Irish Traditional Music Festival 2007
Festival Schedule and Ticket Prices
Wednesday, September 5th
Opening Night, 8:00 pm "The Spoken Word" $12.00
Thursday, September 6th
8:00 pm - An Irish Circle of Song $12.00
Friday, September 7th
Just Added! Tim Britton will open for LUNASA
- Tim Britton at 7:30 Lunasa Concert 8:00 pm $27.00
- Step-dance workshop 8:00 pm $15.00
Saturday, September 8th
Noon - Seisun (where all are welcome to play together), 1:00 pm to 7:00 pm - Fireside Room Concert $18.00
7:00 pm to 11:00 pm - Evening Concert
Activities throughout the day celebrating all things Irish! Including:
*Food, drink and vendors of Irish and other Celtic items
*An Irish House Party, hosted by Marianne MacDonald
*Music and Dance throughout the day in various performance spaces
Saturday noon to 11 pm including Saturday night concert $22.00
Note: Saturday Only Family Tickets will be available at the door, Adult's $14.00, Children 13-17 $4.00 each
Sunday, September 9th
2:00 pm to whenever! - Dancing the Clare and Kerry Sets $15.00
Tickets available at the door and the following locations:
Crown Trophy, 414 West Ridge Pike, Conshohocken, PA
The Irish Shop, 279 Keswick Ave, Glenside, PA
Vintage Instruments, 1529 Pine St, Philadelphia, PA
McKenna's Irish Shop, 1901 Darby Road, Havertown, PA
Bucks County Folk Music, 40 Sand Rd, New Britain, PA
Todaro's Music, 28 N. Lansdowne Ave, Lansdowne, PA
The Commodore Barry Club
6815 Emlen Street, Phila., PA
This quintet’s exciting, groove-driven acoustic sound makes them one of Irish music’s most highly regarded modern instrumental groups. Revered like rock stars back home, Lúnasa takes traditional Irish instruments, fiddle, pipes, flute and guitar and shifts them into rhythmic overdrive with intricate arrangements.
Seán Smyth – fiddle
Kevin Crawford – flute
Trevor Hutchinson – bass
Paul Meehan – guitar
Cillian Vallely - uilleann pipes, whistles
This isn't your father's Irish band, but it may be just the rhythmic and melodic shot in the arm you long for. The term super-group and Irish music don't often end up linked, but Lúnasa qualifies as the first and perhaps only Celtic super-group around. They prove that traditional music can be as vibrant and adventurous as any genre.
Possibly the hardest touring band in all of Irish music, Lúnasa is celebrating 10 years of worldwide success in 2007! In March, Irish Music Magazine published a major feature celebrating the band’s “Decade of Excellence”.
Lúnasa is at a place where past meets future; when all five ‘Lunasicks’ unite in one ensemble they reveal a spirit few of their contemporaries can equal, choosing from a palette of sounds and moods not available to more mortal players! With the debate raging as to whether or not Irish trad music is suffering from a bout of doldrums, these lads ... at every gig they play ... prove that the patient is hale and hearty! Lúnasa is an experience you shouldn’t miss! For more information about Lúnasa, go to http://www.lunasa.ie/home.php
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Saturday Sept 8th Featured Performers
Robbie O'Connell
Robbie O'Connell was born in Waterford, Ireland and grew up in Carrick-on-Suir, County Tipperary, where his parents had a small hotel. He began to play guitar and sing at age thirteen and soon became a regular performer at the hotel’s weekly folk concerts. He spent a year touring the folk clubs in England before enrolling at University College Dublin where he studied Literature and Philosophy. During school vacations Robbie worked as an Irish entertainer in the U.S.A. A nephew of the Clancy Brothers, he began touring with his uncles in 1977 and recorded 3 albums with them. In 1979 he moved to Franklin, Massachusetts.
With the release, in 1982, of his first solo album, " Close to the Bone," Robbie emerged as an artist of major stature. Soon after, he began touring extensively with Mick Moloney and Jimmy Keane, and also with Eileen Ivers and Seamus Egan in the Green Fields of America. In 1985, the trio's first album, " There were Roses," was released. Robbie also participated in The Festival of Mountain Music and Dance on a five-nation tour of Latin America. In 1987, the trio followed up their very successful first release with the album, " Kilkelly," the title track of which was voted "Best Album Track of the Year" in Ireland. 1989 saw the release of a live concert recording of the Green Fields of America.
