How to sort the real Paddies from the pretenders. . .
Irish Independent / June 23 2010
Darragh McManus 

So the Government plans to introduce a certificate of Irish heritage for the Diaspora, eh? Well, that's just dandy. Over 70 million people around the world claim some sort of Irish connection; the Exchequer will be hoping at least 69 million of them stump up a fee for the privilege of calling themselves part-Irish.

Should we just hand out bona fide documentation of Irishness willy-nilly, though, or should some sort of test be involved? In the US, for instance, you have to prove you know your hotdogs from your Hershey bars.

So, we've put together a simple questionnaire to separate the wannabe Paddies from the real Celtic heroes -- and those who prove their all-round Gaelic-ness will be welcomed into Mother Eireann's bosom with open arms.

To spice things up a little, candidates could be strapped down in a holding cell, juiced up with sodium pentathol and blinking into a harsh, Colditz-style searchlight, as they are asked the following questions:

1 Are your parents Irish? Maybe also your grandparents? Even better, can you claim Irish lineage through every ancestor back to Strongbow? (Although he may have actually been French, but we won't worry about that here.)

2 How many pints of Guinness can you horse down without A) falling over, B) vomiting, or C) singing miserable, interminable songs about tragic cases of infanticide in the Kerry mountains, long, long ago?

3 How pink is your skin? Does it bear the distinctive raw salmon colouring of the true Celt? How easily do you burn in summertime? Anybody who doesn't need suncream at factor 900 or higher is automatically disqualified.

4 Have you ever A) read Finnegans Wake, and B) understood any of it? If you answered yes to one or both parts, you're lying, because nobody has ever done either one.

5 When you are describing, 'as Gaeilge', a woman somersaulting through a flaming hoop, which of the following belongs to the genitive case: the woman, the flames, the hoop, or you?

6 How fluent is your Hiberno-English? More specifically, how often do you use terms such as "sure, I might", "grand so", "arrah", "toora-loora-laddie" etc, etc?

7 Do you mutter "I have a little bit of news" when you're about to impart an absolute bombshell to your nearest and dearest? For the purposes of this test, we sincerely hope so.

8 Do you use the brand-name Tayto in a generic way, like so: "Get me a pack of Taytos in the shop." "Okay, what kind?" "Oh I don't mind, anything but Tayto."

9 Is Shane MacGowan a veritable god among men? Please answer yes or yes.

10 Do you know who David Norris is? When he shrieks excitedly, can your ears register this high-frequency noise with clarity?

11 Do you find our oddball place names -- like Newtwopothouse, Ballydehob, Cappataggle, Horse and Jockey, Stoneybatter, Hackballscross, Ovens, Nobber, Ahascragh, Ballinspittle, Borris in Ossory, Watergrasshill -- to be endearing or just stupid-sounding?

12 Are you inexplicably attracted to the immense bore-fest that is horse-racing? If you answered yes, you're almost certainly Irish. But it's still a bore-fest.

13 When at a wedding in some far-flung corner of the world, do you ever feel a strange urge to start mumbling "Beef or salmon? Beef or salmon? Beef or salmon?", like a mantra devised by the world's hungriest but most indecisive Buddhist?

14 Do you agree with Brendan Behan when he said the Irish have a psychosis where other races have a national character? And are you only agreeing because you are undergoing a psychotic episode right now?

15 Work out what proportion of the national genetic code the following comprise: maudlin sentimentality; annoyance at the weather; mindless craic; enmity towards the British; pronunciation of "British" as "Burritteesh"; pure double-blended whiskey; tendency towards writing of epic poetry; proteins and trace elements.

16 Does your own DNA reject the typical double helix formation for an approximation of the contours of a stout glass?

17 Have you ever suffered any of the following Irish-specific ailments: Sport Obsession Disease; Gargle-itis; Begrudger's Scowl; Post-Colonial Identity Self-Annihilation Syndrome?

18 In ancient history, the Tuatha De Dannan smashed the Fir Bolg to smithereens, driving them underground where they have lived ever since, surfacing sporadically to stock up on milk, tinned goods and essential medicines. Who the hell were any of these people? Please tell us, we genuinely don't know.

19 Have you ever seen The Book of Kells? It's right nice, isn't it? Lovely drawings in it.

20 How many times could you bear to hear the term "Celtic Tiger" before an inescapable urge descended on you to murder the man responsible for coining it? Four or five, maybe?

21 What is the best thing about the St Patrick's Festival? A) The nice shamrock. B) The booze-sodden violent anarchy. C) The crappy papier maché things that cost about a trillion euro and only float for a short while before sinking into the murky depths of the Liffey. D) The annoying fact that it used to be just called plain old St Patrick's Day and then they changed it for no reason.

22 What happened to the word "Day", anyway? Was it destroyed by Army word-disposal experts in a controlled explosion sometime around 2001?

23 Are you prone to a spot of hop-leppin' or buck-leppin' from time to time?

24 Have you ever actually heard the pipes, the pipes a-callin', either from glen to glen, or alternatively, down the mountainside?

25 Do you consider a rasher sandwich to be the pinnacle of culinary excellence?

Had great fun playing with Sean Cleland last night at the Old Town School with the Karan Casey band -- Karan, Caoimhin Vallely, Kate Ellis, and Ross Martin were simply amazingly brilliant. The best I've ever heard Karan with three musicians who melded every word, phrase, chord, pulse, and emotion put forth by Karan into a glorious silky engulfing cloud of music. (p.s. - two thumbs up lads!! ;-))

A good laugh from Mick Moloney:

In ancient Greece (469 - 399 BC), Socrates was widely lauded for his wisdom.

One day the great philosopher came upon an acquaintance who ran up to him excitedly and said, "Socrates, do you know what I just heard about one of your students?"

"Wait a moment," Socrates replied. "Before you tell me I'd like you to answer three questions."

"Before you talk to me about my student let's take a moment to filter what you're going to say. The first question is Truth. Have you made absolutely sure that what you are about to tell me is true?"

"No," the man said, "actually I just heard about it."

"All right," said Socrates. "So you don't really know if it's true or not. Now let's try the second question of Goodness. Is what you are about to tell me about my student something good?"

"No, on the contrary ...".

"So," Socrates continued, "you want to tell me something bad about him, even though you're not certain it's true?".

The man shrugged, a little embarrassed. Socrates continued." You may still pass the test though, because there is a third question, the question of Usefulness. Is what you want to tell me about my student going to be useful to me?"

"No, not really..."

"Well," concluded Socrates, "if what you want to tell me is neither True nor Good nor even Useful, why tell it to me at all?"

The man was defeated and ashamed. This is the reason Socrates was a great philosopher and held in such high esteem. It also explains why he never found out that Plato was shagging his wife.

I watched "I'm Not There," a film about six incarnations of Bob Dylan's life the other day -- a strange film -- but one of the best line's of dialogue was from Cate Blanchett as Dylan:

"Doesn't really matter, you know, what kind of nasty names people invent for the music. But, uh, folk music is just a word, you know, that I can't use anymore. What I'm talking about is traditional music, right, which is to say it's mathematical music, it's based on hexagons. But all these songs about, you know, roses growing out of people's brains and lovers who are really geese and swans are turning into angels - I mean, you know, they're not going to die. They're not folk music songs. They're political songs. They're already dead. You'd think that these traditional music people would - would gather that mystery, you know, is a traditional fact, you know, seeing as they're all so full of mystery ... But traditional music is just, uh... it's too unreal to die. It doesn't need to be protected. You know, I mean, in that music is the only true valid death you can feel today, you know, off a record player. But like everything else in great demand, people try to own it. Has to do with, like, uh, the purity thing. I think its meaninglessness is holy. Everybody knows I'm not a folk singer."

