Irish music live: Dervish invites you to a session

A crisp October evening, the warmth of fire and friends, and a top notch band playing music in west of Ireland. What could be better? This time, you can sit in, wherever you happen to be.

The session is part of the heartbeat of Irish music, in many ways an extension of friends and neighbors sharing tunes and songs in the kitchen after the day’s work is done. Pub sessions connect listeners and players of Irish music across the world from the smallest towns to the largest cities. Coming up on 8th October, the members of one of Ireland's top traditional bands, Dervish, will be offering you the chance to share in the fellowship and the music across the internet, as they broadcast a session live from their home base of Sligo, in the west of Ireland.

Dervish, who have had hits with traditional jigs and reels as well as covers of songs including Gypsies Tramps and Thieves, first made famous by Cher, and Bob Dylan's Boots of Spanish Leather, bring together the best of contemporary Irish music. They’ve played in Asia and in the through Europe, in the United States and in Canada in all sorts of situations. Nowhere, though, does the spirit and connection of their music come out better than on their home ground, where their sound was first nurtured and developed.

A full crowd from across the globe is expected to gather as the band plays music from across their back catalogue -- they mark their twenty first anniversary this year. As is the case with most sessions, you never quite know who will turn up to sit in with the band, although several special guests are likely to drop in. Taking advantage of the capabilities of the internet, you will be able to send the band messages during the evening as well, and they are planning to read out some of these.

This live web cast will come direct from Sligo, Ireland on Friday 8th October beginning at 11 pm Irish time/6 pm US Eastern/3 pm US Pacific. There is a small subscription fee of 4.99 euro, and subscriptions and further details may be had at the Dervish web site. Early subscription is advised.



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Music Road: Road Trip Music: Michigan
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photographing music: Scotland

Eddi Reader at the Royal Glasgow Concert Hall, a different view of Buchanan street, and piper in George Square on Burns night


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Road Trip Music: Michigan

Michigan has a sunrise side, a sunset side, an upper peninsula, apple orchards, cherry trees, lighthouses...and let’s not forget the football teams, the gardens, the busy cities, the small Amish communities, the quiet back roads and lake shores. It’s a heartland state, with its own identity.

It’s also a state of immigrant communities. Cathie Ryan’s parents came from Ireland to Michigan seeking work. They found it, and they stayed. “It was very Irish inside the house, and very American outside it, “ Ryan recalled, pointing out that she loved going to Gaelic League events, she heard country music from childhood friends, and growing up in Detroit, there was the ever present beat of Motown. Irish music is what called her heart as she grew into her career as a musician, and as adult Ryan has lived in both Ireland and America. Choosing songs from Irish tradition and the American folk song bag, and writing her own music. Ryan’s work builds bridges between the two lands. “I’ve always been an Irish American singer,” she says.

Should you be thinking that means hearty drinking songs or flowery sentimental ballads, that’s not Ryan’s style at all. Grace in restraint, resepct for the song and the listner, a deft touch of humor and a connection to the land and the stories of both Ireland and America are what you will find in her work. Ryan has so far four solo albums out, and you’ll be well served by any of them. As her music has evolved, she’s become more adventurous in choosing spare arrangements with just a few elements, as her voice has grown in depth and clarity. As you travel the roads of Michigan, listen to her album
Farthest Wave as a good companion.

There’s an original filled with energy and anticipation, What’s Closest to the Heart, a lively set of slip jigs called Dance the Baby, which Ryan sings in Irish and which are songs her grandfather in Ireland used to sing, dancing her around the kitchen when she was small, quiet hope and reflection in the title track, and a celebration of resolution and resilience in The Wild Flowers. The other songs are equally strong.


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Music Road: Chasing Sparks: Jeremy Kittel

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. Stop by and see what the Library has in mind for travels through the Great Lakes states.
For more about the road trip (and a look at some great road songs) see Great American Road Trip: Music begins

Chasing Sparks: Jeremy Kittel

Prepare to go on a journey when you join Jeremy Kittel in Chasing Sparks.
At times, that trip will hold whimsical touches of humor, as with the opening cut, called The Curious Beetle Set. At other points, you’ll see, in your mind’s eye, the whirling steps of dancers or the quiet walk of friends, the rugged landscapes of Scotland and the gentler ones of Ireland, the hustle of New York and the natural rhythms of the heartland.

