I know there are many musical and artistic events going on during the American Irish version of March Madness in and around St Patrick’s Day. But let me recommend one event that does not require you to leave the house: the documentary film Dennis Cahill: Litir ó Do Chara currently playing on the TG4 player. It is a poignant tribute to the late master guitarist drawn from the letter Martin Hayes addressed to his long-time musical soulmate.
Director Donal O’Conner, himself a fine fiddle player, chose to have other Irish musicians speak admiringly about the guitar player: concertina player, Cormac Begley; singers, Iarla O’Lionaird and Niamh Parsons; fiddlers, Liz Carroll and Caoimhin O’Raghallaigh; accordion player Jimmy Keane; and a posse of guitarists, Seamie O’Dowd, John Doyle and Steve Cooney.
Consequently, not much is heard from Cahill or his playing but his enduring influence is pervasive. The short film features some delightful performances but the guitarists take pride of place. Here’s their symbiotic playing of the O’Carolan melody Sí Bheag Sí Mhór.
And, if that was too beautiful and slow for you, here’s the trio with a gorgeous powerhouse performance of the Bearhaven Lasses & The Morning Dew that did not make it into the film. Thanks to Michael Black for bringing it to my attention with a Facebook post.
The Quiet Man of Irish Music has left the Stage, my own tribute to Dennis Cahill, was offered last year soon after his death. This old blog of mine owes its origin to my attraction to and curiosity about the musical journey of Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill. The first posting back in 2008 was Hayes and Cahill: Recalibrating the Tradition. Enlightenment about playing the music was guaranteed whenever you talked to them. I described Cahill’s accompaniment as taking minimalism to new heights on this album:
His playing becomes a sub-sonic shadow to Hayes’ fiddle on Mulqueen’s. It’s an amazing musical symbiosis. In their collaboration, it often seems like Cahill has the map in his head but Hayes knows the roads and backroads and the negotiated journey is always worthwhile and wondrous.
The Journal of Music published a perceptive review of the film,Every Note To Be Magical. One combination graced by Hayes and Cahill, the Blue Room Quartet, does not get much of a mention in the film. Hayes has said elsewhere that many of the arrangements on The Blue Room album came from Cahill. Myles O’Reilly’s film captures the process of making that amazing albumillustrating many subtle but essential contributions from Dennis Cahill.
The film is available now on the streaming channel ofIrish-speaking television network, TG4. This link will work only if you have downloaded the free TG4 Player.
Vincey Keehan was sidelined by the Covid lockdown but it gave him time to write some new songs and pull some old ones from the bottom drawer. Before he knew it, he had a fine album on his hands, Great Highway. Galwayman Keehan is a vital, long-time node in the San Francisco Bay Area music community. He gathered the village luminaries to produce this lively, lyrical collection of songs, a piece of high-level, homemade art honed over years of playing with like-minded working musicians.
My first impression of these songs with the traveling themes was that Mayo Troubadour, John Hoban, might have a hand in the work. And, sure enough, Hoban gets credited with inspiring Keehan years ago to begin writing songs that were personal and dealt with everyday life. Blended in with memories of childhood and life in Ireland it makes for a memorable mix. Keehan composed all the songs and does most of the singing with help from his son, Michael, and daughter Rosie. The liner notes include a number of beautiful historical family photos.
The album is filled with sturdy, tuneful songs. Any worthy singer-songwriter would be proud to have songs like Working the Streets, Rosmuc Hero, Going Down the Road, The Classic, Argentina or Georges Street. Working the Streets has a measured pathos with Rosie on vocals. Eamonn Flynn on piano, Kyle Alden on guitar, and Dana Lyn on fiddle provide a lovely setting for a sad story. Going Down the Road is a fine country anthem with the pointed refrain,
You call me anytime you’re thinking about the road.
The Classic is a honky-tonk opener inspired by nights at the Classic Ballroom in Gort, Co Galway, Keehan’s home territory. It’s a sketch of his journey from the showbands to traditional music and later emigration to the U.S. The band are firing on all cylinders: the ubiquitous pair of Flynn and Alden; Gas Men regulars Kenny Somerville and Cormac Gannon; and backing vocals from Michael Keehan and Susan Spurlock
Argentina was my favorite song on The Gas Men’s Clement Street album with the touching lines, Although we speak in Spanish now, in Gaelic we sing our songs. Here Mary Noonan takes the lead vocals. It’s a lovely lean arrangement with Colie Moran on acoustic guitar and Paddy Egan on concertina. Another uncluttered song is the ballad, The Lovely Woodlands of Clare, a tribute to Keehan’s niece, who died tragically at a young age.
