RÓISÍN ELSAFTY
Má bhíonn tú liom bí liom
VERTCD080

This diverse, impressive collection, produced by Dónal Lunny, includes items from contemporary oral tradition, from printed sources and two newly composed songs, one in Irish and one in English. Additionally, one of the traditional items, ‘A Mhuire na nGrás,’ a traditional prayer for protection from Mary, more usually known as a poem, has been set to music in a style reminiscent of old-time Appalachian singing, acknowledging a well-known musical affinity in a stylish, understated manner.

The assured quality and Connemara roots of Róisín Elsafty’s voice are apparent throughout, and nowhere more so than in the great Iorras Aithneach or Carna versions of ‘Róisín Dubh’ of which she sings just three verses, and in ‘Eileanóir a Rún’. Other tracks from one of her regions of heritage include light hearted items such as ‘Pota Mór Fataí’, ‘Píopa Ainde Mhóir’ ‘Mo Cheallachín Fionn’, ‘Cúnla’ and ‘Casadh an tSúgáin,’ from which a line of the chorus provides the CD’s title. The strategy of balancing rhythmic songs with the slower rubato melodies that are regarded as the true heart of sean-nós singing, creates a contrast that successfully draws attention to the latter’s sweeping melodies and complex melismatic decoration, persuading the listener to return to these. The two afore-mentioned items are sung unaccompanied, but, unusually for a rubato piece in the West Galway style, ‘Coinleach Glas an Fhómhair’ is treated to sensitive accompaniment, arranged by Lunny and Elsafty, by the RTÉ concert orchestra with Proinsias Ó Duinn conducting.

On other tracks, exemplary instrumental support is provided by greats such as Ronan Browne, Máirtín O’Connor, Graham Henderson and Lunny himself. The singer’s brother Hassan features on Egyptian tabla and her sisters, Naisrín and Zahrah provide backing vocals. Three tracks in particular stand out for this reviewer in an album full of good things. John Spillane’s ‘Poor Weary Wanderer’ is sung with a wistful pathos perfectly matching its mood. Plangent notes continue in ‘Síle Bheag Ní Chonnalláin,’ breathing new life into this wonderful melody and text from Bunting. Siobhán Armstrong’s accompaniment on the wire-strung Irish harp is superb. ‘Alí: Dílleachtín gan bhrí,’ about a young Iraqi boy, orphaned and crippled by war, is also major highlight. Composed by Treasa Ní Cheannabháin, Róisín Elsafty’s mother, this elemental song packs a tremendous lift, further enhanced by the alternating chorus in Arabic and Irish, despite its harrowing theme.

Geantraí
Ceol den Scoth ón tSraith Teilifíse
Gael Linn CEFDVD189, CEFCD 189

This DVD and CD marks ten years of the TG4 series Geantraí, and is a useful and thoroughly enjoyable compilation documenting the variety and vigour of contemporary Irish traditional music. In fact the timespan documented is quite narrower, as the recordings were all made from 2000-5. It’s an accurate reflection then of the twenty-first-century tradition, with a strong emphasis on instrumental music: only three songs were selected from the series, with the somewhat bizarre inclusion of John Spillane the only really false note on the recording. Given that the other songs are from the sean-nós tradition, the absence of any traditional ballads or songs in English is striking. Also notable is the lack of solos: only Gay McKeown’s evocative air and set piece is a solo in the purest sense, although Gerry O’Connor on banjo also contributes a marvellous bluegrass-tinged set full of mischievous invention.

The sleeve notes hint at these being natural, relaxed, and session-like recordings, but these are really performances recorded in pubs rather than pub performances, and what really comes across is the tremendous level of musicianship among traditional players today. Only the last track seems to approach the looseness of a session, Máirtín O’Connor and Cathal Hayden in particular cutting loose at every opportunity. Overall, though, it’s the breadth and contrast of styles on display that is the recording’s most attractive feature. Providence provide a blistering start, and their driving playing contrasts nicely with the untrammelled exuberance of At the Racket’s barndance and reels, and the steely control of At First Light. The fiddle is particularly well served on the set too, with Donegal highlands from the Campbells; and the precise duets of the Kane sisters and Dana Lyn and Patrick Ourceau are reminiscent of the former classic fiddle partnerships of Killoran and Sweeney, and McGann and Reynolds, although here very much drawing inspiration from the East Galway tradition. There’s lovely contributions from the Clare and Kerry tradition also, and a fine balance between new and more familiar material. While the sound is generally excellent, the flute goes missing on a couple of tracks, but this is a minor flaw, and both DVD and CD are highly recommended – here’s hoping that a complete box-set of the show may appear in the future!

