

If you missed Don Stiffe’s concert, you can view the many videos—bad lighting makes them a little more like audio—and our photos of the concert, which also featured fellow Galwegian Gabriel Donohue as Stiffe’s one-man band accompanist.

Videos by Lori Lander Murphy:

July 23, 2010 by
Music

A New Voice You Won’t Forget

Don Stiffe

Don Stiffe

A few months ago, a friend gave me a stack of Irish CDs she liked. “You have to listen to Don Stiffe,” she said as she handed them over. “You’ve never heard a voice like his.”

It was a busy time so I stuck the CDs in a cabinet and didn’t pull them out till a few weeks ago when I was taking a car trip. I unwrapped Don Stiffe’s solo CD, “Start of a Dream,” and popped it in the CD player. Stiffe, a singer-songwriter from County Galway, was barely through the first few bars of the first track– Richard Thompson’s “Waltzing for Dreamers”– when I realized I had goosebumps. And it wasn’t the air conditioning.

Virtually unknown in the US, Stiffe is an up and coming folk singer in Ireland where he’s worked with the likes of Frankie Gavin (who produced and played on his CD), Sharon Shannon, and Lunasa’s Kevin Crawford. He’s poised to join the Keane family (Dolores and Sean), Dessy O’Halloran, and Sean Tyrell as Galway’s gift to Irish music.

Stiffe will be sharing that gift with Philadelphia audiences for the first time on Tuesday, July 20, at the Irish Center, accompanied by Gabriel Donohue, another of Galway’s finest.

“Dolores Keane was a big influence on me growing up,” he told me a few weeks ago on the phone from Ireland. “I don’t live far from the Keanes—maybe 15 miles. I also loved Luke Kelly [one of Ireland’s greatest folk artists] though I would never try his approach to the music.”

Yet, like Keane and Kelly, Stiffe’s voice has that same complex mix of smooth and rough, like an Aran sweater. Like them, no matter what he’s singing—there are a couple of Richard Thompson tracks on his CD, four of his own songs, and even his take on Nat King Cole’s classic “Mona Lisa”—it becomes an irresistible siren song, rich with emotion, stirring, soul-satisfying.

Unlike many Irish singers, Stiffe does not come from a family of musicians. “Oh, my Mum and Dad will sing a song if they’re out at function, but I’m not from a musical family,” he says. “My Dad bought me a guitar when 7-8 years old. I had two lessons. I kept thinking, how am I going to get around all the stringy things on the guitar? After a few years came together. But I was always singing. I played in a local brass band in Galway City and I was always listening to an abundance of music.”

I asked Stiffe about the songs he chose for “Start of a Dream.”

“Most of them are diaspora songs—songs about longing for home,” I said.

“I lived in the States in the 90s,” he told me. “I was in Boston for two years and in St. Louis for a few months. I worked for a few different companies, doing landscaping, doing contruction as we all do.” He laughed. “But while I was there I was playing the circuit around the Boston area and in St. Louis.” While in St. Louis, he played with legendary accordian player Joe Burke who dubbed him “The Bard of Bohermore,” acknowledging the poetry of Stiffe’s lyrics.

Take, for example, “Grosse Isle,” which tells the story of the Irish immigrants, fleeing Ireland’s An gorta mor—the Great Hunger–who landed on this little island (Grosse-Ile) 30 miles east of Quebec City that was designated a quarantine station to prevent the spread of cholera. Today, a tall Celtic cross greets visitors to the island where an estimated 6,000 Irish are buried.

“In their thousands they died on the island of sorrow
Not from the under, but the feverish course
They left pillage behind them, in the land they loved dearest
But to land is Gross Isle, to die in the dirt.”

“I had been reading about the people who left Ireland in the coffin ships, only to land in Gross Isle and die there,” he explained. “I was really moved by it. . . I could go months without writing a song because it can’t be fictitious. It has to be the truth of the story.”

It’s my favorite track on the CD—that and Stiffe’s take on Richard Thompson’s poignant, “Dimming of the Day.” I first heard the song on a Bonnie Raitt album and loved it. Stiffe’s version is just as good. He’s joined on the track by singer Fionnuaula Deacy.