Spent the last couple of weeks or so playing in a variety of great and enjoyable musical combinations in Chicagoland with musical friend's Dennis Cahill, Liz Carroll, Sean Cleland, Marta Cook, Rose Duffy, Paddy Homan, Maurice Lennon, Tommy Masterson, Denis O'Sullivan, Pauline Ronan, and John Shine. (And had we all played together at the same performance, we could have called ourselves the "The Dirty Diddley-Dee's").

The musicians were quite amazing too -- from Liz Carroll, the first musician I ever played Irish music with (and nothing like starting at the top) to Denis O'Sullivan, a grand singer from Kerry whom I met for the first time just a few weeks back and ended up backing him on a few songs "live" onstage for the first time (sure, we're a bunch of chancers to a degree too)...

That's the great great thing about this Irish Traditional Music -- you can meet someone for the first time and share a common "well" of wonderful songs and tunes -- no matter where or whence they came...

Thanks to those of you who were able to come out and make some of the performances!!!

 

I had a marvelous time in Glasgow last week at my first Celtic Connections festival as part of "An Irish Homecoming" the brainchild of the inimitable Joanie Madden and features Cherish the Ladies (and the great gang of dancers: Cara Butler, Joe Dwyer, Declan McHale, Michael Boyle, Dan Stacey, Noelle Curran, Colleen Farrell, and Jon Pilatzke), Maura O'Connell, Liz Carroll & John Doyle, Dermot Henry, and bohola -- well, most of bohola. The sad news was that Pat Broaders was unable to make it to Scotland due to a visa mixup in China. He is touring there with the dance show Celtic Legends -- and not living there -- although when he could not get out since they held his passport, I bet he began to wonder would he ere see the snow covered lawns of Beverly again... Needless to say, Pat was missed. The bold John Doyle was gracious and brilliant in covering Pat's part of the show with me -- learning a brand new song along with the handful of tunes I threw at him -- and all squeezed into a half hour rehearsal. You're a mighty man John -- Thank you again JD!

For those of you who have not had the pleasure of seeing the show -- it starts off with a blast with Cherish (Joanie Madden, Mary Coogan, Liz Kane - filling in for Roisin Dillon, Mirella Murray, Kathleen "KT" Boyle, and Michelle Burke) and continues on a musical roller coaster ride from there. The 2500-strong sold out crowd were a very receptive audience and sang, clapped, hooted and hollered the whole night long through to the final encore. Longtime Cherish soundman John Murray made us sound like an orchestra. With multiple live microphones and monitors onstage, he turned a sound engineers nightmare into something very sweet and powerful at the same time. Not too bad for a Dubliner like... :-))

Joanie Madden made the Glasgow Concert hall listeners feel as if they were sitting in her kitchen with her commandingly friendly interaction and storytelling -- never mind how she enthralled them with her powerful brand of flute playing and the incomparable beauty of her whistle playing. Corkonian Michelle Burke had the crowd in her adopted home of Glasgow captured with her beguiling style of singing. Mary Coogan is one of the most unsung guitar players today -- Coogie was just brilliant in her backing of songs and tunes. The fiddle playing of Galway's Liz Kane (with her head down and eyes closed) was heartfelt. My favorite piano accordion player, the impressive Mirella Murray, was in top form as ever and her duet playing with Liz was as spectacular as the Connemara landscape. And Glasgow's own KT Boyle's piano playing surpassed that of Charlie Lennon, Josephine Keegan, and Bridie Lafferty combined. It's no longer just "thump-thump-thump-thump" with KT around. ;-))

Maura O'Connell proved once again why she is simply the finest interpreter of song (of any style) in music today. She treats each and every word of a song as if it were the only word that matters and her twists and turns of the tune meld perfectly with her dynamic earthy voice. One of the highlights was when Maura was joined onstage by Rob Ickes and his elegant dobro playing during Nanci Griffith's "Trouble in the Field" -- which is as apt a song today as when it was written many years ago. All I can say about Rob is Jerry Who??? ;-)) (only a joke -- hand's down now fairly lively!)

Liz Carroll and John Doyle were as unbelievable as ever. Liz and JD started with "Paddy Glackin's Trip to Dingle" and reached Mars by the end of their set. As someone who had the pleasure and great luck of growing up playing music with Liz in Chicago, I am constantly amazed and flummoxed as how she continually gets better and better and never rests on her laurels - which is probably why her back is in good shape these days - Scottish influenced accidents aside ;-)) The intensity, drive, and melodic rhythmic inventiveness of Liz and John together is something to "be-heard". Powerful powerful stuff. (Here's keeping fingers crossed that both Maura O'Connell's "Naked with Friends" and Liz and John's "Double Play" walk away with nice shiny Grammy's next week -- they both received my vote -- in full disclosure, I'm a voting member of NARAS which awards the Grammy)

Dermot Henry, my fellow first timer to Celtic Connections was the hit of the show and received a standing ovation after his comedic yet poignant set. That say's it all. One more word (well, at least a couple) his song: "Folk and Irish Singer." Say no more, say no more. OK, then one more -- his ode to Christy Moore -- with the chorus which starts: "Chris-ty, Chris-ty, Chris-ty, Chris-ty Moo-re, you're a who-re….of a singer…"

I truly hope that Joanie Madden gets Dermot to complete his album of self-penned songs soon. He is a Sligo/New York treasure that needs to be heard by all. (And for trad music lovers out there, a cousin of Sligo/Chicago's own Kevin "the piper" Henry)

The dancers were fine-a-foot as one can see anywhere. The highlight within the dancing segments was by far the Chair Dance from the Step Crew which features Canadian's Dan Stacey and Jon Pilatzke along with USAer's multi-Irish dance award winners Cara Butler and Joe Dwyer preceded by the jealousy-inspiring fiddle duet of Dan and Jon with Mary Coogan wringing each glorious strain of J. Scott Skinner's waltz "Rosebud of Allenvale" which was followed by the fiddle only Jean Carignan's "Bird in the Tree" -- come on lads -- can't ye be just great at one thing like and not everything??? A??? ;-))

The other was the dance combo set which features Pat Broaders -- oops, still stuck in China - ;-)), I mean John Doyle and me singing Tommy Sand's "When the Boys Come Rolling Home" in conjunction with Joanie Madden's great tune "The Cat's Meow" followed by a full line treble jig. Just to clarify, the highlight was the song sung by John, Joanie's tune, and the skillful (ditto award winning) dancing of Declan, Michael, Noelle, and Colleen and the Step Crewers. Ya really don't want to hear me sing like… :-))

One of my personal pleasures of the concert was to get the chance to play a tune I wrote for the late Gwen Sale (wife of my dear friend Dennis Cahill) who hailed not that far from Glasgow. It's a tune called "Gweneen" and it was cathartic to play. I only wish Gwen was there in person to hear it.

John Doyle did a great guitar part on the tune and that's only with a few minutes of hearing it before the concert. Also, which I nearly forgot, was the addition of John Joe Kelly on bodhran - he was playing in a tribute-to-Johnny "Ringo" McDonagh-style and joined John and I on a couple of tunes after Gweneen. Now that be a rhythm section like!!

Overall, the Celtic Connection's Glasgow Concert Hall show will be a treasured memory for me to cherish for a long long time…

It was a pure pleasure to take part in this with all these loving and generous friends. Thanks Joanie for having me - i'm indebted to you for making this happen!!!!

The Herald
January 18 2010

Celtic Connections

CHERISH THE LADIES: AN IRISH HOMECOMING

Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow
by Rob Adams

***

LIGHTNING does strike twice in the same place. Back in 1994, on their first appearance in Glasgow at the first Celtic Connections, Cherish the Ladies turned up as an unknown Irish-American band, made a huge impression, and on the basis of their performance began a continuing relationship with the festival and the city. Last night they introduced a friend who promptly gained a standing ovation and may well follow Cherish’s example in achieving honorary Glaswegianship.