Kittel is a fiddler, with a background in Irish and Scottish fiddle, who has been known to play bluegrass, and who holds two academic degrees in jazz. Chasing Sparks goes toward the Celtic Americana sides of his interests, but now and then there’s a hint of other flavors as well.The music comprises are three traditional sets, four covers, and four originals, making a well balanced, thoughtful and engaging program with music and ideas which reveal new facets each time you listen, and sparks of inspiration and orginality all over the place. One of the covers is a set of F Chunes written by Hanneke Cassel, a fiddler and composer you've met before here along the music road. Sitting in with Kittel at varied points are other musicians you’ve met here before as well, among them Natalie Haas on cello, Edgar Meyer on bass, Tristan Clarridge on cello, Brittany Haas on fiddle, and Nick Gareiss on foot percussion.

All the tracks are keepers. Especially worth note are The Rolling Waves Set, The Chase, Remember Blake, and The May Morning Dew, as well as that set of tunes by Cassel.

Kittel, who currently tours internatonally as a member of the Turtle Island String Quartet, grew up in Detroit, and received his undergraduate degree in Ann Arbor. Coming up along the music road in the Great American Road Trip, you'll soon meet another musician from Michigan.


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music and connection, continued

This photograph always suggests all sors of music, ideas, and stories to me. Perhaps to you as well?

It is from a place in Louth, Republic of Ireland. The county’s tag line is, after all, land of legend.


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Road Trip Music pick up for bluegrass awards

As A Traveler’s Library and Music Road have been exploring book, film, and music ideas which inspire journeys through the regions of the United States through the Great American Road Trip, you’ve often heard about books, films, music, authors, and artists with award nominations to their credit. Word comes that it’s time to add another to the list.

The International Bluegrass Music Association Awards are the Grammys of the bluegrass field, top professional recognition of the highest sort. Our good wishes go out to Claire Lynch, whose album Whatcha Gonna Do was our soundtrack for Alabama. She has been nominated for Female Vocalist of the Year. Two songs from that album are up for awards as well. My Florida Sunshine, a lesser known song by bluegrass giant Bill Monroe that Lynch chose for the album, is up for song of the year, and That’s What Makes You Strong, a collaboration Between Ms. Lynch and songwriter Jesse Winchester, is up for recorded event of the year. You’ve met Mr. Winchester along the Great American Road Trip too: he participated in the Kid Pan Alley project called I Used to Know the Names of All the Stars, which was our soundtrack for travels through Virginia.



A full list of IBMA award nominees is here.
The awards will be given out in Nashville on 30 September.

Check out these stops on the road trip to find out more about this music, and join us on Wednesdays as the journey goes on.

Music Road: Road Trip Music in Alabama: bluegrass, faith, & architecture

Music Road: Road Trip Music in Virginia

Road Trip Music: Ohio

A place of change and challenge, testing and opportunity, successful experiments and failed ones, exploring new ways of living and seeing how familiar ones would work beyond the edges of civilization: this was the Ohio River Valley in the early years of the American republic. As the Great American Road Trip winds through the state of Ohio, the soundtrack comprises a set of songs about the people who ventured to that frontier, and how they faced the challenges the found there. It is an album called Wilderness Plots..


Tim Grimm was in a bookstore one day, and came across a pocket sized book called Wilderness Plots, by Scott Russell Sanders. It was a series of short one and two page vignettes of moments in people’s lives from the early days of the Ohio Valley which Sanders had created from his notes from research for a novel set in the Ohio county where he was born. Drawn by the vivid stories, Grimm started hearing songs in them. He took the idea to a group of songwriters he knew, a group who met regularly to exchange ideas and share progress in their writing. Tom Roznowski, Michael White, Carrie Newcomer, and Krista Detor were the other songwriters in the group.

All of them live in the Ohio Valley, in southern Indiana, so both place and story resonated with each of them. Each is a professional musician, a songwriter who values both word and melody, but their styles and interests are varied. They decided to use stories in the book as workshop challenge, at first. Over time, that evolved into the idea of an album.

In the songs, Roznowski tells of the dreams of a man who looks at the wilderness and sees bustling cities rising; White sees people both afraid and intrigued as they marvel over recent inexplicable discoveries; Detor tells of a couple finding their way and testing their marriage at the edge of the wilderness, and, in another song, gives voice to a woman’s hopes for her children in a time of great change; Grimm looks at the life of an itinerant preacher who struggles with mending his own faith while he mends shoes to make a living; Newcomer, in two very different songs, finds a woman caught in the hard changes frontier life sometimes brings, and another who risks standing up to make a things different.

