Road Trip Music visits Pennsylvania

From Lake Erie to the Poconos, from the Alleghenies to the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is filled with variety and change. That’s part of what songwriter Anne Hills gets at on a song she calls, reasonably enough, Pennsylvania. It’s on her latest album, Points of View, which includes a dozen more songs filled with description and insight, some arising from Hills’ concern with social justice (she’s a social worker as well as a musician) and others from the lighter side of life.

You’ve met Matt Heaton along the music road before. A guitarist, singer, and songwriter, he plays contemporary and traditional Irish music in a duo with his wife, Shannon. He’s based in Massachusetts these days, but is originally from Pennsylvania, and got his start in music there.

Irene Kelley has moved away from her native Pennsylvania, too. She headed for Nashville, where she’s recorded several well respected albums which mix country and folk, and has seen her songs recorded by bluegrass award winner Claire Lynch and top country star Alan Jackson, among others. Her most recent album is called Thunderbird.



Then there’s Solas. That band is credited with bringing fresh energy and new ideas into Irish music when they started off in 1996. They’ve recorded almost all their albums in Philadelphia. One recording which gives a full flavor of the exciting music they make is Reunion: A Decade of Solas which also includes a dvd of a reunion concert they gave, in Philadelphia. They have a new release out, also, called Turning Tide.

This is part of The Great American Road Trip, in which I’m partnering up with A Traveler’s Library to add musical ideas to the book and film suggestions for journeys through the regions of the United States which you’ll find there. This week, the Library considers reflections on a Pittsburgh childhood of a well known writer. For more about the road trip (and a look at some great road songs) see Great American Road Trip: Music begins


you may also wish to see

Music Road: Long Time Courting: road trip visits New Hampshire

Music Road: winter turning to spring

storytellers

Over at Frugal Kiwi, there's been quite a discussion going on about the question would you survive as a pioneer?


Most of that conversation revolves around practical skills, which of course are well needed. Seems to me storytelling is a practical skill as well, as is reflection. Otherwise how would anyone ever learn anything? including those practical skills. Not to mention have the courage and wisdom to carry on. The seanchai and the singer have their places in a pioneer existence too, I think.

You could take just about any of the music here along the music road to go along with this idea, really. Several suggestions:

Music Road: reflections with Adrienne Young

Music Road: Songs of the Immigrants

Music Road: tuning up for Burns Night: four Scots musicians

Music Road: Carrie Newcomer: Before & After

Music Road trip in New York state

The Hudson River Valley and the Adirondack mountain area of New York state have long been a places where people of different cultures traded, traveled, and settled. That’s an idea that Dan Berggren, Chris Shaw, and John Kirk draw on for their recording North River, North Woods. Their traditional and original music includes French Canadian, Irish, Swedish, Danish, and old time music among its sources and subjects. It’s a lively mix that includes and connects the many musics which have met in the area.

Sara Milonovich’s music has taken her to many places, but she calls the Hudson River Valley home, and her solo album, Daisycutter, reflects that. Milonovich is a fiddle player and a singer. Daisy cutter is a fine Americana album, and there’s more about it here.

Milonovich has worked with folk icon Pete Seeger. Top notch blues woman Rory Block guests on North River North Woods. They call the Hudson Valley home, too, and their legendary work is well worth your time.



This is part of The Great American Road Trip, in which I’m partnering up with A Traveler’s Library to add musical ideas to the book and film suggestions for journeys through the regions of the United States which you’ll find there.


This week, the Library is visiting western New York.
So a tip of the hat to some of my favorite musicians of western New York is in order, too : The Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra

For more about the road trip (and a look at some great road songs) see Great American Road Trip: Music begins


you may also wish to see

Music Road: Music road trip New York City: Irish Musicians

Music Road: pride of new york

Music Road: Music of Maine: Lissa Schneckenburger

darwin song project

Darwin Song Project

Charles Darwin's scientific ideas on the origin of humans and the evolution of species have been the subject of controversy for more than one hundred fifty years. To eight songwriters invited to collaborate on making songs inspired by Darwin and his legacy, though, it was Darwin the husband, the father, the adventurer, and the ministerial student turned scientist wrestling with faith who proved most compelling.

