Hi !
We try to do our best. Please, tell us what you think about our video !
Bienvenue dans le Chiffboard. Je vais faire mon commentaire ci-dessous en anglais, naturellement …
Sorry, but this video and the others on that YouTube channel are bizarre. The singing bears little relationship to the underlying sean nós style, and the heavy French accent of the singer makes the lyrics difficult to understand and the performance cringe-worthy. The use of soprano recorder (mis-identified as simply “flûte”) played in a classical everything-tongued style is inappropriate, and the classical fiddling is unlike Irish fiddle style in bowing and phrasing. The guitar is OK, but the use of a Selmer-style “petite bouche” jazz guitar seems out of place.
The group name “Irish Kind Of” is also kind of bizarre. It’s barely grammatical in English. And instead of communicating what I presume is the intended meaning (“Irlandais, à peu près”), it makes me want to ask: Irish Kind Of … What? 
For what it’s worth, the choice of song (She Moved Through the Fair) and tunes (Din Tarrant’s, Cooley’s) is also typical of non-Irish amateurs. Why these pieces and a few others have ended up as reliable shibboleths I still don’t quite understand, but so it is. They turn up again and again.
I understand the attraction of Irish trad music for non-Irish, classical musicians who are ignorant (meaning simply not knowledgeable) of the tradition. I understand the impulse to explore playing this music using whatever instruments and techniques you already know. What I never quite understand is the desire to put amateurish efforts before the public. Even to the point of creating an MTV-style music video.
To a domestic (in this case, French) audience unfamiliar with the tradition, the effort is basically dishonest IMO, because it presents false performance as the genuine article. It misrepresents the tradition and mis-educates the audience. To knowing musicians and audiences, the effort makes a sort of parody of the tradition, and is implicitly disrespectful.
I’m sorry to be so harsh, but an opinion was asked for. To be fair, these problems are not unique. I’ve heard and seen many American and European groups and bands follow the same course, with the same bizarre results.
By all means, enjoy the music, play privately for yourselves, and improve your knowledge as much or as little as your motivation allows. But you’re not ready to perform publicly as an Irish band or to commercialize your efforts. Especially with a band name that implies an Irish connection, when the performance is not Irish trad at all in style.
Sincerely, I hope these comments will help you understand the negative reaction you are likely to get outside of your own circle. And maybe they will motivate you to think about approaching the music on its own terms. There are many fine French players of Irish trad music, and a background of classical music can be a good starting point. It can be done! Je vous souhaite bon courage dans vos efforts …
Irrespective of whether or not it’s “Irish, kind of” … I think it’s very nice, though I would have liked to be able to understand the lyrics better, the French accent does make it difficult for an English-speaker.
I’ll leave the politics of the presentation and marketing to those who have a better grasp of the concept 
Unlike Mr Guru Sir, I am speechless. I have no constructive criticism to offer. Oh dear. I truly can’t think of anything helpful to say. It makes me feel guilty for hating it so much.
Well, I deliberately omitted to say whether I personally liked the music or not.
The video … no, not at all. It doesn’t work on multiple levels. And the choice of “She Moved Through the Fair” by a French group, given the song’s association with Alan Stivell, seems very derivative.
As for the tunes, I can’t say I dislike them per se. I enjoy good technical proficiency, and the players clearly have that. But context is everything. If this were a generic “Baroque and Folk” group drawing from a variety of musics and interpreting them according to their own classical lights, then a few Irish trad tunes and songs in the mix, even if performed in this non-trad way, could be enjoyable and interesting.
But to me a name like “Irish Kind Of” raises the bar and expectations, even if “Kind Of” is intended as a disclaimer. Hence the criticism.
You fellows certainly know how to encourage newcomers to the tradition, don’t you?
I found nothing to object to in the video. In fact I rather enjoyed the echoes of Stivell’s performance: Chemins de Terre was one of about three LPs I had to listen to in 1973, as a 19-year-old during the long lonely nights while living in a worker’s hostel at an Opel car factory in Germany, and it used to carry me off into a world of dreams and nostalgia. Of course at that time (if you had given me the music) I would have played Lord MacDonald’s on fiddle in similar fashion to the young lady here, though with less skill. So from such beginnings, er, the likes of me can emerge. 
Going back to the video: true, a bit of help with the English pronunciation would help, but as it is the singer does a better job than Stivell, who is famous for massacring la langue de Shakespeare.
So unlike my esteemed colleagues above, I would encourage the band to continue exploring. At some point in the near future, the fiddler would do well to start paying closer attention to how Irish fiddlers make the tunes work, preferably by attending summer schools - the one in Tocane St-Apre would be a good start.
