Lunasa at Clark Art, 1/8/00

by Seth Rogovoy

(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., Jan. 9, 2000) - The Clark Art Institute kicked off its fourth annual winter folk music series on Saturday night with a rousing, standing-room-only performance by the Irish band Lunasa.

Once again, well over 300 concertgoers packed the Clark's cozy auditorium in the middle of winter – it is winter, really – to hear a band that I'm absolutely confident the vast majority had never heard before, in concert or on recording.

This was a tribute both to the Clark's uncanny ability to promote successful events and to the incredible popularity of all things Irish. The title of this winter's music series at the Clark - "Celtic Music for the Millennium" -- appropriates two of the hottest catch-phrases in marketing. From Frank McCourt's memoirs - now a major motion picture - to the mega-hit road show "Riverdance" to a slew of recent movies about Ireland to the rock band U2 to public radio's "Thistle and Shamrock," it's a green-tinged world, and Irish eyes are smiling.

This is partly the triumph of some sophisticated marketing of a "Celtic" revival - a vague, catch-all term which takes the particular spin of "Irish" and universalizes it into an all-inclusive term for a politically-correct era. It also acknowledges the reality that we live in a world where borders, geographic, cultural and otherwise, are fluid and malleable, and that many groups playing Irish music also include musicians and repertoire from outside the Gaelic-speaking territories.

But the success of the Celtic revival is not due to marketing alone. What Irish musicians, and Irish artists in other fields, have succeeded in doing is to tap into a genuine hunger for "authentic" or "folk" culture - the opposite, say, of what Disney/Hollywood has to offer – while carefully tweaking the forms to make them speak with contemporary flair, and, presumably, satisfying the artists' own needs to be creative.

Which brings us back to Lunasa, the all-male, instrumental quintet that exhibited its own unique take on traditional Irish folk music. From the opening bass line of "The Noonday Feast," the group's first number - a thumping ostinato answered with ringing guitar chords - it was clear that Lunasa was going to deliver traditional with a contemporary twist.

With arrangements and dynamics that owed as much to rock music as anything, Lunasa's brand of Irish, while firmly rooted in tradition, was in spirit and execution Irish folk's answer to neo-hippie jam-rock. While melodies were always prevalent, pulsating rhythms driven by double-bassist Trevor Hutchinson and guitarist Donogh Hennessy predominated. This was jigs and reels as pure groove music, and it was easy to imagine it being played at a festival in front of a crowd of tie-dyed noodle dancers.

This isn't to slight the musicians at all. They brought equal parts joy, energy and virtuosity to their performance, one which was full of striking juxtapositions. One medley opened with some rocking guitar chords by Hennessy suggesting Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama," until fiddler Sean Smyth took the reins and sawed a traditional-style melody over it. Kevin Crawford then doubled Smyth's melody line on flute, and eventually Cillian Vallely tripled on pipes, turning the number into a kind of modal, traditional Irish funk music.

The group occasionally favored its more lyrical side, such as on a medley of "O'Carolan's Welcome" and "Rolling in the Barrel," which featured some delicate fingerpicking by Hennessy and a breathy melody by Crawford, who throughout the evening was a gregarious and witty frontman. Dignity, however, was much in evidence in the music, as when Hutchinson bowed mournful bottom lines atop which Smyth wailed melodies, alone or in tandem with one of the other melody players.

But there was plenty throughout the group's two sets of music to leave a staunch traditionalist distraught, seemingly much to the delight of the audience and, for that matter, the musicians, who acknowledged as much several times while introducing songs that they said would never make it into the traditional repertory. One set of reels kicked off with Crawford on bodhran (Irish hand drum) and Hutchinson on bass, the two of them laying down a kind of Irish-folk version of the classic rock 'n' roll Bo Diddley beat, while Hennessy got a washboard effect from his guitar by scraping the strings. Smyth played a whistle melody over the rhythm, before the song exploded into a shimmering, full band number which could have been the missing link between U2 and traditional Irish dance music.

While most of the concert exploited this energetic dynamic, there was enough variety of texture to avoid the feeling of sameness, although the band actually derived strength, within songs and throughout the concert, from a certain amount of repetition – a lesson no doubt learned from funk music. But highlights of the evening also included "January Snows," an air which in form if not exactly in content had a hint of a Romanian doina, or shepherd's lament, with Crawford playing a solo flute melody over a dramatic bowed pedal-point by Hutchinson. A Breton song featured a lyrical, finger-picked solo by Hennessy, an adept, versatile guitarist who could make the instrument play the role of piano one moment and mandolin the next.

Ultimately, whatever the group might have sacrificed in terms of delicacy and lyricism was more than compensated for by its dynamism and virtuosity. This was no archival representation or museum exhibition. The music was full of life, immediacy and spontaneity, bespeaking the characters and personalities of young musicians who grew up in a rock 'n' roll world but who love the old sounds just as well as the new.

[This review originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on Jan. 10, 2000. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 2000. All rights reserved.]

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