Group called Ceilizemer, CD called Shalom Ireland! I only heard one track, flute and bodhran, and it was Irtrad. I wonder what the rest is like. Anyone have it?
Oy
Except for “Planxty Ginsberg”, it looks like they alternate styles. Unfortunately, I can’t get any of the MP3 links to work.
I had a fiddle playing friend who had a band that alternated between Celtic and Cajun. Later she started up another one that also included some Klezmer. Her concerts were never boring.
I can’t imagine this alternating being anything other than disconcerting; being a bit of a melting-pot job, when I think about it, I can’t help but picture two of my uncles having an inconclusive fight for control of the CD remote control at a family party.
That said, klezmer is being successfully fused with lots of different styles at the moment. In this movement, there are some fantastic New York bands, some nifty European outfits and a couple of brilliant Melbourne bands. Those who like Moving Hearts and Kila—not many here I think—might think that Irish music could fruitfully take the same direction. I don’t think these experiments should be thought of as competing with pure drop but simply as another way of moving forward. One problem, though, is that failed attempts at fusion sound excruciating and any experimental movement is bound to have at least as many failures as successes.
De Dannan did this sort of thing in the eighties & nineties. Check out “Ballroom” for some examples. De Dannan actually toured with Andy Stratman, a well-known New York Kletzmer musician, and his band. I think it works quite well, actually, but you’d want a chromatic instrument for it.
Lunasa has recorded at least a couple of Klezmer tunes, right?
Is that not Andy Statman, the well-known New York Bluegrass musician? To quote from his “Teach Yourself Bluegrass Mandolin”:
“I play in a style considered unorthodox and avant-garde by some; however, my playing in steeped in the bluegrass tradition. I’ve been influenced by jazz, rhythm and blues, Balkan and Middle Eastern music. My style introduces new rhythmic and harmonic concepts to bluegrass.”
Old-timey music in the US already modifies various British and Celtic forms, and Bluegrass adds strong a blues/swing influence on top of that, but doesn’t fuse it all together in every song, so that a reel in mixolydian mode can be followed in a set by a ballad in dorian mode, a hornpipe in a major key, a boogie, a blues, a four-part a capella gospel song, a cowboy song, or something more complex and jazzy, like “Dear Old Dixie”, “Little Rock Getaway”, or “Santa Claus” http://www.CoastalFog.net/flatpick/mp3/santacla.mp3 . For my money, it’s a pretty successful approach.
Clifton Chenier’s brand of Zydeco sometimes alternated between rather straight R&B and rather straight Cajun.
When I lived in Taiwan (1964-66), some friends and I formed a band that alternated US/British folk and Bluegrass with Chinese folk songs. The Chinese songs were sung in Mandarin, but played on 5-string banjo, upright bass, and 12-string guitar. We got invited to play in lots of places, and I’m sure that the fact that we played for free (and had a really good-looking Chinese lead singer) had nothing to do with it.
Almost certainly yes. The Andy Statman being referred to had a background in both bluegrass (specifically mandolin) and jazz (saxophone.)
Somewhere I have a set of Statman’s mandolin instruction tapes and booklets that has lessons on both bluegrass and bebop, including at least one lesson contrasting the two different rhythmic approaches. I like a lot of jazz, but playing it is totally beyond me. ITM has its little oddities for me, but at least it seems much, much more accessible than jazz.
Planxty used to delve into some Eastern European stuff, as well as your run of the mill coffee house “folksinger” whinging. While I agree a lot of this cross pollination can be entertaining, doesn’t this say more about the musicians themselves, suggesting that they are not satisfied with ITM; that it isn’t enough for them?
djm
More about the musicians than what? The only way I can think to finish this sentence is with ’ .. than the music’. But the musicians who mix genres aren’t saying anything at all. They’re just playing music that appeals to them. If Donal Lunny chooses to play Irish/jazz rock fusion, as he did with Moving Hearts, is that to be read as a rebuke to all those musicians who choose not to? I think he’d be extremely surprised to hear that view.
Whether you are a purist traditionalist or an experimental innovator seems to me to depend more on temperament than anything else. If a music isn’t big and healthy enough to tolerate both approaches, it’s ready for the museum. IMO, Irish music is big enough, can happily tolerate diversity and isn’t headed for the dinosaur section of the museum any time soon.
Sorry you took that in a negative vein. I simply meant exactly what you’ve said, that the musicians mix the styles of music because they aren’t satisfied by the one style, but feel the need to incorporate other styles that are to their tastes.
Its not about being snobbish or purist or elitist, just that perhaps they don’t find the music in one particular style fulfilling enough. And I put the point out as being opposed to doing various types of fusion to meet any great public demand for these eclectic mixes. It seems very much oriented to the particular batch of musicians as to what styles they choose to incorporate.
djm
No worries djm. I’d say sorry for being picky except this is the board for being picky. I can see now how what you said could be taken that way. The desire to experiment or fuse tells you more about the temperment of the musician than about his or her or anyone else’s views about inherent limitations.
Still, this is a topic people are rightly sensitive about. Some fusion musicians talk as though they were above the music in a way that rightly strikes traditionalists as unwarrantedly arrogant. ‘Jazz is dead’, ‘ITM is for old fogies’, ‘classical music is played out’ sound as though the style exists just for the self expression of the individual and is of no value except as a dated moment in the eternal quest for the next big thing. But most styles that have stood the test of time are very rich veins that a good musician could happily work for a lifetime and not be wasting that life. To make it about temperament and not about the worth of styles is, I think, the right way to view it, so it looks as though we really do agree.