“That one got an award from Irish Music Magazine,” he acknowledges. “It’s a tricky slope doing a cover song. People listen to it and they want it to sound like the version they heard.”

Even if it’s your favorite song, Stiffe—who promised to sing it on Tuesday—you won’t be disappointed. And even if it’s 98 degrees and steamy, don’t forget your sweater. For the goosebumps.

July 15, 2010 by
Music

Blackthorn Does a Freebie in Collegeville

Blackthorn concert

A young listener gets into the act. Photo by Brian Mengini. (Click on the photo for more.)

One of the great things about summertime in the Delaware Valley are the free concerts where you can bring your blanket and your baby and occasionally your bucket of beer, to steal a line from James Taylor.

Blackthorn played a freebie this week in Collegeville (look for them July 7 at Central Park in Doylestown and July 8 at Prospect Park’s Park Square Summer Concert series). Fortunately, photographer Brian Mengini was there and captured these moments.

Click on the photo at right to see Brian’s excellent photo essay.

June 17, 2010 by
Music

All-Ireland Champ Isaac Alderson, Singularly Focused on the Music He Loves

Isaac Alderson

Isaac Alderson, on one of the several instruments at which he excels, the flute.

Isaac Alderson is many things…

At age 27, he‘s young.

As a musician, he’s talented in a manner many dream of but few can lay claim to: In 2002, he was named the All-Ireland Senior Champion on the flute, the whistle and the uillean pipes, in the process making this Chicago native the first American since Joanie Madden to win a tin whistle championship.

For a profession, he is making a living playing the Irish music he loves. “Irish music… I came across it when I was 11 or 12. My mom had a friend who gave me my first practice set of pipes, and I started playing them at 14. The pipes, they’re the most awkward thing for a beginner…I was really enthusiastic about it; through my high school years it was almost like an obsession. I practiced all the time,” Alderson recalled.

“I grew up in a musical household, not Irish music, but my dad had been a professional musician for a short time when he was young. He played the bass, the guitar, the harmonica. I played the saxophone when I was 10.”

Alderson’s teachers, once he discovered his passion for Irish music, were the likes of John Williams, Laurence Nugent, Al Purcell and Kieran O’Hare.

“I had a lot of people helping my interest along the way. I played a session in Evanston, and I learned a lot, hearing them play. Laurence Nugent was a primary influence.”

“My parents, my mother especially, worried about me a lot, about whether I’d be all right financially. When I was 17, my parents said, ‘Well, we think it’s about time you got a job,” and then I got handed down the session at The Hidden Shamrock in Chicago, paying $75,” Alderson laughed.

After graduating from Sarah Lawrence in 2005, Alderson made the decision to move to New York to pursue professionally the career that had begun as a fascination with Irish music and culture.

“I never saw myself getting into it in a professional capacity… I had no idea I’d ever make any money in it at all. New York’s a great place. There are tons of bars to play in, and always lots of traffic from Ireland… you don’t feel like you’re stepping on each other’s music toes.”

There’s a regular crowd of Irish musicians in New York, many of them around the same age, having arrived in the city about the same time. A camaraderie has developed among them, and an ease in playing together.

For Alderson, a collaboration between two of those musicians in particular has emerged: Fiddle player Grainne Murphy and guitar player Alan Murray.

“Alan and Grainne and I started playing together about two and a half years ago, a regular session at the Pig ‘n’ Whistle on 3rd. Six hours of playing together every Sunday for two years… slowly over the course of time, we’ve started to feel really comfortable together musically. We work very well together.”

The Philadelphia Ceili Group has thoughtfully and affectionately arranged for the trio to play at The Irish Center tonight, Friday, April 30, at 8:30 p.m. A last-minute scheduling conflict for Murray is bringing John Walsh and his guitar to town instead with Alderson and Murphy.

“I’ve played loads with Johnny. He was born in The Bronx, but raised in Kilkenny… he’s a remarkably versatile trad musician. He often plays with Paddy Keenan. He also has a recording studio in Westchester.”