FRANCIS HEERY
Garry Kasparov vs. Deep Blue

The likably strange American comedian Emo Philips once observed that a computer had beaten him in a game of chess. ‘But,’ the comic added, ‘it was no match for me when it came to kick-boxing.’

My sympathies are with Philips in this matter, as they were a decade ago with former Grand Master and youngest-ever World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov, when he suffered the public humiliation of being defeated by IBM’s Deep Blue computer at the end of what had proved to be a suprisingly titantic struggle, pitting prowess against programming, man against machine.

The focus of ex-Trinity Music and Media Technologies Masters student Francis Heery’s new, self-produced, minimally packaged, compact but dense composition is the week-long third encounter between Kasparov and super-computer in New York in 1997. Astonishingly, the notion of computer chess can be dated as far back as 1833, but in the last decade of the last century, when the contention that mathematical algorithms could match and better the mental agility of a human was put to the test, it provoked astonishing pandemonium. Underneath the media frenzy attending the dual conceits of IBM and Kasparov, it was as if something antediluvian and primal had been forced back to the surface to swirl menacingly in the discernible but indescribable woof and warp of this unique conflict.

Heery builds his six-movement work (one for each of the games in the match) from a series of free-flowing algorithms expressed electro-acoustically. The result is something curiously fascinating, if in places – all those sci-fi bleeps and bloops that don’t so much puctuate as puncture tracks four and five! – a touch banal. But perhaps that’s also part of the multiple dualities – man/machine; action/thought; instinctive response/learned response; ego/nemesis – that this clever exercise seeks to describe.

Particularly likable is Heery’s judgement-free engagement with the overwhelming hubris of the contest. Certainly there is enough incident and colour, texture and tonal variation in the piece (it’s not always clear whether this is by compositional design or mathematical default, but nor, essentially, does it matter) to alert you to the intense drama of the event while remaining free of unnecessary rhetorical flourishes. As he maps out the trajectory of individual moves and games, Heery, while intimately involved, also allows himself to step back and simply observe, with the result that each movement moves from simplicity to complexity of expression as the harmonic and textural language incrementally accrue an almost subterranean – or, more accurately, given the inviting liquescence of the music’s surface, a sub-aquatic – aspect.

It is too clumsy to reference ambient music, and too tangential to mention Satie, and Debussy, Riley or Eno, merely in passing, but there is a simple immersive beauty in this hypnotic blend of the allusive and the elusive that is, at just €5.99, worth investigating. Let’s hear more from Heery, please!

Una Hunt
Fallen Leaves from an Irish Album
RTÉ Lyric FM CD109

Una Hunt has long been a champion of forgotten Irish music in the concert hall and on disc. Previous recordings have included forays into overlooked repertoire from both sides of the border, with discs dedicated to the elegantly aged music of Enniskillen-born Joan Trimble on the Marco Polo label, and to the curiously evocative salon music of Limerick’s George Alexander Osborne, for RTÉ Lyric FM.

Now comes a welcome second RTÉ recording of ‘Popular nineteenth-century Irish piano music’, one that requires Hunt to be detective and archaeologist as well as performer. Those who caught her all too brief Music Network tour last October will know what to expect here: a compendium of once popular solo piano pieces, largely unearthed from the National Library of Ireland archives and lovingly dusted down and spruced up by Hunt herself.

An excusable sleight of hand permits the inclusion of three twentieth-century miniatures by Stanford and at least as many from the seventeenth century. Of those, Thomas Augustine Geary’s then innovative use of a folk melody, Aileen Aroon, translates into a beguilingly serene set of variations that owes much to Bach, while Philip Cogan’s nimble Clementi-dedicated Rondo brims over with light-hearted charm. And what a pleasure to hear something by the towering figure of John Field that isn’t a nocturne, his delightfully ornamented Fantasia on Martini’s Andante (in Ernst Pauer’s revision) requiring Hunt to range decoratively across the keyboard.

Other familiar names include William Wallace – whose ‘Venetian Souvenir’, La Gondola, bobs along with politely controlled glee while his Burns setting, Ye Banks and Braes, gently sways like a kilt in a warm summer evening breeze – and, following Hunt’s debut album with RTÉ, George Alexander Osborne, whose Pauline proves to be that most singularly curious of creatures, a nocturne closer in style to Chopin than Field but with a distinct tinge of green ink about it.