Rosmuc Hero honors the boxer Sean Mannion. The song tells the poignant, painful portrait of a man’s rise, fall, and redemption. It has a layered lonesome sound with sax, guitar and harmonica. Make It Back is sung vigorously by Michael Keehan, giving Van Morrison a run for his money. Along with Morning, this is a new song developed in street sessions during the Covid lockdown. This song and Pride Comes Before the Fall are wonderfully embroidered by Bill Sparks saxophone playing.
Many of these songs will have longevity and be carried on down the highway by other singers. Kyle Alden shows the way with Georges Street on the album with a solo performance. He applies the style from his W. B. Yeats albums Songs From the Bee-Loud Glade (2011)and Down in the West, Volume I (2013). Yeats might relish lines like,
My mother said my neck would break,
Staring at the Gateaux cakes.
Alden contributes some musical adornment on almost every track and co-produced the album with Keehan.
Another delightful ballad is I Got to Dance with the Rose of Tralee. Rosie Keehan’s other claim to fame was representing San Francisco at the Rose of Tralee Festival in 2014. She also gets her own song Rosie is Going to School, one of Keehan’s early songs. The Blackbird Set is a fine string adventure with the band showing their traditional chops on two mandolins, a fiddle, a concertina, and guitar.
Keehan has been singing trad and folk songs for many years. There are songwriting lessons to be learned from the old songs and Keehan has absorbed them well. He continues his journey down the Great Highway, making all the stops along the way. Like many of us, Keehan found the San Francisco Bay Area is just like the Hotel California: you can check out any time you want, but you can never leave.
The CD launch party has been rescheduled to October 7 at 7:00 pm at The Balboa Theater, 3630 Balboa Street, San Francisco.
Selected Blogiography
For more information on Keehan’s music and performances visit:
Mick Moloney is a giant figure in the Irish music universe. His sudden passing last week at age 77 has left musicians and music lovers all over the world reeling with grief. Coming so quickly on the heels of other major departures, Dennis Cahill, Tony Mac Mahon, and Paddy Moloney, makes this a sad season of mortality. Each represents an enormous loss to the diverse rainforest of Irish music and Moloney is another huge tree whose fall echoes throughout the ecosystem. However, the roots he put down in Ireland and the United States, and the seeds he has sown in many other corners of the world will nourish new growth for years to come. Even his shade will be fertile.
Mick Moloney could be described as a universal unitarian since he did not recognize clear-cut musical borders between Irish, Irish American, folk, and other cultural traditions. The outpouring of eloquent, dignified, and heartfelt tributes on social media has been overwhelming. Many are from musicians who knew him, were mentored or taught by him, had their first performances engineered by him, or were touched by him at critical moments in their development. Many are well-known names, others less so. What is crystal clear, is that every encounter with him was enlightening and uplifting, sometimes life-changing, and often memorable.
He was a brilliantly accomplished musician but his modesty meant that he rarely hogged the limelight, preferring to praise and honor other musicians. He loved ensemble playing and the list of his collaborators is extensive. His style was composed and cool but he wanted always to be known as a banjo-driver.
I met him through his music, initially with The Johnstons whose Colours of the Dawn album was a mind-blowing experience that still has resonance fifty years later. It was one of an early series of ear-opening Irish music performances that stretched from Sean O’Riada, the Clancy Brothers, and The Dubliners to Planxty and Horslips. For many years, my go-to party piece song was The Old Man’s Tale (by Ian Campbell) appropriated from Mick’s rendition on that album. And, I can still sing a couple of verses of The Fields of Vietnam (by Ewan MacColl) from his 1973 solo album, We Have Met Together.
Then there is the song, Kilkelly, composed by Peter Jones from letters sent to his great, great grandfather by his father back in Ireland. I first heard this on the compilation album, Bringing It All Back Home in 1991, played by Moloney, Jimmy Keane and Robbie O’Connell. This poignant song became emotionally powerful for me in 1994 when my father died in Dublin and I did not get home in time to say a last goodbye.