Robbie has taught songwriting at the Augusta Heritage Arts Workshop in Elkins, West Virginia, Gaelic Roots Week at Boston College and at the Summer Acoustic Music Week in Boston. His album of original compositions, Love of the Land, was voted the #1 acoustic album of 1989 by WUMB in Boston. In 1991, he won a prestigious Boston Music Award as Outstanding Celtic Act and was also featured in the highly acclaimed TV series "Bringing It All Back Home." In 1992 he performed at Carnegie Hall with the Clancy Brothers and was also seen by an estimated 500 million people worldwide on the telecast of a live tribute to Bob Dylan at Madison Square Garden, a performance that Rolling Stone magazine described as "breathtaking.”
"Never Learned to Dance," his 1993 album of original songs, was critically acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1994 he headlined a celebration of Boston based Irish Music at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. "Older But No Wiser," his last CD with the Clancy Brothers was released on Vanguard in 1995, followed in 1997 by the "Clancy, O'Connell & Clancy CD and in 1998 by "The Wild and Wasteful Ocean" CD with Liam and DÛnal Clancy. " Robbie O'Connell, Live, Humorous Songs" and "All on a Christmas Morning" with the group Aengus, were released in 1998. "Recollections," a twenty-year retrospective collection album was released in 2001. He is currently working on a new CD of original material.
For more information http://www.aoifeclancy.com
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Dónal grew up in the Ring Gaeltacht of Co. Waterford, a place steeped in traditional music and song. Being born into a musical family (his father Liam, being one of the legendary Clancy Brothers) he was exposed to Irish music from an early age. Dónal began his musical career at age 14 performing in venues around his native Waterford. Since then he has recorded two albums with his father Liam and cousin Robbie O'Connell and also has appeared on many other recordings by artists such as Kevin Crawford, Danú, Martin Murray, Mike & Mary Rafferty, Aoife Clancy, Cherish The Ladies, The Clancy Brothers, Eileen Ivers Band and Solas. Dónal now lives in New York.
ALSO PERFORMING SATURDAY
BEGLEY & O'RAGHALLAIGH
West Kerry native Brendan Begley (Breandán Ó Beaglaoich) is one of Ireland's most renowned button accordionists, melodeon players and singers. As long time member of Boys of the Lough and Beginish, Brendan has played the slides and polkas beloved by Kerry dancers with unequalled energy and flair, but can also entrance an audience with soulfully delicate renditions of classic songs in Irish or English. For this concert at the 33rd annual Philadelphia Ceilio Group Festival, he has joined forces with one of the most impressive young fiddlers in Ireland, Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, who drew raves for his precocious debut solo CD Turas go Tir na nÓg and for his more recent collaboration with piping great Mick O'Brien. Caoimhín is noted for his use of non-standard tunings and the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle to bring unusual harmonies and drones into Irish traditional music.
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Kevin Henry (an excerpt from liner notes): About twenty years ago I saw Kevin Henry play the black flute at an early Francis O'Neill Club ceili behind the Pickwick Theater in Park Ridge. He played wtih Michael Flately, then a teenager and a student of his. I had never before heard reels played on the black flute in the breathy West of Ireland "rushing" style. As the pace of the reel accelerated and locked into a fierce chugging rhythm powered by the stamping of their feet and the syncopated heavily accented breaths, the hair on my neck rose in realization that I was witnessing a musical style that my grandfather from Ballaghaderreen might have acknowledged with a passionate, strangled yelp of encouragement and a pounding of his pint on the bar. It was physical, nearly athletic, and passionately ritualistic as if the method of play was an assertion of ancient right, a call to action. It was as if a cultural memory locked in my genes had been released by this sound. I now know from Kevin and his accompanist, Malachy Towey, that the rushing style was very likely indeed a fevered call to action, precipitatied by the cruelty of the landlords, then fostered by the Land League marches. Born in 1929 in the Mayo/Sligo border townlands near the town of Tubbercurry; his brother was born with albinism which allowed him to stay home and practice the fiddle. He was very much in demand for house parties and local dances. Johnny became an inspiration and teacher to other family members; Kevin eventually took up the flute: "I was left handed. Only for that I would be a fiddler. And there was only one fiddle in our family, we couldn't afford another!" He was influenced by bands formed during Michael Davitt's Land League Movement of the 1870's to