Bonne année à tou(te)s !
Not so completely unlike.
There are certainly some good Francophone ITM resources on the net. The [u]CoFFI board[/u] is just one example that comes to mind.
Thank you for the link MTGuru , we had the same debate about this group on our french forum and most of us didn’t like their music, for the same reasons as you.
This group asked us, like here and on many others forums since a few months, what we thought about their music but we never had any answers. Maybe our answers were not kind enough. 
Ooh! I like that phrase: “sad as a day without bread”. I’m keeping that one. 
Stilted, wooden.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtwQG7XOR-g&feature=related
How can you say that??!?! I mean just look at the expression in those shoulders. Not only that, they’re clearly playing the correct version. They’ve even got it on the stands in front of them just in case they should stray from the true piece, as it was written.
Well, I like this one (not so much the first one in this thread). I did see what appears to be an English horn on a stand - I would love to hear this in an ITM context!
Pat
It’s a personal thing, but I find the inclusion of the third verse completely changes the song. I can think of so many versions where it’s left out, this one included. I prefer it with all four verses, regardless of accent. Bring back verse three!
I can see MTGuru’s points but I do not agree with many of them.
I think the name “Irish.. Kind of” is creative. Nothing wrong with that. They can be French but be Irish in spirit.
I do not hear a “heavy French accent”. I did have trouble understanding the words but I often have trouble understanding the words of native Irish singers too. I think for a French woman (assuming she isn’t bilingual), she did great.
In French, the recorder is called “flute à bec” and the french just call it a flute for short. The flute held horizontally is called a “flute traversiere”. So if you say “flute” it’s just short for both. I can see how this would bother non-French people, but if you’re French it makes perfect sense. Interestly enough on their website it lists the instrument as “whistle” in english. Now that’s stretching it too far! I’ve never seen a recorder in an Irish music tune and while I think that’s weird, I don’t see any harm in it. It did sound very nice.
Overall I think it’s great that a French group is into Irish music and is performing it. It may not be great compared to what you’d hear in Ireland but there probably aren’t many Irish musicians performing in France. If they raise awareness of ITM then I think that’s a good thing.
For the video.. it was “ok”. If I judge it by low budget homemade videos it was quite good. I think it could be better done though (better storyline and better images of things other than the 3 musicians sitting around), but that would cost a lot more money so I can understand and won’t fault them for that.
I encourage them to :
- either play the whistle or call it a recorder
- continue learning ITM
- the singer to work on her pronunciation. I can hear her emulating an Irish accent and it’s not bad but always room for improvement.
PS: My wife (who’s French) calls my whistles “flutes”. I keep reminding her they’re whistles but she keeps calling them flutes…
We can disagree. Ça va. 
But their name is not “Irish … Kind Of”. Or “Irish, Kind Of”, or “Kind Of Irish”. It’s “Irish Kind Of”. Which is literally ungrammatical in print. It either needs a prepositional object or it needs the punctuation. And their classical music, performed from sheet music, displays nothing of the spirit or style of the Irish tradition. That has nothing to do with being French or not.
That’s true, and I was nit-picking a bit. But they call the instrument “flute” on their English language website, too. And in English, the distinction between whistle, recorder and (unqualified) flute is clearly, er, significant. If I went to a concert or bought a recording expecting an Irish flute performance and got a recorder, I think I’d be more than a bit peeved.
I must say, though, the lack of attention to (or cultural knowledge of) these details just seems to me symptomatic of the same lack of concern or knowledge evident in their music.
You know, they’re probably very nice people, and worthy of encouragement to take the right path. But if they are, questionably, newcomers to Irish trad (despite a claimed 10 years of travel and playing in Ireland), they are certainly very experienced conservatory-trained musicians who ought to know better. They’re simply promoting themselves to be something they’re not, and that’s what bothers me. And their acceptance of the designation “The most Irish of French groups” by France TV seems fairly insulting to all the very, very fine French players and students of ITM and traditional music who have made the effort that they haven’t, but who are not self-promoting like them.
Whistles belong to the flute family, but using the word “flute” to call them isn’t clear. In french, a tin whistle should be called a tin whistle because there’s no translation for this word and that’s the way we call it on our forum. I’ve never heard any musician in France calling it a “flute”.
For the simple system flute, we often call it “flute”, “flute irlandaise”, “flûte traditionnelle”, “flûte traditionnelle en bois”… A flute is for us a “flute traversière” (Boehm or simple system), and it’s a mistake to simply call a recorder (flûte à bec) a flute. These instruments are so different !