He is an archetypal Good Ancestor who landed in a nurturing family in Limerick and spent summers with his grandparents in Sliabh Luachra, that mysterious space that borders Cork and Kerry whose music belongs to neither county. Heeding the biological imperative to bloom where you are planted, Moloney absorbed the cultural and musical riches around him. When he moved to Pennsylvania in 1973 to study ethnomusicology at the University of Pennsylvania, he sought out, acknowledged, and proclaimed some of the Irish musicians who had toiled in the U.S. for years, notably Ed Reavy, Mike Flanagan, Eugene O’Donnell, and Sean McGlynn. He was determined to honor these living ancestors who kept the music alive in often inhospitable circumstances.
Our paths crossed a few times, most memorably at Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2003 when a Who’s Who of Irish artistic, literary, musical, political, and cultural characters participated in the Reimagining Ireland Conference. Moloney was a compelling, lively, and witty talker and he was in his element at this extraordinary gathering. When he chaired the panel on Irish Music in Charlottesville (an occasion when there really were “good people on both sides” in that gracious city) he opened the session by commenting on the “almost frightening display of punctuality” he was witnessing at an Irish event.
I had some informal interviews with him when he played in the Bay Area. You always knew a little more about music, culture, or social history after a conversation with him. He oozed erudition. In 2016, he performed a program of song, dance, and poetry at the Freight in Berkeley for the centenary of the Irish Rebellion, a pivotal and cathartic moment in modern Irish history. In typical fashion, he was more keen to sing the praises of his fellow musicians that night: Billy McComiskey on button accordion, dance champion Niall O’Leary, and Athena Tergis on fiddle.
I was a very minor figure in his Irish music universe but nevertheless, he generously responded to my requests and messages. We remained in contact via email for many years and I was surprised to find how many messages I had received from Moloney, oftentimes from his adopted home in Bangkok.
Moloney was an unabashed liberal with a life-long passion for social justice. He was woke before it was popular or profitable inspiring Joanie Madden to form the all-women group Cherish The Ladies, still going strong after almost 40 years. He was, as the Irish Times obituary described him, a renaissance man with many strings to his bow. He also received a half-page obituary in The New York Times. His capacity for positive and progressive work in and around the music was immense and he was playing right up to his final days.
In the follow-up publication from the Reimagining Ireland conference, Moloney contributed an insightful and incisive essay on Irish music. He was fundamentally optimistic about its future. The music has preserved a core identity, he argued, while accommodating a variety of outside influences. It has shown itself to have enduring aesthetic value and cultural meaning and thus may be hard to uproot from Ireland’s cultural ecology. Moloney deserves a big share of the credit for that rootedness.
Additional Resources
By Memory Inspired, Mick Moloney Songbook is a riveting series created during the Covid era and available on YouTube. Each episode features a song or tune around which Moloney weaves a tapestry of social, cultural, and historical context. Start with this one but take the time to view them all: you will be enriched and uplifted.
The book on the Charlottesville Conference is:
Re-Imagining Ireland: How a storied island is transforming its politics, economics, religious life, and culture for the twenty-first century. Book and DVD, Edited by Andrew Higgins Wyndham, University of Virginia Press, Virginia & London, 2006. 288 pages.
And I recently found an excellent recording of highlights from that concert posted on YouTube. It’s nicely organized into segments, so you can easily find your favorite Johnstons song.
Eamonn Flynn playing at the Poretta Soul Festival in Italy
Irish singer-songwriter/pianist Eamonn Flynn is making up for pandemic lost time with his recent performance schedule. He has crafted a show titled Dublinesque from his grooving, moving, tuneful Dublin tribute album, Anywhere But Home. I saw this lively, lovely and engaging performance in May at the Back Room in Berkeley with his musical partners Darcy Noonan, Autumn Rhodes, and Hector Brogado.
Now he is bringing an online, solo version to the Freight and Salvage on August 13. Flynn is no stranger to the Freight stage. He’s played there many times over the years with the Black Brothers, Elvin Bishop, and under his own name. The show is online because Flynn is playing and traveling in Europe this summer. Last week, he was in the house band for the 34th annual Poretta Soul Festival in Italy. From San Francisco, the Anthony Paule Soul Orchestra contained, according to Flynn, “an embarrassment of singing riches we are backing up: Omega Rae, Nona Brown, Larry Batiste, Salassie Burke, John Ellison, Mitch Woods, and Chick Rodgers.”