Not that they ignored the impact of his science on the rest of the world. The songs they created took in a range of subjects as wide as their own backgrounds Krista Detor, Jez Lowe, Mark Erelli, Rachael McShane, Chris Wood, Stu Hanna, Karine Polwart, and Emily Smith were invited to spend a week at a farmhouse in rural Shropshire, England, not far from where Darwin himself lived, collaborting on songs. A kicker in the invitation was that they’d come up with enough music to fill an evening’s concert -- a concert which they learned was already sold out, and would recorded for an album and filmed for broadcast.

Another item in the mix was that most of the songwriters were not acquainted with each other, or each other’s music, before the week began. Each comes from the folk genre, but that encompasses a whole range of things, in this case including Lowe’s leftist political commentary, Detor’s enigmatic and indirect mystical reflections, and Smith’s lyrical ballads based in Scottish tradition. It was an adventure for all involved.

The result -- heard in the recording made at the live concert -- shows that they've created songs anchored in the details of Darwin’s life and ideas yet which reach beyond that to universal resonance. There’s the young man setting out on his round the world voyage, excited but not without his doubts. There are people reacting and offering their comments on his published ideas, among them a merchant puzzling out his way and an indignant woman claiming no one will make a monkey out of her. Darwin’s own doubts and faith, and the thoughts of his wife Emma as they seek to love past their differences in belief, come into focus in several songs. There’s a mystical look at time and change, both constants in Darwin's story, a funny song in which the scientist is cast as the villain in a wild west sort of tale, and a sort of hymn where faith and doubt meet and reconcile in respect for love and the unknown.

Impressions of Darwin rather than narrative, the songs show the high levels of imagination and musicality of the eight who collaborated to make them. The energy and connection of their live performance comes across strongly in the recording, with gorgeous harmonies and well thought out lead singing and playing. You do not have to agree or disagree with Charles Darwin's ideas -- or know anything about them, for that matter -- to find much to think about and much to enjoy in the ideas and the music these artists offer.

you may also want to see

Music Road: Best Music, 2009

Music Road: now playing: Emily Smith: Too Long Away

Music Road: Carrie Newcomer: Before & After

photographing music: connections

Connection -- player to listener, musician to musician, melody to idea, harmony to harmony, instrument to voice -- is part of the work of music. It is also part of the work of life which music helps us see and know.




























thanks to the musicians who were kind enough to let me take these shots: Shannon and Matt Heaton, Hanneke Cassel and Cathie Ryan, Mark Stuart and Stacey Earle, Eileen Ivers and Greg Anderson, and Matraca Berg, in Cambridge, Fall River, Austin, Tallahassee, and Nashville.

you may also wish to see
Music Road: creative practice: winter light, and music
Music Road: Reflections: five of the best
Delicious Baby's Photo Friday, where travelers offer new insights to the world each Friday

photographs taken by and copyright Kerry Dexter.

Music road trip New York City: Irish Musicians

New York City has been home, waystation, birthplace, and seedbed for many sorts of Irish and Irish American musicians over the years. Even when they’re playing the strictest traditional music, there is at times a bit of New York energy and edge in the music of Irish musicians steeped in the Irish communities of the Big Apple, and you'll often find them writing original music, and connecting Irish music with other traditions, too.

Celtic Cross offers a mix of Irish and rock to tell their tales of immigration and modern day. Cherish The Ladies started out in New York, and have taken the spirit of Irish music -- and Irishwomen playing music -- around the world for twenty five years now. Founding member Joanie Madden also teamed up with three New York Irish men to record the lively quartet album Pride of New York. One of her popular compositions, recorded by Cherish, is called Bonkers in Yonkers.

Dublin born singer Susan McKeown came to New York with an acting scholarship and stayed to become a part of the music community, keeping deep Irish roots and seeing their connections with the musics of Africa and with Jewish traditions. Eileen Ivers has taken her fiddle playing into collaborations with jazz musicians and orchestras as well as other Irish musicians, and has taken her New York energy into connections with Appalachia and the blues.

Though they’ve moved on to other places. several other musicians you’ve been getting to know along the Music Road also have spent time in the crossroads that is New York Irish music, among them Heidi Talbot, John Doyle, and Cathie Ryan.

During her time in New York, Ryan wrote a song called The Back Door. She was thinking about undocumented Irish who came to New York, but it is a song which goes to the heart of all who face change and hardship with courage. There’s a video of her singing it here.

Many of the artists mentioned above have played at the Irish Arts Center, a vibrant place for Irish music in New York which also has programs and classes on drama, literature, art, Irish language, and other aspects of Irish culture. It's been around since 1972, on West 51st Street in Manhattan.

