JigTime

There are names that people use in Irish traditional music circles that are immortal. In my home county of Donegal most of these names are fiddle players. The Donegal style of playing has something very special and unique about it. It has the feel of the driving wind and rain that can beat hard on our coastline for days on end. It also has the sweetness and melody of a summer’s day.

People have argued for years about the different styles of traditional music up and down the length of Ireland. Not many, especially in Donegal, will argue about who the great fiddlers are. There are just a handful of them. John Doherty is the best known and is of course now a legend. Tommy Peoples’ playing commands a similar amount of respect and reverence.

There is one name that is creeping into those barroom conversations when people talk about “the greats”. Ciaran Tourish has been playing the fiddle since he was a very young lad. In my opinion he is one of the great Donegal fiddle players of all time. But more importantly for me than that. He is a good friend.

I started playing with Ciaran in the Pyros way back when he was just a lad. We got to know each other well over the years. When I moved to London Ciaran had become a full time member of, and one of the driving forces behind Altan. I was a drinker at the time, a pretty serious drinker. It took a long time for me to break the chain and when I did I had left a fair bit of wreckage in my path. A lot of people doubted me when I came out of rehab and tried to start again after not being sober for over 15 years. I don’t blame them either. I had let a lot of people down over the years. Even some of my hard drinking friends had trouble coming to terms with the new me.

But Ciaran never looked at me like that. He did with me what he does with everyone: looks for and finds some good. I was a big fan of Altan and to show that appreciation I would organize parties for them when they came to London. These were “all night”crazy sessions but a lot of fun. Ciaran and I would inevitably end up in a corner of the bar talking nonsense and laughing about the world.

When I moved to live in America, Ciaran once again went the extra step to show his faith in an old friend and invited me on tour with Altan as a tour manager. I did about 5 tours with the band over 4 years and we traveled all over America. It was one of the most fulfilling things I had ever done. It was a lot of work but it never seemed like it. I got to travel with people I loved and listened to amazing music every night.

But on those days off when the band had some down time, the phone would ring in my room and it would be Tourish inviting me to lunch or just keep him company for a drink. And we would laugh about our Pyros days and talk about how we missed our kids when we were on the road.

It is a coincidence that while I am doing these little blog tributes to my fellow Pyros that Altan are now in the same US state as me. I will see Ciaran tomorrow and again feel that rush of pride when he takes a solo. And after the show I will be among friends and especially one who showed a little faith in me when I had very little faith in myself.

Cheers Ciaran. Heres to many more tunes.

So today I finally got Paul Rodden on the phone and what a fun show it was. I enjoyed this one more than any of the other. We talked a lot of nonsense of course as we have done for many years but we did manage to throw in some talk about music and the festival itself. Music today from John Hiatt, Mister Midnight, Frank Tovey and the Pyros and Rory McLeod.

Over many years, especially it seemed on cold wintry nights, we would play a regular Wednesday session in O’Flahertys Bar on Buncrana’s main street. The musicians changed from week to week. Sometimes it would be just Paul Rodden and I, occasionally Dinny McLaughlin, Michael Gallanagh or one of the younger local players like Ciaran Tourish.

At other times there could be twenty great musicians who would appear out of nowhere and a night of magic would suddenly materialize.
I am not sure if I was away for a while playing with another band or just oblivious to the changes around me but one of those nights I looked up and there was a new face in the crowd. He was good too. Kevin Doherty even at that young age had slipped in as quietly and unassuming as he has always been and it seemed like he had been part of these sessions forever.

It wasn’t long before he had been drafted into the Pyros and was brow beaten into playing mandolin for a lot of the tunes. But we could all see so much more than a handy mandolin player in Kevin. His songs had something different. They were about the places and people we knew. Oh there were the love songs of course but they were set in the hills of Donegal and not in the mountains of North Carolina. And in songs like “Joefy Spokes” the characters from Buncrana came alive. Of course when he sang “Slow Song” and quoted a man who was a friend to so many of us, the late great Leo Rodden, we would be suddenly back at the bar listening to Leo impart his wit and wisdom, and complaining about the weather and the powers that be.

But the songs and the singer were bigger than our wee town and soon Kevin was taking Joefy and Leo all over the world with him as a solo artist and with Four Men and a Dog. I even heard a story that one of his songs “Donegal Breeze” was played in space when a cd featuring Mary Black’s version was taken up there on the space shuttle by an astronaut.

It is always a pleasure to play on stage with Kevin. He is one of the good guys, as they say around here. It is easy to compare people with the greats like Dylan but just like Dylan, Kevin writes from what he knows best, his heart.

See you in a couple of weeks Kevin. Lets make time for a slow song!

Or as Samuel Beckett may have written “Waiting for Rodot” On the last two live video-casts I tried to make an impromptu call to the banjo master himself. Paul can be tricky to get hold of at certain times of the day, mainly when the sun is out. He really is a night person.

Many years ago in Liverpool I was staying with him and Nelly in their very cozy basement flat. The kitchen led into a cavernous room under the street that was originally the coal bunker for the main big house. The coal men would dump the coal for the week down the manhole in the street and then the staff would use it to feed the fireplaces all over the house.

It was empty now with just the echoes of a time long gone and the occasional thud of people walking on the street above. So late at night, invariably after a good dinner and some nice wine, maybe Paul and I would play a few tunes to practice for a day’s busking down Bold Street. Then Paul would take his beer or even just a big mug of tea and go out into the cold coal bunker with the banjo. There he would sit and practice a particularly difficult banjo lick he had heard from the bands we were listening to at the time: Country Gazette, Newgrass Revival, Country Cookin’ or one of the legends like Earl Scruggs.

The cold bricks of the bunker reverberated with a strangely rich and warm sound. I fell asleep many times to the sound of the same three notes being plucked over and over until they were perfect. Is it any wonder that today he can sit in the company of any of the great musicians in Irish or Bluegrass music?

I spent a lot of my life in Paul’s company. He is very much the brother I never had. I learned to play guitar because he was learning banjo and needed someone to strum along. We have played music together, recorded with some cool people, drank way too much, travelled all of Europe, cried a few times, and fought too many times as well. But when I look back on it we laughed a lot more than we cried. And still we laugh and play after more than 30 years. On March 28th we will take to the stage together again and feel about as grown up as we did back in Liverpool in the late 70s.

Here is today’s web-cast with a lot of good music. Enjoy!

I have been rather busy recently trying to earn some money from real world projects and of course helping Lupa with her tarot site. That has been a lot of fun as it really stretches what we can do with very little equipment and some fun easy coding.

But a lot of our excitement now is in the upcoming trip home for me, and Lupa’s first ever visit to Ireland. In fact it is her first visit to any European country. So this will be something of a culture shock to her poor brain.

My own brain is filled with the ideas of what silly things we can do with the Pyros in this the last year of the Ar Ais Aris trilogy. Paul Rodden and myself using the power of very cheap phone calls via Skype have talked a lot recently about some fun ideas for songs to do with the Pyros.

It will all be a rush when the time comes. Everyone has a million things do to. Paul alone has a family concert to play in, the big concert on the Friday night with Mícheál Ó Súillabháin, The Pyros gig for two nights and his gig with Mister Midnight on Sunday.

But I suspect that somehow things will fall into place and there will be more good music this year than both previous years combined.

So here is last Friday’s video-cast. I have a few in the bag since I last posted so if you want to watch those again then you can go to my Ustream page and click on any of the Past Clips (there are 21 now)

See you all live on Monday at 10am EST.