Flynn also spent time teaching kids at the 2nd annual United Irish Cultural Center Summer Camp in June. The wide-ranging program included hip hop dance, drama, coding, sport, improv, and lots of music. And he played music for the Bloomsday Celebration on June 16 at the Mechanics Institute in San Francisco.
Dublinesque is a soulful celebration of Dublin, its music, stories, and history. As Sean Laffey put it in his Irish Music Magazine review of Anywhere But Home: “Dubliners need have no fear. The well is not dry; Flynn is the bard to continue the canon of songs for Dublin because every generation needs its memories and melodies.”
Dennis Cahill died this week at his home in Chicago. His low-key style, superb guitar playing and authoritative musical presence expanded and enriched Irish music. His relationship with Martin Hayes is one of the most enduring and inspiring musical achievements of the past 30 years, one that extended into two other influential groups, The Gloaming and The Martin Hayes Quartet. Accompaniment always seemed like a pale descriptor for his beautiful work.
Dennis Cahill was the quiet man in the Hayes-Cahill partnership. But his silence was studied, voluminous and eloquent. In other settings like workshops or classes, he had plenty to say, much of it pointed, precise and passionate. And, he had a good ear for humor and jokes.
He embodied the traditional value of modesty which takes a particular variation in Irish culture. He never flaunted his universal musical wisdom and experience. It was this very global reach which drew Hayes to him, first as a friend, and later as a harmonic partner. In his recent biography, Hayes describes their second round of playing together on tour in Norway. (There was some serendipity around them becoming a pair.) Instead of becoming a traditional guitarist in a generic sense, he encouraged him, “…to look at these tunes in the way one might imagine a Bach partita or a Beatles song.” The harmonic and chordal side of traditional music is not so clearly defined and Hayes felt that together they could find some unexplored territory.
I had the great privilege, with a cohort of other Bay Area admirers, of seeing their partnership grow and flower over almost thirty years. I saw them play many times in San Francisco and Berkeley before I ever tried to write about their music. One element of their performances I always enjoyed watching was their on-stage communication. Traditional music is full turns, repetitions, not-quite-repetitions, and shifts in cyclical patterns. Rabbit holes of a sort. Someone has to call the changes even in a duo. Early on, Hayes’ signals were broadly visible: the headshake, the direct stare or the half-turn. Over time, though, this communication became subtle, almost imperceptible. Hayes says in his Facebook tribute to Cahill: “There were so many times on stage when you were simply able to read my mind…”
One of my favorite passages in Martin Hayes’ book describes their routine when they drove to gigs, Martin behind the wheel and Dennis on the maps:
We were both OK with long stretches of silence where an hour or two would pass by without either of us saying a word.
This was easy to imagine since in any long-term relationship there is a plateau where people are content to say only what needs saying.
One reality that is painfully illustrated in Martin Hayes’ biography is how precarious a pursuit of artistic integrity can be. There are many years spent playing to small audiences, in cramped venues with relentless travelling and very limited income. There is no guarantee of a safe and successful passage from the noisy stage in the cavernous Fort Mason or the tent in Sebastopol or the old Freight and Salvage in Berkeley.
The last time I saw Cahill play live was in 2018 when Hayes and his Blue Room Quartet were featured at the Freight. I noted that Hayes was, “Doubling down fruitfully on his long association with guitarist Dennis Cahill, Hayes has now created a Quartet..” The full review is found here. One of the duos most memorable shows at the Freight was 10 years ago when sound engineer Tesser Call created a sonic wonder for the enraptured audience.
Interviews with Hayes and Cahill were always enlightening, a colloquium in the finer points of playing music and the creative process. One of my most memorable interviews with the pair also took place at the Freight in 2008. When I asked about how they prepare for concerts, Hayes explained their shows this way:
“Our live performance is sort of its own thing. Whatever happens, happens. They go a certain way. The live show doesn’t vary hugely from night to night, it kind of gradually changes. No two nights are the same –I might like it to be- but some tune will fly and another one won’t. There’s not much you can do about that. You have to feel it out every time.”
Dennis weighed in with this observation:
“And you have to do it that way for two reasons. One, there’s only two of us up there, so you’re very exposed. And if you don’t let it flow, and get in the habit of doing that, you run the risk of becoming your own tribute band –sounding like somebody doing a version of you.”
You could tell from his expression that this was the worst fate he could envisage for them.
Then, he added this acute analogy:
“You have to have a framework and you have to keep it in your head. I think of it as being like one of those chairs you need to assemble –you can put the screws in place but don’t tighten them. Because if you do, it may not fit and you’ll end up with one leg hanging too high in the air. Each piece, each performance has to work like that.”