This is part of The Great American Road Trip, in which I’m partnering up with A Traveler’s Library to add musical ideas to the book and film suggestions for journeys through the regions of the United States which you’ll find there. Check out what's on tap at A Traveler's Library for this visit to New York City. For more about the road trip (and a look at some great road songs) see Great American Road Trip: Music begins


you may also wish to see


patrick season: far from home
Potato Music
patrick season: thoughts for patrick's eve
more music from the road trip
Irish music

Altan: 25th Anniversary Collection

Altan: 25th Anniversary Celebration


Lough Altan is what some would call a mysterious lake, near Mount Errigal in Donegal in the far northwest of Ireland. For twenty five years the members of the band Altan, who decided to take their name from the lake, have done their fair share of taking the mystery, joy, and individuality of the music of Donegal to the rest of the world. Fiddles. bouzouki, guitar, whistles, accordion, and the outstanding voice of Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh are elements of the band’s sound, elements which they turn and tumble and weave and twine through songs of the Donegal tradition, original compositions, music from other parts of Ireland, American folk music, and on occasion the music of Bob Dylan.

To mark their two and a half decade celebration, the group decided to pursue a project they’d been considering for some time: making a recording with an orchestra. Though they’d played live in orchestra settings before, they’d not recorded that way.

The result, a collaboration with the RTE Concert Orchestra, conducted by David Brophy, proves to be an engaging way to add new colors to the band’s work. The arrangements by Fiachra Trench respect both the orchestral side and the hills of Donegal side of things, so the musicians and encouraged and challenged each to do what they do best. It really works.

The fifteen tracks are favorites with the band (and listeners over the years). Cití na gCuman, A Tune for Frankie, Is The Big Man Within? / Tilly Finn's Reel, and Dún Do Shúil are especially worth noting, and the whole program works very well together from start to finish, too. It proves a fine celebration to start Altan into, perhaps, their next twenty five years.

Side note: I had the chance to see Altan play with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra while they were putting together this recording. The recording itself was not done before a live audience, but every bit of the beauty and excitement of live performance comes through. It was clear that night that conductor Brophy, the band members, and the orchestra players were all having fine time challenging themselves together with this collaboration, and that must have been true of these recording sessions also.


you may also want to see

Music Road: music of Donegal: Altan

Music Road: now playing: Athena Tergis

Music Road: Three Fiddle CDs for Fall

Savannah Music Festival begins

Savannah, Georgia, is a port city, a place where old south meets new, where world cultures converge and intertwine. The Savannah Music Festival both celebrates the world of Savannah and its connections to places and music around the world, with more than one hundred concerts across the city. The events begin on 18 March and continue through 3 April. If you’re not able to make it in person, the festival’s web site offers access to some events through web radio broadcast.

Artists you’ve met before along the music road will be there. along with many others. Mark O’Connor, whose eclectic background in country, classical, and jazz makes him a perfect fit of the festival’s focus, will bring his Hot Swing Trio to town. Joe Craven will teach in the education program that open doors to the arts to hundreds of area schoolchildren. Kathy Mattea will offer her folk inspired country and the flavor of her West Virginia heritage, on a double bill with another outstanding singer who grew up in the southern mountains, Patty Loveless. Lang Lang, who has been engaging classical audiences around the world, will appear in a program with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. There will be a concert of ‘Forbidden Music’ featuring pre holocaust compositions, staged in Temple Mickve Israel, Georgia’s oldest temple, with players including festival associate artistic director Daniel Hope, Jeffrey Kahane, and others. Ruthie Foster will bring her Texas based brand of blues, funk, and soul to town, in a bill with Savannah blues singer Kristina Train. Marcus Roberts, also an associate artistic director of the festival, will helm jazz programs featuring concert on the Riverfront and presentations from some of the country’s finest jazz educators, and will appear himself in a piano showdown with Henry Butler and others. There will be a double bill with Bill Frisell and Bassekou Kouyate, while up and comers Canadian Sierra Noble and Texan Sarah Jarosz hold up the bluegrass side of things, along with veteran Del McCoury.