The same studio, in fact, where Grainne Murphy recorded her recently launched CD, “Short Stories.”

Murphy hails from Boston, where she was gifted with her first fiddle at the tender age of 4. She learned to play from County Clare’s All-Ireland champion fiddler, Seamus Connolly.

Alderson is effusive in his praise for Murphy, with whom he “absolutely loves“ playing. In addition to her talent on the fiddle, “she has an incredible ability to pursue lots of different things at once. She’s a lawyer by trade, and an avid runner… she maintained her job as a lawyer, finished up her solo recording, kept up her running, and went back and forth to Massachusetts to help her brother, Patrick, in his campaign for city council, which he won.”

For Alderson, for now, his focus is on the music.

“It’s not a glamorous living, but I make enough to get by, and to have fun at the same time. I have thought at times of finding something a little more stable,” Alderson mused.

There doesn’t seem to be much need for that anytime soon. In addition to his regular gigs with Murphy and Murray, Alderson is pretty well booked.

“I freelance, and I get a lot of gigs by virtue of playing the pipes… I get way more gigs as a piper than as a flutist. They share me, I guess. The pipes are the quintessential Irish instrument, especially for stage gigs; people like to see the pipes.”

Oh, yes, Isaac Alderson is many things, including modest.

He can be seen playing with Shannon Lambert-Ryan, Fionan De Barra and Cheryl Prashker in RUNA.

He can be found performing with the group Jameson’s Revenge.

He recently returned from touring with Celtic Crossroads, and is set to go back out on the road with them in July.

And he is working on his first solo CD, which he hopes to finish up this June.

“What I like best above everything else is just playing tunes…playing trad music in its unadorned form.”

For information on their Philadelphia Ceili Group performance, Friday, April 30, visit their Web site. 

April 30, 2010 by
Music

Solas: The Perfect End to St. Patrick’s Day

Solas on stage at World Cafe Live, banging out reels, jigs and songs: If there’s a better way, a better band and a better place to close out St. Patrick’s Day, I haven’t heard of it.

Starting with a foot-stomping set of reels and ending (an encore, of course) with the wildly rhythmic “Coconut Dog,” the Irish-American band headed by native Philadelphian and multi-instrumentalist Seamus Egan kept the joint jumping all night long.

If you weren’t there—and I probably shouldn’t tell you this because you’ll be heartbroken—Solas was joined onstage by Mike Brenner on dobro (he appears on the band’s most recent release, “The Turning Tide”) and by longtime collaborators Ben Wittman on drums and Chico Huff on bass. Normally, Huff is the only non-band member to accompany the band in local performances. This was a much fuller sound, more like what you hear on recordings. Quite the treat.

Highlights of the evening:

•Winifred Horan’s lovely performance of her tune, “My Dream of You;”
•Singer Mairead Phelan’s sensitive rendering of the Josh Ritter song, “Girl in the War,” with accompaniment by Brenner and harmonies by guitarist and keyboard player Eamon McElholm;
•The band’s killer performance of “Hugo’s Big Reel,” the opening track from the new album;
•A weird and wonderful little story from Winifred Horan about the hilarity that ensues when a fan confuses “fairy forts” with “fairy farts.” And probably enough said on that score.
Oh yes, one other highlight, maybe the best of the night: a sweet a capella performance by Phelan of the old standby, “A Parting Glass.” We were in pin-drop territory on that one. Even the servers stopped buzzing about.

Truly, “goodnight and joy be with you all.”

We’ve a couple of videos from that performance.

March 18, 2010 by
Music

Five Questions for Eamon Murray

Beoga

The supergroup Beoga. Eamon Murray is at lower right.

Beoga takes Irish traditional music and turns it on its head, flips it sideways, yanks it inside out, tosses it up in the air, twists it like a pretzel, pounds on it with a meat tenderizer, and crams it into a wood chipper just for good measure.