With exquisite communication and profound intuition, Hayes and Cahill assembled many magical musical chairs over their years together. Hayes says Cahill was one of a kind, a very special blend of talent, humility, grace and good humor. He will be deeply missed by the music, the musicians, the audiences, his family and friends.
A review of Shared Notes: A musical journey by Martin Hayes
Martin Hayes has written a memoir that’s every bit as brilliant, engaging and moving as one of his famous extended performance sets. The Irish fiddle player was forced onto the sidelines by the Covid epidemic in 2020 but that gave him the time and space to complete the book. In his music, he’s a master of time and space and those skills transfer to the flow, structure, and measured pace of the narrative. It’s a substantial and welcome addition to the meager store of good books on Irish music. The photograph shows a selection from my own modest collection with Hayes’ book in pride of place.
His story starts in the heart of a hotbed of traditional music in East Clare. He grew up immersed in that culture working on the family farm, walking to and from school, and absorbing the music organically along with its “doctrine of soulfulness.” Hayes opens with a lovely portrait of his mother who was “an independent-minded, free-thinking spirit.” She had worked as a nurse in the psychiatric hospital in Ennis and as a waitress in an upscale restaurant in London. She had also spent a year training to become a nun, something Hayes did not learn about until his father’s death in 2001. Irish mothers can diligently secure their secrets. She only lasted a year in the convent, emerging with a lifelong suspicion of authority and a watchful eye for hypocrisy.
Like mothers in many traditional cultures, she gave up her ambitions and dreams to nurture and tend to her husband and family. Not to mention feeding the steady stream of musical visitors who came to commune with Martin’s father, PJ Hayes, leader of the famed Tulla Céilí Band. His father was a huge influence on him but he had other sound ancestors like his uncle, Paddy Canny and local fiddler and piper Martin Rochford. Other early musical influences included Tommy Potts, Joe Cooley, Tommy Peoples, Peadar O’Loughlin, Junior Crehan and Tony Mac Mahon.
Hayes has a number of aphorisms that he regularly delivers with style and precision. One of them is, “… the 1970s were the 60s in Ireland.” More sociologically sound than it seems on the surface, Hayes was a teenager in the late 70s so he knows whereof he speaks. Early on, he was a conforming non-conformist, a position that many young Irish people began to adopt in that era. He worried that he was, “… a socially compliant cultural manikin at the cost of a normal teenage life.”
But, wanted or not, social change was coming to rural Ireland in the 1970-80s and Hayes, like many others, took off for elsewhere. He is unsparing in describing the ups and downs of his life journey. He was enamored of the drink for a few years but giving it up brought more clarity and focus to his search for meaning. He ended up for a time living illegally under the radar in Chicago on an expired tourist visa, suffering the embarrassment of being ripped off by a shyster immigration attorney when he tried to become a legal resident. He had his fallings-out with fellow musicians and once smashed his fiddle on the head of band member.
His detailed and loving memories of childhood and adolescence are extraordinary. The book covers the paths not taken. At various points Hayes could have been lost to music by becoming a Fianna Fail political figure or a frozen food salesman or, briefly, a stock market trader in Chicago, or even a college graduate with a business degree (he dropped out after a year.) And his musical journey had some unproductive byways. Like playing banjo for a time in the Tulla Céilí Band, or playing an electric fiddle in a Chicago folk-rock band, Midnight Court, or accompanying ballad singers in a bar band.
At one concert, Hayes has had enough of the audience members who talk and drink noisily during the show. He asks them to leave, offers a refund, and they reluctantly depart. It’s an empowering moment when he exercises his right, with righteous anger, as a performer to play in conditions that suit his musical goals and ambitions.
Hayes has done the work to arrive at an authentic self and a workable philosophy of life. He came through a tough period when he felt he was losing his past, was disengaged from the present, and not creating a future. His personal spiritual search brought him back to the music. Integrity for any musician or artist is complicated, Hayes says, and “Sometimes, we’re just not ready to handle our own gifts.” He writes eloquently about his experiences teaching music where he revels in the mutual learning possibilities in that creative exchange.
He is deeply committed to making his music “invitational,” drawing the audience into emotional participation, a reciprocity that can be transcendent. Many older musicians frowned upon stage craft but Hayes found that he had to grapple with the dynamics of performance to bring his playing up to the highest possible levels.