Dermot Henry’s bewildered bumpkin persona won’t be everyone’s taste – his Folk and Irish singer skit is a well-worn joke given a bit of a polish – but it obviously struck a chord with the audience here in what was an, at times, chancy balance between sentimental Oirish get together for old times sake and sharper than sharp celebration of the traditional arts.

Cherish the Ladies themselves have moved on considerably, personnel-wise, since that first gig. Four of the six musicians involved actually come from this side of the pond and while that gives a stronger native Irish accent to some of the material, their essential recipe of music, song and dance remains the same.

Musically, there were particularly strong contributions from their guests, fiddler Liz Carroll and accordionist Jimmy Keane, and songwise, Henry apart, there was a striking contrast between Michelle Burke’s sweet singing and another guest, Maura O’Connell’s more lived-in tones.

But it was the dancers who particularly caught the eye and ear, with Dan Stacey following a spectacular solo tapped entry with a Quebecois-style chair dancing quartet that should have carried a “don’t try this at home” warning.
 

There was a man who worked for the Post Office whose job was to process all the mail that had illegible addresses.

One day, a letter came addressed in a shaky handwriting to God with no actual address. He thought he should open it to see what it was about.

The letter read:

Dear God,

I am an 83 year old widow, living on a very small pension.

Yesterday someone stole my purse. It had $100 in it, which was all the money I had until my next pension payment.

Next Sunday is Christmas, and I had invited two of my friends over for dinner. Without that money, I have nothing to buy food with, have no family to turn to, and you are my only hope. Can you please help me?

Sincerely, Edna

The postal worker was touched. He showed the letter to all the other workers. Each one dug into his or her wallet and came up with a few dollars.

By the time he made the rounds, he had collected $96, which they put into an envelope and sent to the woman..


The rest of the day, all the workers felt a warm glow thinking of Edna and the dinner she would be able to share with her friends.

Christmas came and went.

A few days later, another letter came from the same old lady to God.

All the workers gathered around while the letter was opened.

It read:

Dear God,

How can I ever thank you enough for what you did for me?

Because of your gift of love, I was able to fix a glorious dinner for my friends. We had a very nice day and I told my friends of your wonderful gift.

By the way, there was $4 missing.

I think it might have been those bastards at the post office.

Sincerely, Edna

(got this from Dennis Cahill)

The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.

As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as 'Euro-English'.

In the first year, 's' will replace the soft 'c'. Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard 'c' will be dropped in favour of 'k'. This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome 'ph' will be replaced with 'f'. This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.

Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.

Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent 'e' in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.

By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing 'th' with 'z' and 'w' with 'v'.

During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary 'o' kan be dropd from vordskontaining 'ou' and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensibl riten styl.

Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.

Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.

The one and only Joe Burke...
 
The Joe Burke archive is now open...

Fiddle-player Martin Hayes on traditional music in the twenty-first century

Like most other musicians, I have a lot of strong feelings and beliefs about music that I would rarely share unless I felt safe in doing so. I grew up listening to people with hugely strong opinions on what was good, and what was bad – people like my father, Peter O’Loughlin, Martin Rochford and Paddy Canny. They didn’t even say ‘good’ or ‘bad’, they said right or wrong!

When I started to play, as a child, I didn’t have any clear opinion about what was traditional or what was not traditional. In fact, my musical vision centered around whatever musicians I heard and whatever records I had in my collection. I wasn’t even aware of such a thing as an East Clare style of fiddle playing until I went to West Clare – but I did then begin to make that distinction.

As a child I didn’t like Sliabh Luachra music, and I didn’t like Donegal music. This was to become a deep moral issue for me; I adhered quite strictly to what I was familiar with musically and it took me until I was an adult to actually come around to understanding what Donegal music is and what Sliabh Luachra music is – and this is after having played obsessively throughout my teenage years.

Though I did, of course, come to an understanding of these styles, it was a long time before the Donegal fiddle player Johnny Doherty made sense to me, and the music of Tommy Peoples at first felt harsh to my ears. It just wasn’t appealing according to the aesthetics of East Clare at the time, though I began to slowly recognise a kind of stark high loneliness in the music and a kind of tension and a beauty. That, for me, was stepping outside; my first ‘stepping outside’ musically was to embrace things that were already part of the tradition. This indicated to me that we have a diverse and sometimes aesthetically conflicting tradition. In other words, this tradition is actually a combination of many traditions.

Adamantly traditional
At the age of twenty-one I moved to the United States. Being from East Clare really didn’t matter so much in Chicago. In fact, being from Ireland wasn’t even that significant. Slowly, I began to embrace and think about other forms of music, and I have thought deeply about music ever since. I have come to many conclusions, through an ever-expanding experience of embracing ever-wider fields of ideas that I find applicable to this music.

And yet, I remain, I think, adamantly traditional, at least by the standards that I would like to see define the tradition.

I left Ireland as a result of some foolhardy business ideas that I had at the time, which left me paying off the bank manager in Tulla. Being in America without a Green Card meant there was just a couple of options: one was hauling lumber (that lasted for about nine months), and the other was playing in a lounge bar on the south side of Chicago where the musical choice was either Neil Diamond or ‘Danny Boy’. I went down the ‘Danny Boy’ route.

At all times I realised I was playing music that I would have previously dismissed, and yet I was forced to do it, and learned to be humble about it. I actually began to enjoy doing some of the stuff, as ridiculous as it might seem. I played in wedding bands, rock ‘n’ roll bands, had an electric fiddle and grew my hair just to fit in.

Eventually I got tired of this. Having found that fate had cast me in a situation of earning my income as a musician, I decided to play the music that meant something to me. I felt some level of guilt around the whole issue of performance as a profession, believing that there was very little of it in our tradition and that it had, in some respects, a distorting influence. I grappled with that.

The truth, however, is that performance has always been a part of the tradition, even if only in small intimate settings where only a few, or even one, was listening – or even if nobody was listening. I believe that to play the music is to perform it – you respond to circumstances, whether it be in front of a large audience or privately for oneself. I don’t think that the ultimate purity comes from ignoring the circumstances or ignoring the audience as a distorting influence, but rather that there is an artistic lack of integrity in not trying to reach toward the listener.

When you become a professional musician there are a lot of responsibilities that you have to take heed of. For example, when a person books a concert for me in, say, Holland. In such a case, I would feel a responsibility to this person; I would feel a responsibility to the tradition; I would feel a responsibility to an audience; I would feel a responsibility to myself; I would feel a responsibility to the musicians that I got the music from. When you start brining together all these responsibilities, there is a degree of compromise that has to be reached. In many ways, the question of authenticity then becomes a personal one in which you have to do your best to balance these various ethical matters. I’ve often felt that in previous debates regarding traditional music people didn’t truly understand the life experience and dilemmas that are involved in navigating these choices, and that judgments of musicians in these situations can be overly simplistic and sometimes unnecessarily harsh.

Tradition and authenticity
When I think of what is good traditional music I’m back to people like Martin Rochford. I’m back to that very beginning point. I know what people like him felt good music was, though it is a highly subjective thing. I remember looking at Fleadh Ceol adjudication sheets and fifty per cent of the marks went, I think, for something called ‘tradition’. That should really be called ‘subjective opinion’, for that is what good music amounts to in many ways. It amounts to whether one can in fact respond to it. The word ‘tradition’ is loaded. The tradition in Donegal is different from the tradition in Clare, as is the tradition in West Kerry and East Kerry – everywhere you go is different. Even people from the same musical region will often have widely divergent views of what their particular tradition is.

