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| The Chieftains: A Return to Tradition An article from 1977 by David Pietrusza |
| In taverns dark with age and musty with the aroma of Guinness and Harp, and in concert arenas as prestigious as Carnegie Hall, a new generation of admirers of traditional Irish music has arisen. Generally it is a young crowd. Often it is not even Irish, but in the soulful and poignant melodies it finds something eternal, something which touches upon everyone’s origins.
Often the sound is “rebel”—a collection of ballads challenging the Black and Tans or tearfully rallying all the counties together. Increasingly though, it is straight-out “traditional”—reels and jigs, slides and Kerry polkas played on a collection of truly medieval instruments, tin whistles, fiddles, harps, uilleann pipes, hones, and goatskin drums. And the unchallenged champion of this form of Gaelic music is a seven-man group from Dublin called the Chieftains. They are, wrote a critic for Britain’s Guardian, “superior because of the sheer quality of their playing, the quality of [leader Paddy] Maloney’s arrangements, and the fact that in their music there is room for everyone to improvise so that no two performances are ever the same. The music varies from grand, ancient melodies ... played on the pipes, the fiddle or the harp, through to passages as delicately arranged as if they were for a chamber group, and then boisterous jigs and reels. There is no folk academic stuffiness about their playing, but a spontaneity and vitality that ensures that the oldest of songs are treated with contemporary excitement.” For nearly fifteen years these instrumentalists bided their time, built up their repertoire and their following, turned out five respectably selling albums, scored the sound track for the film Barry Lyndon—and with a strong streak of practicality kept at their old jobs, unwilling to turn fulltime professionals. The group’s leader, Paddy Maloney, a craggy-faced man with a huge Irish grin who pumps away at the uillean or elbow pipes, and Sean Potts, the hand’s tin whistle virtuoso, got the whole venture started when they signed on with Sean O’Riarda’s folk orchestra, Ceolteoiri Chaulann, in 1960. Soon afterwards fiddlers Martin Fay and Sean Keene and Peadar Mercier, who handled the bodhran or goatskin drum—an instrument resembling a giant tambourine—enlisted and the quintet became the Chieftains. They produced their first recording in 1964 but they held on to their positions as postmen, administrators, purchasing agents, and construction foremen, and did not come forth with Chieftains 2 for another five years. Joining eventually were consulting engineer Michael Tubridy, who specializes in the concertina hut also feels at home with the flute and the tin whistle, and Belfast harpist Derek Bell, the only trained musician in the assemblage, who strums an ancient lyre in the style of the harps of Queen Mary and Brian Boru and also doubles on a tiompan or Irish dulcimer and on the more conventional oboe. It was not until their work on the Academy Award, winning soundtrack of the generally ill-fated Barry Lyndon that the Chieftains moved beyond the range of Irish music fanciers and began reaching a far wider audience—an audience so diverse and appreciative that in 1975 Music Maker, the British equivalent of Billboard, named the group, as not only the folk group of the year but the group of the year for all categories—"for making unfashionable music fashionable." They are just as unstylish in appearance as in repertoire. “We look terrible on stage in our sweaters and suits,” admits Paddy Maloney. “We don’t jump around, we have no gimmicks, and we don’t even have any metallic instruments except the steel strings on the harp. But it seems that people are listening more to music now. And we don’t want to play to folk audiences. We wanted to play to rock audiences, the lot.” That ambition may at first seem strange, but the Chieftains have succeeded amazingly well with many varied segments of the music-listening public, from writing the music for the London National Theatre’s first production and playing Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall to touring with Jerry Garcia’s Grateful Dead and rock guitarist Eric Clapton. With their success a singular change has come over the Chieftains—the replacement of Peadar Mercier by Dubliner Kevin Conneff. Aside from giving a slightly more youthful cast, the move accelerates their switch from strictly instrumental performing to occasional vocalizing, a decision presaged on their latest album, Bonaparte’s Retreat, which includes vocals on the title offering by Dolores Keane. Nevertheless, it appears that no other great innovations are envisioned by the Chieftains, a musical aggregation that has arrived this far by a strict adherence to traditional forms. “There is now a tremendous interest in this kind of music,” says Sean Potts, “and we are doing our best to preserve its purity.” “We can go back to our old jobs anytime,” adds Paddy Maloney, “We know exactly what we want, and we’re not going to do it any other way.” |