Hayes is the preeminent exponent of Irish traditional music in the world. He has transcended his status as an Irish fiddler to achieve parity with other artists, classical and otherwise, in concert halls far beyond Ireland’s borders. He plays, “Music in the universal sense first, and Irish music second.” And performing in more formal settings brings its share of stress. Since traditional musicians don’t usually read music, playing extended pieces with an orchestra can produce a unique kind of terror and sense of inadequacy. Hayes describes this clearly in the book and it matches the experience that Tony Mac Mahon endured in his first performance with the Kronos Quartet.
He brings a high degree of artistic, intellectual and cultural credibility to Irish music, universally defined. Hayes was fortunate to have a long line of ancestors, many with musical abilities. In turn, he has become a good ancestor, taking the long view back and into the future. He is a master practitioner with the right blend of character, charisma and modesty for younger players to emulate. He has done a great deal to expand and enrich Ireland’s cultural capital as a musician himself and as a facilitator of combinations that have led Irish music into new pastures.
In the first post on this blog in 2008, Hayes and Cahill: Recalibrating the tradition, I concluded: “This is quantum music played with a bonsai sensibility, centrifugal explorations of notes and the spaces in between, pulsing with possibility.” Hayes observes that particular notes in tunes carry more weight than others. In Shared Notes, he weighs his words and deploys them as artfully as he draws out the ancient melodies.
Martin Hayes annotated Blogiography
I was fortunate to hear and see and, in time, talk with Hayes as his playing career ascended the heights. Here’s a collection of blog posts on Martin Hayes. He has been a source of great inspiration for my writing over the years. My first piece on Hayes in the San Francisco Irish Herald in September, 2000, was titled Zen and the Art of Fiddle Playing. I first heard him at the San Francisco Celtic Music Festival held each spring for ten years from 1991 under the watchful eye and ear of the late Eddie Stack.
Later, in that same timeframe, I heard him play in various combinations at the Sebastopol Celtic Music which was guided by Cloud Moss. His book honors the memory of those festivals as seminal influences in his playing career. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Hayes made regular appearances in the San Francisco Bay Area. He savored the spaciousness and freedom he experienced in the city and felt that the spirit of Joe Cooley was still in residence.
There was something very fitting about seeing Hayes and Cahill play in church buildings around the area. Apart from the acoustics, the settings induced a certain reverential expectation that was often fulfilled.
Hayes played many times at the legendary Berkeley concert venue, the Freight and Salvage. One of his appearances with Dennis Cahill from 2004 is recorded on the venue’s calendar wall.
One unique evening is recorded here when sound engineer Tesser Call facilitated an acoustic miracle.
Hayes brought every one of his musical groups to Berkeley: twice with The Gloaming, once with his Blue Room Quartet, and once with Masters of the Tradition. Every show was memorable and magical. The two Gloaming concerts are reviewed here:
And here are two insightful reviews of Hayes’ memoir by fellow-fiddle players, Niamh Ni Charra in the Irish Times and Toner Quinn in the Journal of Music.
Two Irish music giants died last month. Tony Mac Mahon was a fervent guardian of the music traditions, an accordion maestro, a folklorist, and communicator par excellence. He lovingly championed the cultural riches of Irish music for his fellow citizens and shared that huge heritage with the world. Paddy Moloney was a genius and a musical entrepreneur, taking the ensemble structure initiated by Seán Ó Riada with Ceoltóirí Chualann to glorious and enduring heights with The Chieftains. With that ebullient band, he passionately presented the cornucopia of Irish music to the world, taking the music out of the pubs and into concert halls.
Both men leave behind immense cultural legacies, preserving and renewing melodic masterpieces and rare tunes, and seeding the revival of Irish traditional music. Mac Mahon was a collector, curator, broadcaster and often provocative commentator. Moloney was a brilliant band leader, a fine composer, and a generous musical partner.
Moloney was a master of the notoriously temperamental uilleann pipes, a skill characterized by the late Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin as akin to wrestling with an octopus. It’s fair to say he popularized octopus wrestling in many surprising corners of the world. Mac Mahon had a famously ambivalent relationship with the accordion and occasionally wished that he could have played the pipes, a more authentic traditional instrument, in his view.