It’s to Hunt’s credit that her advocacy of the less familiar names here is every bit as probing, perceptive and positive as for the celebrity names. She tackles the Brahmsian harmonics and sweeping left-hand arpeggios of Michele Esposito’s Op. 59 No 1 Ballade with persuasive relish, delivers Francis Panormo’s Woodlark Rondo with a winning Mozartian brio, and lends eloquence to Arthur O’Leary’s Valse Heureuse, as pleasant an example of late Victorian salon music as you’re likely to find anywhere.

To note that this is a collection of small-scale pieces intended for a domestic audience is not to chastise the music or diminish Hunt’s cleverly proportioned performances, merely to lament the passing of a genre that could produce so much pretty and precise music.

The exemplary recording cleanly foregrounds the piano in the accomodating acoustic of Castlia Hall in Callan, Co Kilkenny, and lends a wholly agreeable immediacy to Hunt’s well-judged performances.

Gerard McChrystal & Craig Ogden
Pluckblow
Meridian CDE84546

Here is a disc full of unexpected atmospheres, the straightlaced classical discipline of its formal duo relationship shot through with the decidedly more relaxed attitudes found in jazz and pleasantly suffused by the easy-going reciprocity one asociates with the best folk music.

Of necessity, Derry-born Gerard McChrystal and Australian Craig Ogden have had to create a repertoire for their peculiar pairing of saxophone and guitar. Pluckblow, their first album together, collates some of the works that have been written for the two, or arranged by them.

The reach is international, with contributions from Australia, Germany, the UK and, happily, substantially, from Ireland. The title track (composed in 2002) courtesy of Belfast man Greg Caffrey, requires McChrystal to dance around Ogden with a teasingly playful rhythmic vitality that polishes the music’s surface sheen to disguise the intricately constructed underpinning. Caffrey’s Skipping (2006) delightfully takes the playfulness one step further.

Ian Wilson’s brittle miniatures Tern and Icarus (both from 2005) are ‘two short songs without words [that follow] the rhythmic and emotional contours’ of two poems by John Burnside. Where Tern takes quiet delight in quotidian detail, Icarus offers a sun-dappled portrait of over-reaching vanity.

Dubliner Ciaran Farrell’s three-movement Shannon Suite began life in 1996 as a piece for solo guitar and was revised last year. It carries itself with a liquescent vitality expressed in a free-flowing pellucid sax line punctuated by the darting rush and becalmed stillness of the guitar, and in which both soloists are admirably nimble and nuanced.

Australian Stuart Greenbaum’s Cloud Eight (1995; revised 2005) is an aspirational dialogue grounded – but not defeated – by brute reality, the resulting melancholia-tinged conversation concluding with an elated reverie that redeems and rewards.

The oddly titled Nemesis (1996-98; revised 2005) by Andy Scott, a 2006 British Composer Award-winner, arranged here by the performers, has guitar replacing the originally conceived vibraphone, with Ogden delivering pinprick jazz and latin pungency against the improvisatory contemporary classical accent demanded of McChrystal.

Scot Billy Cowie’s three Romances (1997; revised 2005) are intimate in scale (all are under two minutes in length) and tone, the guitar an eloquent substitution for the original piano voice. Imagine Dowland re-scored by Peter Maxwell Davies and you’ll come close to the charming sincerity and endearing warmth of these delightful pieces. The mysterious, transformational Incantation (2003) of Englishman Tony Davis is hauntingy delivered and Germany’s Ulrich Schultheiss’s No Rest – a showstopper at last year’s Belfast Festival – concludes the disc in feisty, fun-filled fashion, sax and guitar colourfully sparring with each other.

Amidst the plaudits, I do have one reservation: that the often too under-stated guitar could have been recorded a touch closer or pushed higher in the mix throughout. A small cavil about an otherwise entertaining disc.

John Sillane & Louis de Paor
The Gaelic Hit Factory
EMI, CDGHF1

John Spillane and Louis de Paor’s first album together, The Gaelic Hit Factory, brings a contemporary approach to Irish- language song, blending poetry and music, to provide an organic work of true merit.

Hugo Simberg’s painting of The Wounded Angel is reproduced conscientiously on the album cover to signify the impetus for the work. In this context, the wounded angel represents the plight of the Irish language which many believe to be antiquated (if not extinct), while the two boys helping the angel represent the artists. This image symbolises the artists’ belief that the Irish language can be used in a contemporary context, if given the chance.