If we substitute the word ‘authentic’ for the word ‘tradition’ we might be moving towards something that may be sufficiently comprehensive to embrace a wider and more musical definition of Irish ‘traditional’ music. Authenticity might mean representing the voice of your forebears. In some minds it could also be considered authentic to recreate music by a process of mimicry. But it is also authentic to be yourself, completely, as an artist, as a human being. Following your deepest artistic impulses while being informed by, and being respectful of, the tradition from which you come is, in my opinion, an authentic musical path in this music.

However, there are a few authenticities in conflict with each other here right away. The question is now wider and more complex and cannot be easily resolved by simple definitions of what is good or bad traditional music. As the priests taught us in school: you have to have an informed conscience. The morality of your musical choices are dependent on how much you already know. If you play ‘bad’ music, and you don’t know the difference between it and good, then you’re doing fine. It is only when you know better and don’t act accordingly that you’re actually walking into the grey, moral territory in traditional music.

There is also ‘the muse’ – the intangible aspect of music, the source of inspiration, the key motivating force. In most discussions this is left out because it does not fall within the accepted criteria. Is it traditional or acceptable to talk about the Zen of fiddle playing? Well, I would argue that it is. How do we talk of heart, of draíocht, of feeling, of a deep spiritual meaning in music? Even though there is no precedent for the music of Tommy Potts can we say his music is traditional or not? I would argue vehemently that it is traditional.

I would like to argue against an often unquestioned assumption, which suggests that what we most commonly hear played as traditional music should, by an act of simple democracy, define the parameters. I would prefer to focus on those I consider the masters – the true innovators in music – and define the music by people such as Tommy Potts, Willy Clancy, Johnny Doherty, and Pádraig O’Keeffe, rather than by what I normally hear in a session, which is how we tend to define it now. We need to take a few steps backward and examine what is now mainstream Irish music and see how we got to this point.

More than dogma and repetition
It might not be so obvious when you live in Ireland, but when you live in Seattle, you become very aware of how insular thought can be around issues to do with traditional music, what I would call ‘cultural nationalism’. It gets confused because the music in itself, though it does clearly suggest, in some sense, our identity, in other ways it is actually just pure music. There are, therefore, issues of national identity battling against the forces of creative musical expression.

I would like to move it onto the plain of just pure music and assume that we now have a universal acceptance that our national identity is both diverse and secure. This is not to say that our music is not reflective of our past or of some essential part of our national psyche. However, we are treating the music as an unruly teenager to whom we are unwilling to offer full independence lest it not adhere to some static notion of what the tradition is. That fear exists because the context that created the music, that nourished it, that even brought the revival movement of this music into existence, all of these things have, in some sense, almost run their course and we now no longer have the cultural environment that created this music. The passing on of the tradition has to involve more than dogma and repetition. It must now also include some of the universals that are part of any artistic journey.

I teach workshops in various corners of the world and I go to great pains to explain to the students that the people in Ennis can also watch CNN and order in pizza. In fact, these students abroad that I teach can get all the latest recordings, chat on the internet, subscribe to magazines, turn up at the Willy Clancy week every summer and be equally well informed and engaged as anybody in Clare. Though I can’t statistically offer any facts for this, I think that there are presently so many traditional musicians in the United States, the UK, Australia, Canada, Tokyo, and around the world, that it is possible that there are more traditional musicians residing outside Ireland than within.

I often think about the evolution of jazz music in the United States in relation to the learning of traditional music. It went through something similar to Irish music, but only just a few decades ahead. There was a point when most of the mainstream media was dismissing jazz as some kind of un-thought-out, intellectually deficient music, but now there is widespread acceptance of it. Virtually every music school has a jazz department and, in fact, some would argue that they have figured out how to reproduce this music in an almost assembly line manner. The problem now is that much of the music played can be without depth of expression. There are people who can play like John Coltrane, but they haven’t undertaken the journey that John Coltrane did, so it doesn’t feel the same. That’s why it doesn’t feel the same if some band today is exactly like the Bothy Band. If we put Ceoltóirí Chualann on stage today, it would not sound as good to us because it wouldn’t be breaking any ground. It wouldn’t be changing anything.

In our understanding of developments in music we have to take the visionary spirit and the creative imagination of the artist more seriously than the end product of their creativity. It is the driving creative imagination of John Coltrane or Seán Ó Riada that we should be emulating. It may be more important to understand how they navigated their uncharted roads as artists than to try and draw conclusions from their artistic output. Every artist has to speak from the depth of his/her soul and that goes for artists that come out of a proscribed tradition as much as it does for artists in genres where personal creative expression is the norm.

Why I do what I do
As a professional musician I have to grapple with what the value of traditional music is. I haven’t much interest in religion, but I do have a deep interest in spirituality. I have had to try and rationalise what my position in music is – why I do what I do, other than to make a living, because that would be, in a way, a kind of a misuse of it. But I’ve often felt that the only clear thing I can offer as a performing musician is to actually enliven the spirits of the people that are there with me for that period of time.

In other words, I don’t have a long-held agenda. I don’t have a big plan to change Irish music or to move anything in radical directions. I can only go deep into a musical experience at that particular moment when I play and to bring people into it with me. I am very proud of this music and the strengths and qualities in it, and I am very aware that it does cross boundaries. The notion that I once grew up with, that only certain people could understand this music, is no longer true. What is lacking in the music, however, is some discourse, some criteria for performing it, some rationale, some basis by which we can decide what is good and what is right and what is the way to go about it. I once read a book called Zen and the Art of Archery. In many ways it reflects, in a universal sense, what it takes to engage in an act of performance, how one must truly engage in the most committed manner possible. That kind of thought has been very important to me. It is important that what is offered from a performance is something that truly reaches the heart of people, that it moves people in a deep way.

That is performance. Traditional music ‘sessions’ are another thing. I don’t turn up at sessions very often, usually because I’m afraid I won’t like it, and that people will expect me to play all night! I did organise sessions in Chicago when I lived there. I found out that it wasn’t always about making good music.

I would get people together to play at whatever level suited them, and usually I found that the lowest level was the best level to play at. I got people into a kind of communion, and I became very engaged in the concept of community, in the concept of people feeling united in their music. I was very concerned that we didn’t get too caught up in trying to make it the highest musical experience possible. It could get there. Sometimes it would get there for just five minutes a night.

Tradition and aspiration
As a teenager I remember an occasion when I was alone, walking down one of the roads not so far from our house after counting cattle. I remember thinking about the music of that locality and thinking that nobody will ever want to hear it. Nobody, I thought, will ever want to hear Joe Bane play because a lot of hiss comes out of the whistle when he plays, a lot of bad tone comes out, a lot of intonation issues, a lot of getting tunes wrong.

The outward shell of this music, however, was just a reflection of the musical aspiration; as with any artistic expression, the message is often more significant than the artistic vehicle. They spoke their inner aspirations through the musical vernacular of their locality with a naive innocence and purity that the most accomplished of artists have a hard time achieving. This music wasn’t widely appreciated because they played in a local, almost personal, vernacular and the outward form wasn’t often very refined. The musical voices of Martin Rochford, Joe Bane, Bill Malley, Junior Crehan and Bobby Casey, were, however, personally very important to me. I sometimes enjoyed it more when Martin Rochford sang a tune into my ear or when he talked about it, than when he played. I got a strong sense of his musical aspiration this way.

John Naughton came to the house a lot when I was a child, so did Tommy Potts, and various other people. There were always high moments, moments of communion between the listener and the player. There were high moments that the performer had no control over. But there were also a lot of dry stretches in between when the music was only OK. In fact, the majority of the time, that’s how it really was, but I choose to remember the special moments by which to define those people.

I’ve chosen to hear the aspiration of Martin Rochford and Junior Crehan. I don’t copy them and I don’t copy anybody else, but I do, in a sense, define tradition as my attempt to embody their aspirations, and to follow through, to keep reaching. As an artist, unless one is reaching forward or deep within, there isn’t life in what you do. The tradition can move forward without mimicking the past, while at the same time actually emulating it in as many personal ways as there are people playing it.