Paddy Moloney’s life was celebrated recently on the RTE radio Rolling Wave show. One of his early achievements (sometimes forgotten with all his subsequent accomplished) was as CEO and producer for Claddagh Records. These included classic records like The Liffey Banks by Tommy Potts and The Star Above the Garter by Dennis Murphy and Julia Clifford. The role Moloney played in expanding Claddagh Records and the work of reinventing the label are described by Siobhán Long in a recent piece in the Irish Times. The Chieftains played regularly in the Bay Area and they were the last live concert I attended before the Covid lockdown in February 2020.
Moloney was often described as an ambassador for Irish music and culture but Mac Mahon had the equally vital role as emissary from the recent and not-so-recent past. He spoke for the vernacular Irish artists who kept the music alive during the worst of times, before and after the state achieved a measure of independence.
The Rolling Wave (another tune Mac Mahon favored) radio show also memorialized his contributions with praise and recollections from Liam O’Connor of the Irish Traditional Music Archive, Noel Hill, a musical partner and soul-mate, and Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh who persuaded Tony to record Farewell to Music, his last album released on Raelach Records in 2016.
Mac Mahon, like Martin Hayes and Iarla Ó Lionáird, served as messengers from our traditional musical history, loyal spokesmen for the ancestors. His message was directed at Ireland and the Irish, his plea echoing Breandán Breathnach, that we love and respect the music because it is our own. Mac Mahon’s lifework may be viewed as a Tabharthas, an offering to the artists who preceded him and his peers. According to Manchán Magan’s fascinating book, Thirty-Two Words for Field, the term also means sacrifice. And there is little doubt that Mac Mahon sacrificed some parts of his life for his work. One of his favorite pieces was the lament The Wounded Huzzar and the title may have resonated with his experience.
O’Connor describes Mac Mahon as a force of nature, a sweet and forceful player who did not value technique but had tons of it. Noel Hill, who played with Tony on the classic recording, I gCnoc na Graí/Knocknagree, noted that their way of thinking about the music was very much aligned. They shared a sadness about what had gone before and the loss of the Irish language. And it could be heard in his playing. Caoimhin O’Raghalaigh said that Mac Mahon felt the real music is in the slow airs. He loved the sean-nós singers. His playing was like brushstrokes bringing out the dramatic depths and spaces in the tunes.
I never had the opportunity to meet Moloney in person, other than the time a few years back I saw him in his favorite Indian restaurant in Glasthule but chose not to intrude on him. I did have a phone interview with him once for a San Francisco Irish Herald article during one of the Chieftain’s almost annual U.S. tours. His “people” offered me ten minutes but Paddy was happy to talk for longer as he bemoaned the lack of proper tea in his Denver hotel room. He was naturally gracious and generous.
I had more time and interactions with Mac Mahon and count myself fortunate to have crossed paths with him as an aspiring music writer. I saw him play two extraordinary concerts with the Kronos Quartet at Stanford University in 2002 and at a Napa winery in 2003. David Harrington of the Kronos Quartet told me, “…when I hear something as remarkable and rare as Tony, I believe it. His playing has an extraordinary singing quality in the way he molds and shapes every note.” He was gracious and eloquent, eager to share his insights about the rich store of traditional music. He had an edge to him but his curmudgeon persona could be brilliant and funny.
He played a number of other concerts at smaller Bay Area venues during his 2002 visit. One was at the Resource Center for Non-Violence in Santa Cruz, hosted by Bob Breheny of the Celtic Music Society of Monterey and recorded by Pete Haworth of Molly’s Revenge fame. Tony was in fine form and partnered up with Japanese guitarist Junji Shirota, who has a refined ear for Irish traditional music. It was a magical evening and Tony responded wholeheartedly to the energy generated by an audience of aficionados who were very familiar with his oeuvre.
I was in attendance and later received the recording from Haworth. I treasure it and listen back frequently. And since it is better to listen to Mac Mahon play than read about him, here’s a rare live recording from that house concert in Santa Cruz. It’s the mournful air Amhrán na Leabhar
Mac Mahon and Moloney had the benefit of growing up marinating in complete universes of traditional Irish culture, one rural and one urban, with music at the heart of it. Both men were strongly committed to uncovering and displaying the shapeliness of the harp tunes, the song-airs, and the music of great, largely unrecorded, older players. They worked at mastering the technical elements of their art and willingly absorbed the codes, customs, and wisdom embedded in that life. That’s what made them such credible messengers and advocates for the tradition. They will live long in our hearts and ears.
The Old Blog Node 