There’s quite a bit more: school programs, a competition with singers choosing classic American songs, a New orleans Blues party, a gospel workshop, one off events and continuing collaborations. There’s more about it all at the festival’s web site.

you may also want to see

Music Road: Boston Celtic Music Festival on the way

Music Road: Songs of Homecoming, to Scotland and other places

Music Road: photographing music: Celtic Colours

patrick season: emigration

There's a recurring story in Irish legend in which a person sets out -- usually because they've been banished from the island, community, or family--in a curragh with only the night stars as guide and a knife for tool. No oars, no companions. A curragh is a small fabric framed boat. Having made the night (and day) sea journey to arrive again on land, the person is then able to accomplish great things.



photograph of the Irish Sea off the coast of Louth


you may also wish to see

Music Road: patrick season: music and mist
Music Road: Songs of the Immigrants
Music Road: Cathie Ryan: Songwriter
to explore photographs from many parts of the world, visit Delicious Baby's Photo Friday

Rhode Island road trip: Newport & Blackstone River

The Blackstone River Theatre is a small place, far up in the north of Rhode Island, which specializes in presenting Irish and Scottish music. The Newport Folk Festival is a major acoustic music festival in the coastal town of Newport. It’ll be celebrating its fifty first season this summer.

Though it is small in area, Rhode Island has a flourishing music scene in styles from folk to Irish to Americana to classical to rock, in larger places like Providence and Newport to smaller towns like Cumberland, where The Blackstone River Theatre is located.


The Blackstone River Theatre just celebrated its ninth year of presenting music related to the ethnic groups who settled the Blackstone River Valley, including music of the peoples of Ireland, Scotland, and Africa. They’ve received recognition from state and federal governments for their work, and many of the artists you’ve met along the music road have played there, including Long Time Courting, Hanneke Cassel, Natalie Haas, Cathie Ryan, and Archie Fisher.

From its first season in 1959 when a teenaged Joan Baez appeared up to present day appearances by top folk artists including Rani Arbo and Caroline Herring, the Newport Folk Festival has been a force in acoustic music. During the folk revival of the 1960s. Vanguard recorded artists in classic live settings at Newport. Here are three of my favorites of these vintage recordings



Joan Baez: Live at Newport

Judy Collins: Live at Newport, 1959-1966

Ian & Sylvia: Live at Newport



What festivals and venues have you explored in your hometown, or on your travels? I’d be interested to know your favorites.

you may also wish to see

Music Road: Road Trip Music visits Connecticut

Music Road: now playing: Hanneke Cassel (video)

Music Road: Lovers' Well: Matt & Shannon Heaton
note: The Heatons will be playing at Blackstone River later in March, sharing the evening with Kimberley Fraser and Troy MacGillivray

This is part of The Great American Road Trip, in which I’m partnering up with A Traveler’s Library to add musical ideas to the book and film suggestions for journeys through the regions of the United States which you’ll find there. This week, the featured book offers a fine way to share what's unique about Rhode Island with the children in your life.

For more about the Great American Road Trip project (and a look at some great road songs) see Great American Road Trip: Music begins

song for ireland

"...I saw a land where no one had to fight..."

Just a few days back, a car bomb exploded in Newry, a town where I've spent good amounts of time. There have been deaths and attacks linked to politics rising up again along the border and through the counties in the north these last months.

Mary Black sang Song for Ireland at Stormont, during the peace negotiations there, some years back now. I've no idea which way the voting on devolution will go. Whatever happens, though, the words of the song ring true

"...I saw a land where no one had to fight..."

you may also want to see
Music Road: Ireland, north and south

Music Road: Reflections with Mary Black

RTE News background on the devolution vote

exiles return: karan casey & john doyle

Exiles Return

Irish music is filled with stories, and that is certainly what John Doyle and Karan Casey offer in this long planned collaborative project. The stories in the main have to do with loss and longing, whether that be of the emigrant in the title track, the betrayed lover in False Lover John, the man who loves so much he returns as a ghost in The Bay of Biscay, or the man whose sure he’ll come back to Belfast by the end of the year in The Shipyard Slips.

Doyle is an Irishman who lives now in America; Casey is an Irishwoman who lived long in the United States and is now living in Ireland again. He’s an endlessly creative guitarist and arranger, and a fine singer, she’s a singer of clarity and thought who’s been called one of Irish music’s best. They both were for a time part of the band Solas, whose work is credited with changing the face of Irish American music. In the midst of full solo careers, they’ve been planning a duo album since they crossed paths again for a Solas reunion concert and recording several years back.