My talking about musical aspirations does not necessarily reflect where I am as a musician. These are things that I believe in. These are things that I aspire to. These are things that I very, very often do not achieve and these are things that maybe in my lifetime, I won’t achieve. But I do really feel that the first instruction I received, to play with feeling, is still the most consistent and most meaningful instruction that I’ve ever known.

My father used to say, ‘That music has no tradition...’, or ‘This music does...’, and I often felt it was a very naïve way of expressing it, but he was entirely accurate. For him, tradition was defined, not by whether a person played in a definable traditional manner, but merely whether the echo of that feeling, that emotion, that content, that melancholy which gives it meaning, was contained in the music or not. If the music didn’t have some of those qualities, it wasn’t traditional music at all.

“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit.” Enough said... 

 I listened to nearly 10 and a half hours of the remastered Beatles in my studio yesterday.



The reissues were sonically superior to all previous versions (and that was even after I made the transfer from disc to iTunes).

An unbelievable group (goes without saying, but IS worth saying)

All said and done, their songs would sound great even on wax cylinder connected to a milk pail speaker.

If you are a Beatles fan (and really, who isn't??) definitely worth checking out...

Now back to the "reel" music...

I was fortunate enough to spend quite a bit of time with Liam Clancy over the years - quite the man and musician. Looking forward to this documentary when it is released in the US



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Last Clancy standing

Sat, Sep 12, 2009
Irish Times


INTERVIEW: Before Van Morrison, before U2, Ireland (and the world) had The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. A fine new documentary by Alan Gilsenan marks out the group's sole survivor, Liam Clancy, as a storyteller of the highest calibre - and what a story, writes DONALD CLARKE

THE SHELBOURNE HOTEL has been squatting on St Stephen's Green for more than 150 years, but, to people of a certain age, its bars and staircases always summon up memories of the 1970s. Before luxury hotels sprung up on every Dublin corner, the Shelbourne served as a vital way station for the era's key celebrities. Look: there's Richard Harris and John Huston. Is that Edna O'Brien sharing a glass with JP Donleavy? Hang around long enough and you would surely catch sight of a Clancy brother. While Van Morrison was still something of a niche act, and U2 were just shedding their bondage nappies, The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem remained the closest thing the country had to a musical supergroup. They were, of course, never exactly cool. Dressed in thick jumpers and fishermen's caps, they sang the sort of ballads to which even Americans knew the words. But they were very famous indeed.

So, the Shelbourne seems like the right place to meet the mighty Liam Clancy. Possessor of a voice that is both sweet and booming, Liam is, sadly, the last member of the group still above ground. Now, having said goodbye to Bobby, Tom and Paddy Clancy and, as recently as 2007, having lost his old mate Tommy Makem, Liam Clancy remains an avatar of a lost age. It must make a man think.

"It's inevitable. Everything passes," he says, before reaching for an oxygen cylinder and attaching the tubes to his nose for a spell. "I am on my last legs. I need a bit of oxygen every now and then. I got this virus in California, and it attacked my immune system. It's called pulmonary fibrosis - scarring of the lungs. That's what killed my brother. There's no cure, but it seems to be moving quite slowly in my case."

Yet it can't be denied that he looks rather fabulous. Still proudly wearing his trademark cap, his feet wriggling in the Shelbourne's slippers, Clancy is a good colour and, despite his pulmonary difficulties, he has no difficulty belting out an array of disgraceful, well- structured yarns. That talent is also on display in a fine new documentary entitled T he Yellow Bittern: The Life and Times of Liam Clancy. Alan Gilsenan's film places Liam in a huge hangar at Ardmore Studios, and sets him loose on one of the great show-business sagas.

The youngest of the Clancy brothers - the other three of whom all served in the RAF during the second World War - Liam, now 74, was raised among the unglamorous streets of Carrick-on-Suir, Co Tipperary. Looking back, he remembers the country as being "run by Ayatollahs", and remarks that his home area had "barely changed since medieval times". It must, therefore, have been a shock to encounter an exotic American moneybags with a crate of recording equipment. Diane Guggenheim, heiress to the mining empire that bears her name, developed an enthusiasm for Irish folk music and, in the mid-1950s, toured Ireland in search of strong singers.

Liam was swept along by her enthusiasm, and accompanied her to Armagh, where she recorded Tommy Makem's mother, the renowned folk singer Sarah Makem. Later, Guggenheim lured Clancy, whose ambitions were then in acting, to New York, and introduced him to bohemian Greenwich Village. But it soon transpired that she had developed a dangerous obsession with the young Tipperary man.

"She was 32 and I was 19. She was twice- divorced and I had been brought up a strict Catholic," he marvels. "And, of course, I'd never come across anybody who had been deep in psychoanalysis before. Later I saw the movie Fatal Attraction, and I thought: 'Jesus, that's what I went through with Diane.' Except those two characters were from the same culture. At that point, the extent of my world was the rain- sodden streets of Carrick-on-Suir."

Guggenheim threatened to commit suicide when Clancy refused to have sex with her, and the unfortunate woman eventually ended up in a mental institution. By this point, Clancy, deeply disturbed by the incident, had put his acting ambitions on hold, and was allowing the lucrative distractions of folk music to lead him elsewhere.

"Tommy Makem had gone to New Hampshire, working on the cotton mills," he explains. "We had agreed to meet later in New York, and get into acting. We eventually got a job together playing two priests. Then, while we were doing that, a club opened called The Fifth Peg, later known as Gerde's Folk City. Now, whereas acting paid $45 a week, we got $125 for singing a few songs. There's no choice there."

In The Yellow Bittern we hear how, in later years, following innumerable fallings out between the group, Tommy Makem became a somewhat austere fellow. The impression given is that he was the puritanical northerner to the Clancys' more dissolute Munster men.

"Ah no. That only emerged later on," he says slightly sadly. "He was as devil-may-care as the rest. He was a joker, always great fun. He got serious somewhere along the line."

Gerde's Folk City was the club where Bob Dylan played his first professional gig, and the great man is quoted on the poster of The Yellow Bittern , describing Liam as "the best ballad singer I ever heard in my life". It was, however, as part of a group that Clancy finally encountered proper fame. He had never known his older brothers as adults and, when he met up with them in New York, he was slightly appalled to discover that they had American accents. Still, he plugged his ears, and, with Makem in tow, became part of the world-conquering The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem.

Their big break came in 1961, during an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show . The headline act cancelled and, originally booked to do just two songs, the group stormed their way through a triumphant 20-minute set. A year later, the boys sold out Carnegie Hall.

"After The Ed Sullivan Show , crowds suddenly began stopping us on the street, looking for autographs," he says. "I remember Tom looking around and saying: 'Jesus. We're f***ing famous!' Then straight into Carnegie Hall, and then a tour round England.

"Then we branched into Australia. I remember somebody once asking if we'd planned all this. There was no time to plan. It's like we were thrown onto a raft on the Colorado rapids for 10 years. It was all we could do to keep afloat."

The Yellow Bittern should help Liam Clancy recover some of the respect he deserves. The group recorded stirring, skull-rattling versions of songs such as Kevin Barry and Brennan on the Moor and, in the mid-1960s, their albums sold by the lorry-load in Ireland. Some more puritanical folk musicians were, however, a tad suspicious of the show-business aura that hung about them. With those jumpers and those hats, The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem did conform to certain stereotypes of the stage Irishman.

Clancy laughs good-naturedly.

