Folk column: Can trad keep up with the times?

Having spent the last few minutes of Christmas Day watching the Queen’s speech on a large screen TV in a pub in South Armagh I’m under no illusions but that the world is a greatly changed place.

The question you always have to ask yourself when faced with such incongruous change is whether it’s for better or worse? Traditional music is undergoing some great changes. Dumbing down? Bowing down in face of the zeitgeist? Or simply adapting to fresh musical peers in the way traditional music has always re-invented and refreshed itself in a process of musical osmosis? And is it for better or for worse?
Going through the process of coming up with end of year ‘best of’ lists led me to think, as it does every year, about what it is that keeps me interested in traditional music, and to a large extent I think it’s the directness, at its best an urgent simplicity in the playing, and the way that it’s the actual performance, the one killer take, that matters. You can lob all the overdubs and production tricks in the studio at a piece of traditional music and it’s highly unlikely you’ll achieve anything worth listening to, nothing that will stand up against the integrity and vibrancy of a melody played with passion by a skilled player. My first thought then, in putting together my league table for 2007 was to disregard those records where there was an attempt at blending genres or at bringing in stylistic cues from other forms of music. On reflection though, I realised that there is nothing wrong with looking outside the fold. Traditional musicians have always done this and without traditional musicians from slightly different backgrounds playing together there would never have been bluegrass for example, without those mountainy musicians playing alongside musicians from an African background there would never have been rock and roll. I guess the key factor is that if we’re going to pull in other musical influences they need to have the same essential characteristics as our own tradition – a love of melody, simplicity and a directness and honesty in the playing.
One of the distinguishing features of the Irish tradition has always been the relative lack of importance of the song – bizarre really in a country so obsessed with its literary greatness. Instrumental music is certainly king in the Irish tradition. I think this may be why so many influences are now apparent from jazz playing, that other great mute tradition. My own problem with jazz though is that it has become over-intellectualised and lost much of the passion that was apparent in its earliest recordings. Working in a medium without lyrics means that traditional music really doesn’t have any short cut to that hit of emotional intensity that we all love to feel at the heart of a piece of music. The work is harder and the tools not so sharp so the skill in using them needs to be all the greater.
There’s always a need to keep the horizons open and to keep ourselves receptive to positive influences but I think there is a critical need in Irish traditional music at the moment not to succumb to the temptation to produce ‘crossover’ music in the hope that you will double your audience by blending with another genre. In my experience for every new fan you pick up by straying into a new stylistic area there’s another who’ll lose interest because you’ve lost your key focus. In the low level hysteria surrounding the much trumpeted ‘end of the music business as we know it’ I’ve heard a lot of frantic discussion about the need to ‘be more commercial’ or to ‘cross over into new audiences’. I don’t buy that. If your fans liked what you were doing this time last year there’s not much mileage in the notion that they’ll like you better this year if you change. And the guys who didn’t like you this time last year? They’re hardly going to like you any better if you dilute what you do and try and blend it with something you haven’t fully digested.
We should all try and keep in mind that it’s the music business that’s in crisis, not the music itself. People still wake up every morning and put on some music that they love. People still can’t wait to get out of work in the evening so that they can go home and put on a record they love. People just don’t seem to want that music on shiny five inch plastic discs that much any more. So the answer isn’t to give people less of the music they love, it’s to give them more but to give it to them the way the want it.
The bands out there who seem best set to weather the turbulent times ahead as we adjust the way we listen to music are the bands who have a close bond with the audiences they’ve always played to. Bands like Kila – who have wholeheartedly crossed over into other musical forms – have forged an extremely close bond with their fan base and have an almost sixth sense of what their fans are hungry for. They have something else as well, a depth of talent married to an openness that allows the different members of the band to go off and apply themselves to other projects from which they bring back fresh ideas. When they are at their most successful musically they have the ability not only to embrace other musics but to find common ground and similar energy.
Musicians don’t exist in a vacuum, however much that myth might be attractive to fans. The Sheffield that the Arctic Monkeys grew up in is the same Sheffield as the one that produced Richard Hawley and there’s a rightness in their working together. It’s probably pushing it too far to say that they share a tradition but there is certainly a shared heritage. In Toronto, Broken Social Scene have shown that a fairly loose community of like-minded musicians, the bulk of them playing in different bands, can come together and make outstanding records. To my mind this is the kind of thinking that traditional music needs to embrace. It’s hardly an outlandish or alien concept – the session is the same kind of coming together – and in opening up to the possibility of a community of talented performers playing together to produce the best music they can, there’s more of a chance, in my opinion, to reach a fresh and wider-ranging audience.
So if I have a New Year wish it’s that the traditional musicians of Ireland will apply their not inconsiderable energies and intellects to working together to preserve the raw vitality of the tradition while keeping an openness to any other musician who can bring a matching energy to keep the fire lit.