IrishMusicInfo
The Sunday Tribune Weekly Traditional Music Column by Fintan Vallely
990502
The Smithfield Ceol centre's opening pitch has been like a new football tactic that might bring a goal in the first minute. A Donegal fiddle concert, a banjo showcase with Gerry O'Connor and John Carty, Sliabh Notes and Naomh Parsons album receptions, a 'listeners' Folk Club on Saturday nights and the launch of the major Northern Fiddler exhibition. The Cobblestone bar up the street (with music sessions running for more than twenty years) has held its own season with celebrations for Liam Weldon's CD and Seamus Tansey's Bardic Apostles. Paying heed to this, the Harcourt Hotel's current PR informs that "a Fine New Traditional Music Bar and Venue is on the Agenda'. About time too, for despite the so-far unchallenged crack and goodwill of its hosting of music for many years it has always had the most appalling acousitcs and background noise. Has the deafening peace of Ceol's auditorium brought it to heel? Like the old Slattery's Tradition Club, one should be able top pay in, have a drink AND hear what is going on. This is actually good for players too - for driven by the pressure to compete with the buzz of a noisy venue they invariably push themselves beyond their limits and lose the grip on artistic intentions. In Ceol too, the oxygen helps, something the Cobblestone should invest in, for a night there demands that one's lungs be scrubbed on a washboard with Parazone the day after. Milwaukee Irish Fest have hosted a concert in Ceol too, to celebrate the venue's patron, collector Francis O'Neill, and to launch their exit from the century. The gratis Miller beer was hardly needed to leaven their line-up of Mick Moloney, Liz Carroll, Zan McLeod, Jerry O'Sullivan. A superb concert that was all the more startling for the precise clarity of the music, an unaccustomed order that we have been brutalised out of by drink-sales-controlled patronisation. Even if it did not need the PA system, the venue's owner Terry Devey is being well advised by RTƒ's Harry Bradshaw in this respect. The oasis quality is all the more obvious since the overall hotel complex's public areas are noisier than College Green at rush-hour. Silence was not on the agenda at the old comrades' Tansey launch where the showman was introduced by Tony MacMahon whose personal choice of readings from the abrasive Bardic Apostles was wisely side-stepped by Mick O'Connor, but compromised out of NŽillidh Mulligan. A night to be remembered this, flute music and goatskin drum from many mouths and hands, ring-mastered and dominated off a chair by the maestro, benefiting from the notoriety of his insensitivity as much as the distinctive regionality and burbling fruitiness of his profuse music. But of course the paradox - it could never have happened in Ceol. Next weekend the fleadh season gets under way in style with five events, while the first Edward Bunting Harp Festival runs workshops and concerts at T’ Chulainn, Mullaghbane, Co. Armagh.
©Fintan Vallely, IrishMusicInfo.com
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