"We had a manager, Marty Erlichman," he says. "He once asked us to cut 10 minutes from our show to give this unknown girl a break: Barbra Streisand. Anyway, Marty said to us: 'I can make you stars if you do what I tell you.' We came home after Christmas and my mother had knitted these sweaters. We brought them back and Marty said: 'That's it!' You have to remember it was part of the business then. You had to have an identity. Marty insisted." Clancy goes on to explain how, much later, he received a letter from a knitwear manufacturer in Donegal who, by the mid-1960s, was preparing to emigrate. The sweater craze took off, and he was able to remain at home, marry the girl he loved and create a large family. Indeed, you might argue that all those jumper shops in Nassau Street, Dublin airport and every other Irish tourist trap would not exist if Marty had not had his sartorial brainwave. Yes, the Clancys created one ideal of the robust, cosily dressed Paddy.

"God yeah, for years they were called Clancy Brothers sweaters," a currently sweaterless Liam says. "That's our sackcloth and ashes. I tell you, they were good for one thing: keeping the weight down. You sweated so much you never got fat."

The Clancys may not have been cool, but, if contemporaneous records are to be believed, they could have drunk a combined force of Mötley Crüe, Black Sabbath and Lynyrd Skynyrd under the table, out the door and into the gutter. Nobody ever confused Liam Clancy with Val Doonican. "I looked at one of our set lists. I found it in an old suitcase. We once did 35 concerts in 21 nights," he says. "Of course there was a lot of drink. We'd fuel up with whiskey to get up to speed on our way to the next gig. There were a hell of a lot of parties. We were under contract to Playboy, I remember. Hugh Hefner would have these parties and there'd be all this champagne about. We were given these little champagne glasses and he'd say: 'You don't give an Irishman a glass that size.' We ended up with tankards of champagne."

Even if you haven't heard the Clancy myth, you can probably guess where this story is heading. As the jolly 1960s mutated into the less merry 1970s, the group encountered all the usual rock'n'roll calamities. One accountant made a mess of their taxes, and his replacement only managed to get them deeper in debt. Personal feuds developed and, eventually, giving in to the pressures of work and bad living, Liam Clancy suffered a very serious breakdown. He describes the incident movingly in The Yellow Bittern .

"It was much more than just the drink," he says. "It's something that runs in the family. I can remember, as a teenager, people saying my mother 'suffered with her nerves'. I had anxiety attacks and panic attacks. And the stress of touring brought it on again."

He admits that, even now, he occasionally suffers from "his nerves". Still, there is no doubting that Liam Clancy is one of the great survivors. In the 1970s, broke and without a recording contract, he made his way to Canada and embarked on a notable television career. Eventually, he made up with Tommy Makem and, until 1988, the two men performed throughout the world as a successful duo. Further reconciliations came with his brothers and, in 1996, four decades after they ran into one another in New York, an incarnation of The Clancy Brothers took to the road again.

Throughout all the glories and catastrophes, Clancy has kept a home in Ring, Co Waterford. He still lives there with his wife, and maintains that pottering about the area is the thing that has "kept him sane". Mind you, for all his eccentricities, Liam Clancy strikes me as a man with a proper sense of his place in the world. Early on in our conversation, he tells a lengthy anecdote about travelling from Alaska to Los Angeles with Tommy Makem in the early 1980s. The flight took them past an erupting Mount St Helens and, eventually, to the smog and noise of southern California.

"You just see this liquefied, vaporised manure in the air," he says. "Then you suddenly realise there is a human settlement in there. Below you see these homes full of stars, who think the world can't get by without them. Then you are at the concert, and you, who would be this infinitesimal speck from the air, are playing before all these other specks. You have to keep that sense of perspective."

What an impressive figure this man is. He may require oxygen to get through the day. He may not be able to sing any more. But he still looks as if he could chew the average contemporary celebrity into gristle. "I'm doing fine, for the most part," he smiles. "For a guy who's dying, I'm not doing too bad." Well, I think Liam Clancy's pretty darn cool.

The Yellow Bittern: The Life and Times of Liam Clancy is on general release

© 2009 The Irish Times

Two really creative uses of Irish Step Dancing featuring Suzanne Cleary & Peter Harding

 

Oak Lawn accordion shop owner fights to keep music playing
What can Anne Romagnoli do to sell you an accordion?

By Christopher Borrelli
TRIBUNE REPORTER

September 3, 2009



"I am going to sell you an accordion," said Anne Romagnoli.

"Not right -- " began the teenage boy.

"No, listen, I've got to sell you an accordion. Why can't I sell you an accordion? You need an accordion. Look at you."

"I know, but my accordion, it was my uncle's accordion, and, uh," he said, dissolving into mumbles.

"You're playing a child's accordion. You need an adult's accordion. How old are you?"

"I'm 15."

"You're 15, and you're playing a child's accordion. What can I do to sell you an accordion?"

Friday morning, a few days before Romagnoli's 83rd birthday, she sat behind the gray steel desk where she sits most days, cheerful despite a broken wrist, a container of cantaloupe before her, trying to sell an accordion to anyone who might wander into her Oak Lawn store, the Italo-American Accordion Co., on 95th Street. It's 94 years old, possibly older. You need an accordion? She sells accordions. You need a leather strap to shoulder that 30-pound instrument? She sells the leather straps. Need anything else? She sells nothing else. But Friday morning -- well, Friday morning was unusual, because Dovas Lietuvninkas, 15, wandered in and checked out accordions the way other kids might wander into a guitar store. "Unusual," Romagnoli whispered. "He's white, young and plays accordion. It is unusual."

She pounced.

Last month, she sold three accordions. Three. Last month was bad. Some months she sells 15. Once in a great while she sells double that. Lately, though, she's selling fewer than 10 a month. Four. Three. Six. Generally used.

Everything changes. Even with accordions. The Italo-American Accordion Co. probably started in 1910, under a different family; Romagnoli's daughter Roseanne has seen vintage receipts that prove as much, she said, but her mother doubts the date.

Anne was born a Piatanesi, the family moving to America from the tiny coastal Italian town of Castelfidardo, "where all they know is accordions," Anne said. Soon after arriving, her father, Demo Piatanesi, and his brothers Bramante and Finau joined the business and moved it from Taylor Street to 51st and Kedzie; in 1948, an accordion salesman named Joe Romagnoli, whom Anne had met in Italy, moved to the United States and married her. Two years later, he took over Italo-American, first importing from Italy, then making the accordions himself. Joe and Anne traveled throughout the 1950s with accordions in the back seat of their car, selling several hundred a month to music stores.

But "he wasn't a businessman," Anne said, and her daughters spoke of finding unclaimed checks stuffed in drawers after his death in 1994.

"He was an artist," Anne said. He made the accordions himself, for years, from scratch -- reeds, springs, keys, more than 2,000 parts -- until his death. "He would make just enough to sell throughout the next year," said Anne's older daughter, Joanne Hernandez, 59, who lives in Florida. Anne had her accordion school, Republic Music School, on South Kedzie, which closed in 1976 because of declining enrollment; Joe had the Italo-American Accordion Co.. "When my father died," Hernandez said, "the business just dropped in her lap, and she had to learn it on the fly. I have to give it to her, as controlling as she is, she made it profitable. Not hugely profitable, but she did all right, and she needs to be admired for that."

"Anne is pretty much a legend," said Letticia Garfio, the leader of Vencedoras, a Mexican band from Chicago formerly known as Las Destinadas. They buy their accordions from Anne. "Her competition is small, of course. But it's a tradition, and without her accordions our music probably wouldn't be out there at all. It always seems the accordions catch all the attention with us."

Still, the accordion business is not booming. "The market is more scattered than it was in the '50s, when the accordion was the No. 1 instrument and everyone took lessons and there were schools," said John Castiglione, whose Castiglione Accordions has been in Warren, Mich., for 79 years. "People still buy, but for all intents and purposes, you don't find stores selling just accordions."