fight evictions by the English landlords. The bands marched from town to town, accompanied by orators, to draw attention to an eviction. Kevin's father, Thomas, was chairman of the band committee around the turn of the century .Kevin believes that the rushing style of flute playing evolved from these Land League bands. "They didn't play the way you play here with the "tut-tut-tut", they played with a sort of a flow and this rush system, it's a sort of a staccato style of playing, which is the old style of the pipers, what we call Connaught style piping." Kevin was a Wren boy, played the whistle as a kid. In those days the traditional music and dance were entwined, the musicians and the dancers gaining inspiration from one another by their virtuosity and by shouts of encouragement. The dancers would shout such things as, "Put the pigeon on the gate flying!" "He could knock tears out of a stone the way he played that tune!" "Put the cups on the dresser dancing!" "He could blow the ferrules off the flute!" or, "He couldnt blow out a candle, never mind a flute!" "Put more rosin on the bow!" "He's the nearest thing to a flute player as I ever heard!" "He hasn't a note in his little finger!" If they said something bad about you, well you just had to buck up under it and get with it, and so this was one of the ways the dancers helped you along.... Kevin went to work in England in 1947 as a migrant farm laborer, between seasons he worked in the coal pits near Manchester. He took up the war pipes because the flute couldn't be heard in the packed camps and dancehalls where he and a snare drummer would play the Siege of Ennis and some waltzes for 30 minutes before they returned to the modern portion of the dance program. He emigrated after the war to Canada then New York, working as a "sand hog" digging tunnels in New Yourk under extremely dangerous conditions. "There was always the comraderie of fellow Irish immigrants and the solace of music and drink". He moved to Chicago, in part to distance himself from the excessive drinking, but also because it was where the legendary Captain Francis O'Neill had collected 3400 tunes from other displaced Irish, nearly singlehandedly saving the vastly undocumented and quickly disappearing traditional music of Ireland. Unfortunately Irish music was confined to a few dancehalls scattered around the city, there was no music in the taverns and no Irish music organization. In 1956 Kevin was one of the founding members of Chicago's chapter of the Irish Musicians' Association. Some of the original members included Jimmy and Eleanor Neary, Johnny McGreevey, Jimmy Donnelly, Mary Donnelly (now McDonagh), Frank Thornton, and Pat Roche. Kevin and Pauline have four children, Maggie, Mary, Tom and Kevin--all learned to play. Ultimately Kevin made decent wages as an ironworker, laboring on such notable skyscrapers as the John Hancock, the First National Bank and the IBM Building. Rained out at a downtown construction site one day, he and his crew went into a bar where shortly Kevin began reciting. The young crowd quieted down and everybody stopped and listened, moved by his patriotic orations of historical heroes completely unknown to them. "You're shut off! No More!" yelled the bartender. "Why?" a startled Kevin inquired. "Because nobody's drank a thing since you started recitin!" A natural outgrowth of his recitations has been acting, which he first took up as a lad in a production of Sweeney Todd held in an old creamery. He was a member of Chicago's Irish Guild Players. His biggest part, however, came in 1996 when he appeared in the Goodman Theater's production of Eugene O'Neills "A Touch of the Poet" with Brian Dennehy, a role that required he also play the pipes and sing a passage for which he took O'Neill's words and put them to an ancient tune. Raised as he was in the shadow of the 1916 Easter insurrection and the subsequent Civil War, Henry's recitation style shows the patriotic influence from his schoolmasters. His tone is ardent, undeniable, deadly serious, spoken from a moral high ground in the style of the 19th century elocutionists--whether speaking about the injustice of the courts, or the caste system, dangers of drink, or giving the story of a dog with a urination problem. "If you couldn't sing, or you couldn't play, well you had to do something, so you recited what they call a party piece." Kevin notes that his style of playing is disappearing. "They seem to be losing the feel if it, from the old timers. And it has boiled down that...there's only going to be (playing in the style of) Matt Molloy or Seamus Tansey or some other guy...from all the (different) styles that have come down in the old days." "You often heard the old people saying 'he put the nia into it', where nia means splendid nature in the Gaelic. A lot of these players that play so fast--they're not putting emphasis on any particular note. There's no room for heart. The heart is the main thing." -----Justin O'Brien, Chicago, 1998
