Folk centre

It’s awards time again and the public have cast their votes in the Hot Press Readers’ Poll and the top ten in all categories were printed in last week’s edition. Folk/Trad winner’s Dervish will no doubt be pleased as they make their way around the most populated country on earth, China. The Meteors however only allow the public vote in 6 out of the 16 categories. I’ve never understood the logic of that.
On saying that I wholly welcome the attention being paid to the wealth of talent in Ireland because for too long Irish musicians were ignored in favour of the Anglo American major label acts. I just wonder if Irish Jazz artists will be ever be given a category.

Category Crisis
In both the Hot Press poll and the Meteor Awards the folk/trad category pits folk singers up against trad bands, yet their musical output and style is very different. This needs to be remedied. Bob Dylan wouldn’t have been put in the same category as Led Zeppelin...
In the Hot Press Poll the legendary Christy Moore, and solo singers Roesy and Garry Ó Briain were in the running alongside folk festival headline acts Lúnasa, Kíla, Altan and Planxty, and this year’s favourites Dervish. Nominated in the Meteors Folk/Trad category are two long established trad bands, the reunified Planxty and my own band Kíla, pitted against four folk singers who’ve just released their debut CDs, Mary McPartlan, George Murphy, Declan O’Rourke and Pauline Scanlon. A strange omission is Cara Dillon who won this category last year...
I must admit that I have only heard one of the four nominees singing and that was George Murphy mimicking Luke Kelly and Bob Dylan – so I had to do some research.
Mary McPartlan has been singing since the ‘70s but only turned full time in 2003 to record her debut CD Holland Handcherchief, leaving behind a career as a TV producer. It was she who was behind Flosc and the TG4 National Traditional Music Awards.
Dingle born newcomer Pauline O’Scanlon has had a star-crossed start. Sharon Shanonn saw her singing and was so enthused by her voice that she invited her to come on as a guest singer on tour with her band The Wood Choppers. Hummingbird then decided to record and release her CD Red Colour Sun.
Declan O’Rourke is such a good guitarist that he was asked to play on most of the tracks on Paddy Casey’s CD Living. His debut CD Since Kyabram entered the album charts at number 5 last October. All very interesting and laudable – but why these singers are not in their own category is beyond me...
The BBC Folk Awards are being held on Feb the 5th and Planxty have been nominated alongside Brass Monkey, Bellow Head and The Oysterband, Danú won the award last year, so it’s looking good for the Irish.
Interestingly, the BBC are in favour of being informed and want their audience to think they take their decision making seriously. On their web-site they invite people on to their discussion board with the tantalising “What do you think of the results? Are you smarting from the exclusion of a personal fave? Get talking! Tell us what you think...”

Lack Of Exposure
Awards are a strange thing to traditional musicians, because this music was never driven by PR or the cult of celebrity. There were and will be luminaries, but this is because of what is happening not what makes it happen. On the traditional field, the vast majority of musicians play, not for some eventual goal of mass popularity, but for the enjoyment of those present at that moment.
The music is the star, not the players and this is why it always feels a bit odd when one musician is chosen over another by an outsider whose criteria, it would seem, favours the one that’s better known.
For some of you who have been reading this, the trad article, in Hot Press, news may seem no more relevant than if it was reported that accordionist Dick O’Shea played an entertaining set of hornpipes to students from the Down patrick bible group visiting the holy shrine of Saint David in Bundoran.
But look again. This is our music, Ireland’s unique gift to the world and it is thriving despite generally being light years away from the media’s radar. That you even have an opinion on trad music gives you a cultural depth that many in the Anglo-American world do not have. And without Dick O’Shea and his like, Irish people would be no more interesting than those elsewhere who view the stuff on MTV as the only relevant musical culture...

Cause for celebration/Cause for concern
We in the Trad world, like those in the Jazz world, and those in the classical, electronic and other fields all suffer from the same chronic lack of exposure, yet, resiliently, we continue to play our musical trade to audiences who love the music.
It is a cause for celebration that there are now more traditional musicians playing than there was 100 years ago.
There are also more Traditional CD’s being issued than ever before, Toner Quinn Editor of the JMI (journal of music in Ireland) writes that due to the pressures on young bands to have something to play in order to get gigs and the relative ease with which people can record their music, the standard of too many of these issues are very poor. With no producer and no soundman who understands the music, he worries that the bar is being lowered to an unacceptable level. Food for thought...

Asian Opportunity
Lots of Ireland’s biggest rock stars have investigated this country’s musical heritage to one degree or another.
This trend is continuing with rumours that The Corrs are going to do ‘the album they always wanted to’. I don’t know exactly what this will entail but I do remember their first album had a version of The Horslips’ ‘The High Reel’on it. If the trad community are unlikely be holding their breath, they should be re-examining their tour schedules. Due to their global popularity The Corrs going trad will potentially have a massive affect on exposing traditional music to the billions of Asian teenagers in their audience. I wonder if Dervish are being asked to play Runaway at any of their gigs in China!

And finally, there is a Dutchman by the name of John O’Dreams doing the rounds in Holland, who has the tone and timbre of Christy Moore, and is so good that even Sean Laffey was duped by him. Much like Moore, he’s been singing songs by Irish songwriters Wally Page and John Spillane but is now writing more of his own songs. Well, Elvis had his impersonators so why can’t Christy? b