Don’t worry. What comes out in the end might not be anything like a straightforward rendering of “Drowsy Maggie”—they’d probably pump poor Maggie full of Red Bull and tell her to wake the hell up. What it will be, instead, is a breathtaking (no, I mean it—you’ll literally be out of breath) and massively entertaining re-imagining of Irish traditional music.

All of which you can find out for yourself Saturday when the County Antrim-based band pulls into Reading for a 7:30 p.m. concert (and an afternoon workshop) at Albright College’s MPK Chapel.

All of the band’s musicians have deep traditional roots. You can’t re-imagine the genre if you are not already intimately familiar with it in the first place.

One member of the five-piece band is Eamon Murray, the frenetic, four-time All-Ireland bodhrán champion and possessor of a head full of curls and wild ideas. We caught up with him by phone as the band made its way by van from Baltimore to Ohio. Here’s what he had to say.

Q. The one thing I want to talk about is how different your performances are from your recordings. On your recordings, there are a lot of interesting little sound effects, and you’re accompanied by trumpet, saxophone, and electric guitar—and on at least one occasion by the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra. You’re not bringing the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra along with you, are you? You don’t have a kettle drum in your bodhrán bag?

A. I would love to be able to afford to bring all those people! You have to mix it up live. You’re never going to make it sound like it does in the studio. It’s a challenge—we really enjoy doing it. The guys all take extra lines. You compensate and make it sound the best you can. It’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Q. I’m always interested in how bands got together. What’s your story?

A. We got together seven years ago; myself and Seán Óg (Graham, button accordion and guitar) were playing together. But we all knew each other and had played together. The four boys, we all grew up in roughly the same area. Myself and Sean, since we were kids, were inspired by a lot of bands, like Dervish. It was just kind of around that time, when we were 16 and 17, that we decided it was time to get a band together. A few years after that, Niamh (Dunne, on fiddle) joined us.

Q. The band’s musical tastes are, in a word, eclectic. For example, I think “Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone” was your idea. This is a song that was a big hit … in 1930. And of course, there are so many apparent influences, not just traditional Irish music, but rock and jazz and klezmer. Where does all this come from?

A. We collectively have vast influences, some a bit classical and some on the jazzy end of things. I play drum kit, so I’m influenced by pop and more mainstream music. I can’t get over Bruce Springsteen—he’s awesome. We were listening to Michael Jackson yesterday. There’s a lot of pop mainstream stuff in the van. Nobody gets too taxed listening to it.

We (also) all come from musical families. We were all surrounded by a lot of stuff when we were young. Niamh comes from a family with deep roots in traditional music, as so many young Irish musicians do. Niamh’s father is a fantastic piper, so she’d have more knowledge of old pipers’ tunes. The rest of us have very musical siblings and have music in the family somewhere. We started going to the music festivals when we were 7 or 8 years old.

Everybody comes to the table with different ideas for songs or sets. So many bands get boxed into whatever genre they’re supposed to be in. Fortunately, that hasn’t happened to us yet. It’s interesting to just be able to mix things up and take license.

Q. Your music is so different—which is a good thing—that you’ve been described in many different ways. My personal favorite comes from an Irish music magazine: “Deranged Darlings.” What’s your favorite?

A. (Laughs.) I like that one! “Deranged darlings,” at least people understand what you’re trying to do. People don’t knock it because it’s not a purist approach.

Q. You’re one of the best bodhrán players in the world. (Are you blushing now?) How did you come to it?

A. I’m not blushing! Keep it coming! I started on the bodhrán when I was 7 or 8. That was after trying lots of other instruments in which I had no interest. From there it just kind of took legs. I progressed quickly as a child. I didn’t care about practicing—I just kind of hammered on. It was all taking shape by the time I was 11 or 12.

—–

The band will host an Irish music workshop from 5 to 6 p.m. It’s free and open to the public.

Ken Gehret & Irish Mist will play in the lobby from 6:15-7:15 p.m.

Tickets at Albright College Box Office 10 a.m. – 2 p.m.: (610) 921-7547 or at the door. $25, $35, 50% student discount with valid ID, 10% group discount for 10+ tickets

Visit www.starseries.org for full event details.

March 7, 2010 by