It’s a project filled with memorable people, situations both serious and funny, and connections of history and present day, in styles which move across the range of Americana music . The nineteen cuts on the album make a fine bit of listening for travels through Ohio, and chances are, you’ll remember the characters and the songs long after the album ends.

Though their schedules do not often permit them to perform together, the songwriters have done concerts based on the material on the album. Seeing one of these, producer Susanne Schwibs at WTIU at Indiana University had the idea to make a television program. It’s framed loosely as a songwriters in the round session, filled with interesting music, great ideas on songwriting process, and thoughts on the intersections of landscape and history in the Ohio Valley. It is available as a dvd.

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video of an ensemble piece from Wilderness Plots



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. Stop by and see A Traveler’s Library what has in mind to inspire travels through Ohio.
For more about the road trip (and a look at some great road songs) see Great American Road Trip: Music begins

an Irish blessing

Irish blessings can sometimes be problematic: loads of far too sentimental stuff printed on tea towels and quoted by folk with fake Irish accents. In reality, such blessings are usually much more practical: a grandmother dousing her grand kids with holy water as they settle in for sleep at night, a quiet touch of hand and heart and a kind word at the outset of a journey, an evening’s light turning to night across the hills.

This one has a bit of all that, along with a generous helping of rain, which certainly makes it true to Ireland. The music is by Phil Coulter, the singer at the outset is Aoife Ní Fhearraigh, who is singing the Kyrie in Irish, and Roma Downey says the words of the blessing.



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music and perspective

it is the depths of a very hot summer, most places in the northern hemisphere just now. Sorting through images earlier this week, I came across this photograph of another time, not so long ago, made on a winter Sunday morning. Quite a different perspective.

Music can do that, too: shift you into another way of viewing or hearing things, bring back memories or open new doors. If you’d like, tell us in the comments below about a time when music did that for you.


photographs is of a very snowy January morning in Louth, Republic of Ireland.


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Road Trip Music: Indiana

Carrie Newcomer sings of journeys of the heart, and of the spirit, of family ties and the threads of friendship, of encountering God in muddy boots and mystery in summer peaches. She is a Hoosier, brought up in Indiana and based there still.

“When I’m giving concerts I tell people I’m from Indiana and boy, that impresses them!” she says, laughing. “I think I have a very midwestern voice in my writing. And I have this great job where I get to travel all over, to see the desert in the southwest in spring and the autumn leaves change in New England, and then I get to come home to my dogs, my sweetheart, and my house in the woods here in southern Indiana. Sometimes I’ll come back from the road and set my guitars down and just walk straight out to the woods by my house and take a deep breath.”

That connectedness to the land comes out both in the mystical and in the funny sides of Newcomer’s work, and make no mistake, she does have a dry midwestern sense of humor which serves as a nice balance to the serious stuff. She’s been known to write about the perils of e mail gone astray, a night at the bowling alley, and the many crazy names of small town Indiana fairs, for example. She draws thoughtful lessons from her home landscape, too, including a song based on fishing trip with her dad and another inspired by geodes, those common southern Indiana rocks which are dusty on the outside and may reveal bright crystals within.

As the Great American Road Trip makes its way through Indiana, take a listen to Carrie Newcomer’s most recent album, Before & After. You’ll find it a fine companion for the journey.



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Song Journeys

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. Stop by and see what the Library has in mind to inspire travels through Indiana.
For more about the road trip (and a look at some great road songs) see Great American Road Trip: Music begins

Cape Breton music from a new generation: The Cottars

The Cottars
Feast

Seeing musical tradition through the lens of the present, and hearing the present through the framework of tradition is a balancing act. The Cottars perform it with grace and spirit on their latest album, Feast.

Tradition in The Cottars’ case is that of Cape Breton, that island of Celtic culture and history in the far Atlantic north of Nova Scotia in Canada. Scotland is the base of Cape Breton music, kept strong over centuries and refreshed by encounters with the forested landscapes of Cape Breton Island and the traditions other emigrants, particularly those from Ireland, carried with them. All of this is present in the quartet’s work on this disc, in traditional tunes and songs, covers of songs smiths including Gordon Lightfoot and Glenn Yarbrough, and original music.

The current membership of the band comprises founding members Ciaran and Fiona MacGillivray, alongside newer members Claire Pettit and Bruce Timmins. All of them sing - their harmonies are one of the outstanding marks of their work -- while Ciaran focuses on keyboard instruments, Fiona on whistles and bodhran, Claire on fiddle and viola, and Bruce on guitars.

