IrishMusicInfo
The Sunday Tribune Weekly Traditional Music Column by Fintan Vallely
991107
"One of the true glories of Irish Music today", the New York 'Wall St. Journal' is quoted as saying of singer Karan Casey on the poster for her Hot Press HQ concert on Sunday last. The comment is well informed, but one wonders if such an Imperially-authoritative imprimatur is any more meaningful in Dublin than a similar blessing from De Zeit of Germany or The Daily Mail. Yet music-Irishness is an item in the commodity market of Popular music, and that's how scores of young Irish artistes are earning their crust these days. PR or no, within Ireland, and by the standards of her own music canon, Karan Casey - born at Kilmeaden, Co. Waterford, and living now in Cork - is impressive. For a couple of years the lead singer with US group Solas (Deirdre Scanlan from Co. Tipperary is currently with them), the Co. Waterford performer once studied jazz singing in America and now pursues a solo trajectory. Her HQ show was a solid working of Irish traditional song and style in Irish and English, laced together by a politic defined by the finest writing of Woody Guthrie, Leon Rosselson and Ewan McColl. This edgy underlay defines her spot, marking a sense of commitment and consciousness located vaguely between obvious, common decency and workers' rights. But all is addressed with a tongue-in-cheek humour, a tossed-off understatement that could easily conflate the tragedy of the killing of the dual-world selkie of her Scottish opening song with the demand for justice in Guthrie's Pastures of Plenty, or the pain of exile in Sliabh Geal gCua na FŽile. So too the close-to-the-bone, 17th century English revolution referent Ballad of Accounting sat comfortably with a Civil-Rights-aware Billie Halliday song. The awareness of wrong in these too was patched seamlessly to the pain of loss of Wandering Aengus, the triumph over injustice of the Creggan White Hare , and the confidence of the female hero jilted by Roger the Miller,. All were delivered in a deceptively-hushed simplicity rich in passion and easy, unobtrusive melismatic gracings. Playing with Casey were Colm McCaughey on cello, electric bass and guitar, and a magnificent ex-Scullion guitarist Robbie Overson. The cellist's scraped bowing, plucking, full-blood mellowness and growling bass worked harmonically with the singer's voice in moments, masking it periodically, but generally working busily on a highly coloured, minimal tapestry backdrop. Overson picked out detail on this sometimes rhythmically, but generally interpreting melody exquisitely, particularly so on a solo Mn‡ na hƒireann. Such a controlled power in accompaniment occupying the interstices of the lyrics coloured Casey's familiar material differently, marking a development and maturing that is more consistent with singers' constant reworking of familiar place than of instrumentalists' more linear expansion of repertoire.
©Fintan Vallely, IrishMusicInfo.com
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