The songs on the album are primarily in the Irish language, with four written in a macaronic style (texts written in English and Irish). The themes of this album, though local, have universal appeal. They speak of love, loss and the hardships of life. However, the local voice is particularly evident in the story of Ireland’s exiles described in ‘Bata is Bóthar’ (‘The Stick and the Road’) and through the use of local phrases in ‘Rugadh orm in Corcaigh’ (‘Rebeltown’). The occasional juxtapositioning of the mythical with the real provides an original element to the work. For instance, in ‘The Wounded Hero’ (‘Iníon Deichtine’) the courage of Deichtine’s daughter is recounted in order to instil confidence and determination in a disillusioned boy. (In Irish Mythology, Deichtine is the sister of the King of Ulster, Conchobar Mac Nessa, and the mother of Cúchulainn.)

The diversity of John Spillane’s song-writing ability is evident in the collection of songs on this album, ranging from the lyrical ‘Ag an gCóisir’ (‘At the Party’) to the short punchy phrases of ‘Buille mo Chroí’ (‘The Beat of my Heart’). The collaboration of John Spillane with producer John Reynolds has resulted in the imbedding of Spillane’s folk/trad vocal style into contemporary arrangements, varying from pop to drum ‘n’ bass styles. The lyrics emphasise the rhythm and euphony of the words, adding an extra musical quality to the songs. The seamless interweaving of voice, song and music in ‘Luíonn mo Ghrá’ (‘My Love Lies’) exemplifies the synergy of poet, song-writer and producer in this recording.

The comparison of the daughter on track 4 (‘Inghean’) to a mystical goddess, through the use of English-Egyptian singer Natascha Atlas’ cascading phrases, adds an exotic element to the recording. By reflecting on the ‘other’ in this album, we can recognise the significance of this album as an ‘other’ voice within the world music market. Indeed, John Spillane, Louis de Paor and John Reynolds have succeeded in bringing a local voice to the global market without losing its artistic credibility. The support of EMI for this project confirms that there is a viable market for Irish-language song. Here’s to more Gaelic Hits!

Sami Moukaddem
Resistance: Soul Food
BA42072-012

The themes tackled in Sami Moukaddem’s latest album are as diverse as the musical styles on offer. They range from civil war and American occupation to questions of national identity to the divinity inherent in the humble washing machine. However, Moukaddem’s penchant for the juxtaposition of themes of a serious and humorous nature is also paralleled in his compositions and such contrasts seems to be the pervading element of this album.

Born in Lebanon to a native father and Brazilian mother, Moukaddem spent time in both countries as a child before migrating to Ireland in 1985. His music certainly reflects his roots, combining Arabic as well as a host of international flavours. The opening track ‘Resistance: Gentle Persistence’ begins with a plaintive guitar motif which provides the foundation for the tracks evolution. Although it is further emphasised and developed by clarinet and percussion the original pattern never strays far from its origins. ‘I Didn’t Notice You Weren’t Irish’ injects a comical quantity with its Arabic-infused melody over an Irish jig rhythm. Think Arabic Sliabh Luachra and you are halfway there. When the subsequent track, ‘Chicken Breakout Theme’ is described as a ‘national anthem for a human-free chicken state’ one wonders if Moukaddem has issues with everything. With its pounding rhythms and frenetic guitar accompaniment it seems more at home in a Quentin Tarentino movie than a chicken coup.

The manic nature of ‘Chicken Breakout’ is followed by the melodic but fragile ‘I Thank You’ featuring Róisín Elsafty on vocals. Once again short melodic fragments are to the forefront of this piece and the sparse nature of its arrangement only serves to add to its delicateness. Of particular interest is the delightful ‘Resistance: Joy’ with its clapping rhythm serving as the highlight as well as the intertwining melody shared between Moukaddem’s guitar and Brendan Doyle’s saxophone. The remainder of the album follows a similar pattern of frenetic compositions contrasted with the more serene and this is further reflected in Moukaddem’s sound which ranges from a funk/rock-infused distorted guitar to his more latin-styled acoustic playing.

This album makes for absorbing listening and while some may feel it may not be jazz in its strictest sense, a closer examination reveals the jazz idiom is still to the fore particularly in the manner of the instrumentation and improvisation employed. In fact the recurrence of the word ‘resistance’ throughout the album may be Moukaddem’s defiance at being pigeon-holed into any particular musical sphere. From a large and diverse number of musical influences Moukaddem has still managed to carve out a distinctive voice for himself and this is surely the chief goal of any musician.