IrishMusicInfo
The Sunday Tribune Weekly Traditional Music Column by Fintan Vallely
991219
Paddy Moloney, creator of The Chieftains and its uilleann piper, must surely top the financial-reward Christmas tree that has had almost forty rings added to it since he began his professional career. Symbolically indicating this perhaps his latest album is Silent Night - A Christmas in Rome, a multi-national, celebration via traditional voices. A long way this from Donnycarney, Dublin, a journey that began with his Co. Laois grandfather who played flute. Paddy began whistle as a child, by the age of eight moving to the uilleann pipes with Leo Rowsome: "but I had a skiffle group too at school, The Three Squares", he says, " I sang, played the ukulele, whistle - and a washboard, with our logo painted on it. And even then I would put a reel on the whistle in at the end of a song." With such symphonic experience paralleling piping, small wonder he found his first meetings with Se‡n î Riada - on JB Keane's The Golden Folk at The Abbey - spellbinding. Association with such as Barney McKenna, Sean Potts and Michael Tubridy led to various groupings, one of them, The Lough Gowna CŽil’ Band having drawn on fiddler Sean Bracken, Stella Seevers, Tony MacMahon, Eamonn De BuitlŽar and dancer/flute player Paddy B‡n î Broin. Duets generated all-Ireland trophies in the 1950s, in addition to his own four under-18 piping victories. Always in unusual combinations, with MacMahon he gained one Oireachtas award, with Barney McKenna on banjo another, again with Anne Walsh on piano. Such personnel were part of the bedrock of î Riada's mould-breaking Ceolt—ir’ Chualann, some joining Moloney's own Chieftains in 1963. Teenage association with Guinness heir Garret Brown confirmed his interest in "the real thing - M‡ire çine Nic Dhonnchadha, the Keanes, Willie Clancy, Jimmy Ennis". Originally a book-keeper with Baxendales builders' suppliers in Capel Street, Moloney moved to Browne's embryonic Claddagh Records in 1968, developing the label and producing some fifty albums in his time. Full time with The Chieftains after 1975 he has led them around the world into associations with many nationalities and genres of music. Melody Maker's 'Group of the year' in 1975, An Irish Evening and Another Country won them Grammies in 1992, as did The Celtic Harp in 1994. Long Black Veil was their firs gold album in 1995; a fifth Grammy came from Santiago in 1997. But Paddy Moloney's own career continues parallel: now doing the soundtrack for Agnes Brown, and, arising out of a Hollywood (LA) production of the Bible, the story of Christmas: "I wanted to bring in my musical cousins from around the world" he says. And so, Paddy Moloney enters his sixth decade of music-making as he began - largely on whistle - but in dramatic Christian procession with six international singers led by M‡ire Brennan spectacularly covering Silent Night.
©Fintan Vallely, IrishMusicInfo.com
Back to Sunday Tribune, 1999 master page