Anyway, this kid, this Dovas, this kid who looked as if he should be riding a skateboard, so young his older sister had to pick him up, he stopped by Italo-American to get the accordion he dropped off for repairs and stayed to sample the accordions.

Of course, Anne pounced. "Young white kids don't have the interest now. Mexican bands, they do," she explained to a visitor. "The Eastern Europeans. The Lithuanians. This kid, his parents must have introduced a foreign element into the household." She looked at him then, the instrument tilting his thin frame forward, a shaggy head of hair falling across his brow. "Am I right?"

He heard what she said and nodded. He explained his parents are Lithuanian. He learned to play folk songs, waltzes, at Lithuanian summer camps. He said he's the only kid he knows who can play the accordion. His sister, waiting to leave, nodded, then rolled her eyes.

"Who do you normally see in here?" the sister asked Anne.

Anne thought. "Serbian, Polish. A lot of Mexicans. Mexicans, mostly. Look. Enough. I'm selling you an accordion."

"Next year," Dovas said.

"I grew up at 55th and Kedzie," she offered, trying another way to his heart, recalling how she lived a few blocks from the old location of the Italo-American Accordion Co. "All the Lithuanians used to go to Marquette Park. You go there too?"

"Our parents."

"Lithuanians used to sit there playing cards and arguing."

At that moment, through the door came a music teacher, Gloria Guido, who owns Guido's Music in Hickory Hills. She was carrying a bouquet of flowers and a yellow birthday card. She leaned over and kissed Anne and wished her happy birthday, while Pompilio Rosiani, 67, Anne's only employee, took Dovas aside, to show him electronic accordions. Anne and Guido chatted a few minutes more, then Guido kissed Anne and started to leave. "Gloria," Anne said. Guido turned. "Don't be a stranger," Anne said. "Love you," Guido said and left.

"So," Anne said, turning back to the boy, "what you thinking?"

"I don't have money," he said.

"How much you got?"

"Like $200, $300."

"You borrow some?"

"No," he said, smiling at her insistence, "but I'll be back, next year."

His sister spoke up, explaining for her brother: "He works at camp, as a music teacher."

"The money I make playing accordion," he said, "I am going to use to buy another accordion."

Anne listened with a flat expression. "How about this black one?"

"Next year," he said.

"Give me $300."

"Next year."

"We'll see."

It seems every now and then this newspaper checks in on Anne Romagnoli. Once, back in 1990, when her husband was alive. Once, a few years after that, after Joe had died and Anne took over, moving the Italo-American Accordion Co. from 51st and Kedzie to Oak Lawn. And once in 2005, to see how Anne was doing, nearly a decade later. This time, we were mostly wondering how an accordion business stays afloat in a recession, and whether the news that the Grammys would no longer recognize polka music had dealt a blow -- at least to morale.

Turns out, Anne didn't know about the Grammys.

But she smiled tightly at the news and shook her head. "I knew," said Roseanne, her younger daughter, 57, then, changing the subject, "Hey, want to see where old accordions go to die?" She led a visitor past the workroom into a long, cavernous space, holding rows of corroded accordions. The Italo-American Accordion Co. makes most of its profit on repairs, Roseanne explained, for older people who find an accordion in the back of their closet and try to nurse it back to health.

Accordions are no longer made at Italo-American. It's a nostalgic business now, holding back inevitable decay.

Said Juliano Milo, a Belgrade-born accordion player who used to teach the instrument at the Old Town School of Folk Music, "We need that place. You have an accordion, it breaks, what choice do you have but see Anne?"

Said Ron Grenda, of the Chicago Accordion Club, "I wish I had the money, I'd buy it and move it close to where I live."

Said Joanne, Anne's daughter, "To this day my mother calls to ask, 'Did you play accordion today?' I'm like, 'Yeah, Ma, I played accordion -- first thing in the morning!' I mean, my mother, she wants this to go on forever and ever. She thinks it's her obligation to the American public to keep it alive."

For years, Anne's daughters have asked her to retire. "Retire to what?" Anne asked. "What do you do with all this stuff?"

She changes the subject. She points at the showroom, at accordions in sparkling Mexican-flag colors and accordions in funereal hues, with names such Cordovo and Monterrey. She's unsteady these days, so she pulled herself across the room by her heels, the wheels beneath her chair squeaking. She took an accordion from a shelf and pointed at its serial number -- 103-49. "That means this was the 103rd accordion made by Italo-American in 1949." Then she began to play, maybe 20 seconds of a happy song, nothing in particular, the instrument tight against her chest, her chin resting on the edge. Rosiani stepped from the repair room: "Hey, Lawrence."

"Lawrence?"

"Welk."

Anne gave a deadpan look. Then she returned to a conversation she'd been having an hour before. "Look, what else can I tell you? If you have an old accordion, put life into it. The accordion is a happy thing. There is no other instrument this self-sufficient. You play guitar, you need people. But you can take an accordion to a picnic. You can't take a trumpet to a picnic! Not that it matters. I run an accordion company, and my great-grandson, he gets a guitar for Christmas. You believe that? Nice, huh?"

"Mom," Roseanne said, "give kids what they want."

"How do they know what they want?" Anne asked, then turned to a visitor. "Listen, I'll play it again. Someone comes in and wants me to play them a song, I always play them a song. I have a broken wrist, but I will play them a song. What else can I do?"
 

Long time since I posted anything -- I did say it would be sporadic -- but I came across this article written by fellow (and she not be a fella) accordion player Edel McLaughlin. A good read and I get a mention... Thanks Edel!!
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THE PIANO BOX: PRESSING ON
EDEL MCLAUGHLIN
Journal of Irish Music / January 2006
Changing attitudes towards the piano accordion in Irish traditional music.



The piano accordion – or piano box – has provoked a variety of reactions over the years within Irish traditional music. Often, in the context of a session, it has suffered from negative attitudes among other musicians, resulting in a certain stigma attached to playing the instrument. I have encountered fellow musicians who would describe the piano box as a ‘JCB’ even before the performer has an opportunity to sound a note! However, there is evidence that attitudes may finally be changing.

The piano box has for long been in vogue with céilí bands, most notably during the 1950s and 60s. Traditional musician Tomás Ó Canainn played the piano box as his main instrument as a member of the Liverpool Céilí Band at that time. In his thirties, however, Tomás encountered Seán Ó Riada at University College Cork. Ó Riada had a strong influence on Ó Canainn’s decision to abandon his accordion in favour of a more ‘acceptable’ traditional instrument, the uilleann pipes, the instrument with which Ó Canainn is most strongly associated today.

Ó Riada had dogmatic opinions concerning the use of piano accordion within traditional music. In his 1960s radio series Our Musical Heritage he claimed that all accordion players were affected, in some way, by laziness! The focus of his argument was that, unlike playing a fiddle or flute, for example, where the performer creates the sound they produce, an accordion player can simply press a key to produce a musical sound. This to him meant the accordion was an ‘inauthentic’ instrument. He openly stated his contempt for the so-called mechanical nature of the piano accordion, and described the instrument as ‘the greatest abomination of them all…’, concluding that ‘Nothing could be further from the spirit of Irish music.’

In his preface to the printed version of the lectures, Tomás Ó Canainn mentioned how the harsh nature of the above statements caused ructions among many accordionists at the time. Interestingly, Ó Canainn shares his experience of confronting Ó Riada on the subject, whose simple response was that sometimes one must overstate their argument in order to make sure their voice is heard. At this point, I could remind readers that Ó Riada himself chose to play the harpsichord as his instrument within Ceoltóirí Cualann – his ‘ideal’ traditional ensemble. In a similar vein to the accordion, the harpsichord produces sound when the performer presses a key on the keyboard. In this way, the mechanical nature of the harpsichord is not unlike the accordion. It seems to me that, in this case, Ó Riada contradicted his theory of traditional music with his practice.