They open the album with Overture, a brief instrumental which succinctly evokes mountain and sea, present and past, and which they wrote together. In it are motifs which recur at various points through the music on the disc. There are twelve tracks in all, some single songs and some sets comprising several pieces. Mark Knopfler’s Fare Thee Well Northumberland paired with Petttit’s The Purple wave makes an especially strong set, as does the instrumental Munster Suite, the song Young Munro, and the closing piece, Oidche Mhath Leibh/Goodnight to You.

Though the band members are young in years, they have all been exploring Cape Breton tradition for quite a time. This latest confluence of talents and ideas makes a very strong showing here. suggesting that with The Cottars both tradition and innovation of Cape Breton music are in good hands.

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music and late summer

Late summer can be its own season, resting between the energy of high midsummer days and the quiet turn toward autumn that's coming. Time for reflection, time for considering new directions.

Emily Smith stepped outside her house in the southwestern part of Scotland one summer evening and found all those things. She caught them in a fine song called Sunset Hymn, which is on her recording Too Long Away.








the photograph above is of a moment at evening on Carlingford Bay, Louth, in the Republic of Ireland

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Road Trip Music in Illinois: three fiddles

What is the difference between a fiddle and a violin? There isn’t one. It is what you play on it, how it is played, and of course, what you choose to call it. Classical fiddle? Rock violin? The three musicians whose work forms the soundtrack of our Great American Road Trip journey through Illinois will open your ears and mind to new ways of hearing this versatile instrument.



Rachel Barton Pine is a gifted and articulate classical violinist -- and one of her interests is metal music, which she also plays. At a concert celebrating her recent recognition as a Great Performer of Illinois, she played baroque sonatas, Tchaikovsky, and death thrash metal. Her recording Scottish Fantasies is an excellent venture into music of especial interest here along the music road. Alasdair Fraser is a guest on the album.







Alison Krauss grew up in the Champaign Urbana area, where. after a brief foray into classical music lessons -- “not enough to do any real damage,” she jokes -- she found herself drawn to bluegrass, which has led to more than a dozen albums and more than a dozen Grammy awards, as well. A fine place to get an idea of her talent through music, interview, and video is the dvd Alison Krauss: Live from the Tracking Room: A Hundred Miles or More


Andrea Zonn was growing up across town in Champaign Urbana at the same time. She and Krauss became bluegrass fiddle contest competitors and fast friends. Zonn followed her studies in classical music up through college level. When her professors at the University of Illinois wanted her to choose between classical and popular music, though, “ I didn’t want to,” Zonn says. “So I transferred to Vanderbilt, in Nashville. I thought that would be a community where I could do both. I was right.” In the years since receiving her degree from Vanderbilt, she’s toured with Vince Gill, the Alison Brown Quartet and other artists, is in demand as a studio musician, and currently backs up James Taylor on the road. You can hear Zonn’s work on her solo album Love Goes On and, as a producer, on the Celtic Americana album Hands Across the Water-Benefit for the Children. Both are fine choices to add to your soundtrack for our trip through Illinois.


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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. Stop by and see what the Library has in mind to inspire travels through Illinois.
For more about the road trip (and a look at some great road songs) see Great American Road Trip: Music begins

Ireland and Scotland: a conversation on the harp

William Jackson and Grainne Hambly
Music from Ireland and Scotland


William Jackson is from Scotland. He’s worked with group Ossian, recorded several well received solo albums, and scored films.

Grainne Hambly is from Ireland. She too has several highly regarded solo albums to her credit, has played on the Irish Christmas in America tour with the band Teada, among other projects, and is in demand to teach at summer music schools.

You do not really need to consider their backgrounds to enjoy the music here, though. That’s one of the nice things about this recording: there’s more than enough going on to hold your interest if you’re well familiar with harps or with Celtic music, and it’s melodic and clear and intriguing enough to enjoy if you are not up on any of that.

The dozen tracks comprise reels, jigs and airs,. If you’re thinking stiff and formal harp music, this isn't that. It is a lively program of mainly traditional music that Jackson and Hambly present as fresh and engaging. The two each play the harp, and it’s good conversation they keep going there. Jackson adds in whistle, bouzouki, and laud (think lute), and Hambly brings in concertina. It’s good to just let the program play through as they’ve sequenced it, but especially worth noting are the Mull of the Mountains/Drummond Castle set and the Cam Ye By Atholl/Eliza Ross’s/A’Chubhag set.


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