They took time in choosing the material here, and it’s wisely chosen. The dozen tracks are all stories of loss and longing and leave taking in one way or another, and in Casey’s and Doyle’s hands they become companions on the journey of figuring out one’s own experiences with these emotions. They are all not positive tales, exactly. The False Lady stabs her lover and flings him into the sea, for example -- and has to deal with her conscience (in the form of a parrot) accusing her on the subject. The Little Drummer Girl is discovered in her ruse of pretending to be a man in the army and and finds that she must face the world alone again. Sailing Off to the Yankee Land tells of emigration in famine times, a song with an edgy sentiment set to a jaunty tune. Though with one exception they are songs from the tradition, Casey and Doyle make them sound as fresh as though they speak of current happenings.

The contemporary song they chose is the title track, Exiles Return, which was written by Doyle. He doesn’t write so very many songs (you’ll more likely find him collaborating on songs with Cathie Ryan or tunes with Alison Brown, or touring with Joan Baez) but those he does write claim your attention, as does this one, a story of a voyage in famine times on the the ship the Jeanie Johnston.

And though we bid farewell in sorrow
We may meet again in distant lands
And drink a health in joy for parting
For the Exile will return again

Casey and Doyle clearly get to the heart of each song here, none more than this one. From all this it may sound as though the album is a bit grim. It’s not, far from it. It is, however, a thoughtful recording which repays repeated listening.

you may also wish to see
Karan Casey: Ships in the Forest

Liz Carroll & John Doyle: Double Play

Alison Brown: The Company You Keep

Cathie Ryan: Songwriter

Long Time Courting: road trip visits New Hampshire

Long Time Courting is a four woman band which features four equally strong instrumentalists, fine lead singing, inventive harmonies, and music which is based in the traditions of Ireland and includes original music as well as songs and tunes from Scotland, Appalachia, Quebec, and Cape Breton. Fast flying jigs and reels along with ballads and songs with soaring four part harmonies are the group’s trademarks.

It’s not as though any of the four women were exactly at a loss for things to do when they decided to join forces. Guitarist Liz Simmons [who provides the New Hampshire connection here; she grew up in the state and is still based there -- and LTC performs often in the state too] plays in the band Annalivia; Ariel Friedman teaches cello and performs in a duo with her fiddle playing sister Mia; Ellery Klein, for seven years fiddler with the top touring band Gaelic Storm, now teaches in a mother and child music program and is herself the mother of toddlers; and Shannon Heaton, who plays flutes, whistles, and accordion, tours internationally as a duo with her guitarist husband Matt. Founding member Klein will soon be leaving to group to move overseas, and Sarah Blair, top traditional Irish style fiddler who plays often for contra dances with her band The Sevens and also teaches, will join the group.

All that means that the women bring powerhouse musical and creative backgrounds to Long Time Courting. It also means they balance their work in LTC with other demanding commitments. That’s one of the reasons they have not, at this writing, as yet made an album. Their concert tours, mostly in the New England area, are short, focused, and well worth catching. You can find out more about the band and their tour schedule at their web site.

For a taste of what Long Time Courting is like live, check out the video here

photo courtesy of Long Time Courting

you may also want to see

Ellery Klein & Ryan Lacey: Kick into the Beat
Another Fine Winter's Night: Matt & Shannon Heaton
Cherish The Ladies: A Star in the East
Music of Maine: Lissa Schneckenburger

This is part of The Great American Road Trip, in which I’m partnering up with A Traveler’s Library to add musical ideas to the book and film suggestions for journeys through the regions of the United States which you’ll find there. This week, there are animals along for the ride as A Traveler's Library visits New Hampshire.

For more about this (and a look at some great road songs) see Great American Road Trip: Music begins

patrick season: music and mist

In Irish, the word for music is ceol; the word for mist is ceo.

It would seem a fairly large leap to suppose they are related. I’ve asked several scholars of Irish about this over the years, and other Irish musicians too, and have heard of no connection.

Music comes out of silence, and out of mystery. That does not have one face or one landscape, of course, but mist and the varied aspects of Irish landscape are certainly two of them.

Making connection between the two words and the two ideas seems a leap that’s more spiritual than practical or intellectual -- which of course makes it entirely possible. The only musician who offered a thought about this remarked that she didn’t know about the words, but that music rises out of the landscape in Ireland, though it’s not something much talked about.

I think she’s got it right, on both counts. This is in her music and in that of others you have met and will meet along the music road. It’s an aspect of music that travels to other landscapes and other silences as well, I think (see, for example, this ). As is often the case, Irish music gives a good perspective to think about things within Ireland and beyond.


you may also want to see

patrick season: far from home

Potato Music

patrick season: thoughts for patrick's eve

Irish music, Irish landscape