As an experienced piano-box player myself, I feel that the piano accordion is accepted much more widely in some places rather than others. For example, it is largely accepted by Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann. The piano accordion features alongside other instruments in terms of their annual Fleadh Cheoil competitions and Scoil Éigse workshops, as well as their examinations and the teacher-training programme, Teastas i dTeagasc Ceolta Tíre. It could be said that the piano box is not fully recognised in that it is not often represented on CCÉ tours – which do in fact cater for button accordion and concertina – but overall CCÉ has to receive credit for a largely positive attitude towards the piano box. On the other hand, the piano accordion is still not an instrument that is taught at the Willie Clancy Summer School, which suggests the organisers of the festival do not recognise the piano accordion as an instrument worthy of teaching.

Changes in attitude towards the use of piano accordion have come about, however, as a result of the work of some excellent soloists and some recent recordings on the instrument. Names such as Alan Kelly, Jimmy Keane, Mirella Murray, Phil Cunningham and Karen Tweed spring to mind for their brilliant contributions to the body of recorded piano-box music. What makes these performers stand out is the way in which they approach the instrument as a means of expressing their musicality. They display an admirable degree of knowledge and appreciation of the sensitivity of the instrument. Their box playing is subtle yet powerful; confident yet not forceful in its nature. These musicians know their instrument well; they have control over its capabilities and know its downfalls. They will negotiate elements such as bellow movement, volume, tone and rhythm in order to create the best possible sound. Group recordings of bands such as Capercaillie (Donald Shaw), Flook (Sarah Allen), The Border Collies (Declan Payne) and Danú (Ciarán Ó Gealbháin) must also be mentioned for the part they have played, as should those who as teachers have done trojan work at local level – Martin Power (Cork), Michael Tennyson (Leeds), Mary Finn (Sligo), and Paul Harrigan (Donegal). Up and coming players are also emerging fast, including Martin Tourish from Donegal who has just released an impressive debut recording.

Although it was once deemed to be an unacceptable instrument that was foreign to the concept of a ‘traditional’ style of playing, the piano accordion has endured a difficult journey whereby it now sits much more comfortably within traditional music practice. The stigma once associated with the use of the instrument has faded and has been replaced by a broader mindset, which promotes inclusion as opposed to exclusion. Considering the high level of success these soloists and recordings have already achieved, we are clearly currently witnessing the beginning of a new era for the piano box.  

Dennis Cahill has become quite the photographer of late. He had his newest pocket camera with him last week at the Tuesday session at Chief O'Neill's. Its one of the new formats called "Micro Four Thirds System" - I think Dennis picked up the Olympus version. It is basically a mini S.L.R. camera

Here is a snap I took of Dennis (by accident if you must know):



He is using it as his jolly looking Christmas card. (I like the empty chair to his left).

Dennis took this one with his camera (on purpose) calling it "end of session." The water is mine, whisky to the man behind the lens, and Martini to Sean Cleland alongside his fiddle.


 

Had a brilliant evening with Joanie Madden and the ladies from Cherish the Ladies (Mary Coogan, Roisin Dillon, Mirella Murray, KT Boyle, and Michelle Burke) along with the dancing crew including Joe Dwyer and Cara Butler, and soundman John Murray. My bohola bandmate Pat Broaders (and his wife Sara) were also in company for the show and after's. CTL performed their Christmas show in Park Forest at the Freedom Hall Theatre, which is a lovely place. The Christmas show was great fun itself with the Ladies playing and performing in stellar fashion. The chat we all had afterward in a hidden treasure of a pub called Freeh's Again in nearby Matteson was a complete blast!

Joanie told me that her family received a letter of thanks from two of the recipients of her late Dad Joe's eye's which went to two blind people who now have regained sight. A marvelous thing and something that we should all consider in our life plans. More information is available here

Years ago I was playing in the second location of the Emerald Isle Pub in Chicago with the late Mike Deignan, founder of the Irish Minstrels. We were in the middle of a set of tunes and I happened to open my eyes while playing, and lo and behold, there was this elderly gentleman weaving his way towards the stage (an apparent victim of half a dozen too many martini's) with the thumb of his right held up over a clinched fist as if he were a camera man scoping out his next shot. He eventually twisted his way to stage where he leaned over and gently placed his thumb on the front of my accordion, smiled, and wove his way back to bar. When I finished playing that set, I took the accordion off and there was this small round orange sticker with the words Organ Donor...
 

Met up with long-time friend Mike Courtney last night in the city. Turns out Mike had an extra ticket to see the Smithereens at the Beverly Arts Center which he kindly talked me into going. A double first time for me. The center itself is one of them modern glass and brick jobeen's with multi-wings over two floors. The 400 seat theater is very comfortable with great sightlines from any point. Acoustically I think it is just a bit too boxy for loud rock music but it would be a grand room for more acoustic based music. Thanks to Mike we had fifth row seats so we got the full blast from the Marshall & Ampeg stacks and the full Pearl drum kit along with the eight dual onstage monitors. (We were too close to the stage to tell, but I imagine it was as loud on stage as it was in the house if not louder...)



Anyway, for the first time seeing/hearing the Smithereen's live, I was quite impressed. It was good old fashioned solid straight forward rock without any of the modern pretenses. And they are definitely a man band -- not a boy band ;-) Nice and steady rhythms laid down by the brilliant drummer Dennis Diken -- for any of you inspiring rock drummers out there he'd be a great role model for you. They rolled out their hits including their #1 Billboard single "Only a Memory" and capped the night with "A Girl Like You." They also threw in a couple of original christmas songs, and for fun, Elvis' version of "Blue Christmas," and Chuck Berry's version of "Run Rudolph Run." Pat DiNizio is an affable front man and an earnest singer who would make a great next door neighbor. Definitely would see them again -- in a larger rock venue or a small rock club. Thanks Courts!
 

Joe Madden died on Friday, November 14, 2008, five days after a tragic fall at his home. Joe is Joanie's Dad. I first met him shortly after meeting Joanie well over thirty years ago. He was a wholeheartedly nice man and a great musician -- always with the warm powerful handshake, quick smile and abundance of kind words.

I know only too well the pain that Joanie and her family are going through right now. I went through the same thing when my Dad, Jimmy "Horse" Keane, died in a construction accident nearly twenty years ago. After meeting the rest of Joanie's siblings, I know they have the fortitude to carry on albeit with a big part of their hearts missing...

Years ago Mick Moloney asked me and the "Horse," to take part in a Father's and Daughter's concert held in NYC -- we were the token father/son combination to appear on stage along with Joe & Joanie Madden, Liz & Kevin Carroll, The Mulivhill's, Mulhaires, and dozen other father/daughter combinations. It was a great night which the Horse appreciated greatly. It was also the first time that Horse met Joe -- Joanie reminded me that at a certain point the two of them went missing at the venue only to appear later with reddened cheeks from making a sizable dent in the bottle of whiskey which somehow made its way into Joe's accordion case! Two Galway men, an ironworker (Horse) and a carpenter (Joe) who both greatly loved their families and music. And both were very proud that their kids played music too. Rest in Peace Joe (and have another sup with the Horse when you see him)...

Here is Earle Hitchner's Irish Echo article on Joe...

Recently completed the first leg of a new show put together by Joanie Madden called "An Irish Homecoming." It features Joanie & Cherish the Ladies, Maura O'Connell, bohola (Pat Broaders and I), Dermot Henry, and a rake of dancers including Joe O'Dwyer and Dan Stacey. Liz Carroll and Daithi Sproule joined us for one of the performances in Orange County CA as well. Needless to stay it is a blast onstage and equally blastatious offstage. More to come in 2009 -- please check out the tour dates listed elsewhere in this site for more information! Some reviews below and in the promo section of bohola as well... 

Cityfolk
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