Kevin Burke

Fiddler Kevin Burke—veteran of the Bothy Band, the Celtic Fiddle Festival and Patrick Street—and guitarist-composer Cal Scott never set out to record a CD. Still, it probably was inevitable that these two creative musical minds eventually would crank out something like their new release, “Across the Black River.”

It all started when Burke—a London boy transplanted to Dublin, and now living in Portland, Oregon—paired up with Scott, a resident of the nearby town of Tigard, on a score for a PBS documentary.

“When I first met Cal, he was working on a documentary about the political strife in Northern Ireland,” Burke explains. “He asked me, could I give him some advice on what type of music might be suitable. He knew I was living in town, he knew about me from some other musicians, so he called me up and I said, “Sure,” and we worked on that for a while. When it was over, Cal said, ‘I’d love to learn a bit more about this kind of music and play a bit more. Would you be interested in getting together?’ I said, ‘Sure, I‘d love to.’”

And for a long time, that’s how the relationship went. Burke would drop his kids off at school, and then spend the day at Scott’s studio. The two hit it off, and before long they were swapping ideas the way some guys trade fish stories.

It was all very informal and unstructured.

“Cal says, ‘Maybe the best way for us to go about this is for you to just sit there and play something—anything—just play for five or 10 minutes, and I’ll record it,” Burke recalls, “so instead of you having to play over and over again, you can just go away and I’ll just listen to the recording and come up with a few ideas, and then you can come back and I can show you what I’ve done.’”
So Burke cranked out a few reels played by the late, great Sligo fiddler Michael Coleman—tunes like “The Wind That Shakes the Barley,” “Seán sa Cheo,” “The Boys of the Lough” and “Paddy Ryan’s Dream.”

“So I sat and played for five or 10 minutes,” Burke says, “and then I went away. When I came back he had all these great ideas. Some of them were fantastic, and some of them were less fantastic … and some of them were a bit odd. So we just kind of talked about it. I was responding to some of his ideas, and he was responding to some of mine. Before long we had this journey.”

The journey went on for a long time before either man conceived of the notion of releasing a CD. But when they did, those Coleman reels, and one other non-Coleman tune—“The Reel of Rio”—would occupy a place of prominence.

Only it doesn’t quite sound the same as it did when Burke played it the first time. There’s the start, for one. Scott’s introduction sounds a bit like Texas swing. It’s anything but.

“There’s been a kind of a flirtation with that style of guitar backup with Irish music from the ’20s and ‘30s,” Burke explains. “Some of the older recordings have accompanists that sometimes give you the idea, that’s what they’d be playing most of the time, that swing-jazz style. I was talking to Cal about how it might be suitable to start this set of reels because all the tunes in that set, except one, were recorded by Michael Coleman back in the ‘20s. What I wanted to do was play a bunch of classic tunes but give each of them a new twist and at the some time make reference to some of other people’s twists on Michael Coleman’s music. But, since he had such a big impact from the ‘20s on, it just seemed suitable to have the rhythm hark back to the ‘20s as well. With Cal’s background, it was very easy for him to say, ‘Oh, yeah, you mean something like this?’ and he’d just lay it out there. And I’d say, ‘Yeah, that’d be a great way to start.’ And it’s a bit nostalgic. It makes you smile. There’s a smile in it, you know? It’s not silly, though. It’s not supposed to be a comedy. It is slightly amusing, but hopefully there’s a lot of affection there, too, that comes across.”

Together, Burke and Scott were able to create a set that clearly hearkens back to its Irish traditional roots, but with a fresh new approach. “It was my idea,” Burke says, “but Cal’s execution that made it work.”

The two took some liberties with an American tune as well—bluegrass scion Bill Monroe’s famous “Evening Prayer Blues.” Burke had been playing is solo in his performances. Sometimes it worked; sometimes it came up short. He recorded it for Scott, but still wasn’t happy with the sound. So once again, Burke and Scott put their heads together and came up with a few new twists.

“The first time I heard it (the tune), it was Bill Monroe playing it with a band, and it felt very much like a bluegrass tune,” says Burke. “But it’s called ‘Evening Prayer Blues,’ and even though Monroe played it much faster than I played it, even though it was fairly fast in his original version, I really got this hymnal aspect from it. It struck me as a very gentle, private and almost spiritual piece of music. So I took that hymn idea and slowed it down and tried to make it more poignant and thoughtful—the idea of pondering about your spirituality. But I also wanted some reference to the fact that it was Bill Monroe and that it was a bluegrass tune without me trying to sound as if I’m a bluegrass player. So again, Cal’s execution of these ideas is great. He’s a great mandolin player so he made a little reference in there to the bluegrass sound, and he helped me put a second fiddle line on it that would be more typical of a bluegrass reference. And I asked him, what about playing bouzouki instead of guitar? That would still be in keeping with both genres, the Irish and the American, but it would move it slightly away from the bluegrass sound just a little more. That’s how it grew.”

Most of the rest of the tunes on the CD take a similar approach, with reverence for the source material, but tweaking here and there. The result is a CD with—much like the long set of reels—a bit of a smile in it.

You can share the smiles this Friday at 8 when Burke and Scott swing by the Irish Center for a concert, sponsored by the Philadelphia Ceili Group.