Irish Music Forever

Links and Bio's

Name of Performer/Group      Page 18

   Great Big Sea    Back to Artist List

Recent Album:    Turn    2000

Great Big Sea was formed in the fishing village of Petty Harbour, Newfoundland (Canada) by vocalist/guitarist Alan Doyle, Sean McCann (tin whistle, bodhran), Bob Hallett (button accordion, fiddle, mandolin) and Darrell Power (bass). In 1991, the quartet began performing Celtic folk inspired equally by the music of the old country and FM radio, even including a Slade cover in their repertoire. Great Big Sea's live performance gained fame in Eastern Canada, as well as Great Britain and Ireland. Warner Music Canada signed the band in 1995 and re-released their self-titled debut album. Their second album up followed in 1996, and their much anticipated third album Play was released in May of 1997. ~ John Bush, All-Music Guide (From CDNOW Biography)
    http://www.cdnow.com/cgi-bin/mserver/from=sr-7401331/pagename=/RP/CDN/FIND/discography.html/ArtistID=GREAT+BIG+SEA/select=music     Official Web Site     I Music Profile     Celtic Heritage Review "Rant and Roar"
    Dirty Linen Article     All Music Guide Bio


Martin    Hayes    Back to Artist List

Recent Album:    Lonesome Touch    1997

Hayes & Cahill Links
    CD NOW     Official Web Site     Ceolas     Celtic Heritage Review "Live in Seattle"
    Celtic Heritage Review "The Lonesome Touch"     Martin Hayes & Dennis Cahill


   Hayes and Cahill    Back to Artist List

Recent Album:    Live In Seattle    1999

Irish fiddle virtuoso Martin Hayes and American guitarist Dennis Cahill possess a rare musical kinship, ranking them among the most memorable partnerships of our era. Together they have garnered international renown for taking traditional music to the very edge of the genre, holding listeners spellbound with their slow-building, fiery performances. The duo is opening the doors of traditional Irish music and releasing its pure, distilled beauty, incorporating sensibilities from the worlds of classical, blues and jazz. The New York Times calls them "a Celtic complement to Steve Reich's quartets or Miles Davis's `Sketches of Spain.'"
Martin Hayes's accomplishments extend far and wide, both artistically and geographically. He has been an All-Ireland fiddle champion six times over, and has taken home a National Entertainment Award, the Irish equivalent to the "Grammy." He and Dennis have also appeared internationally on television and radio, including NBC Nightwatch, PRI's A Prairie Home Companion, and the BBC's Jools Holland Show. The duo has collaborated with Sinead O'Connor, Iarla O Lion ird and photographer Steve Pike in a special stage performance and film of Timothy O'Grady's book I Could Read the Sky, an acclaimed novel of Irish emigration. Since then, Hayes has recorded with Darol Anger and Irish composer Gavin Friday.
Born in Ireland and now residing in Seattle, Martin plays in the slow, lyrical style of his native East County Clare. He grew up playing traditional music with his father, P.J. Hayes, leader of the famed Tulla Ceili Band. The younger fiddler has a great reverence for the old players, "whose music contains the longing and essence that moves you at the level of your soul." Martin brings the same intensity to his own playing, rendering it unique with passion and intimacy.
Dennis Cahill is a master guitarist, versed as well in classical, blues and rock as he is in traditional music. A native of Chicago, he studied at the city's prestigious Music College before becoming an active member of the local music scene. Cahill's innovative accompaniment is acknowledged as being a major breakthrough for guitar in the Irish tradition. In addition to his work with Hayes, Dennis has performed with such renowned fiddlers as Liz Carroll, Eileen Ivers and Kevin Burke.
Martin met Dennis in Chicago when he first moved to the States in the 1980s. They formed a jazz/rock/fusion band called Midnight Court, in which they experimented with a variety of new music styles. Eventually, though, they both turned back to their traditional roots, and after recording two acclaimed solo albums, Hayes began a new musical relationship with Cahill. The news of their riveting, galvanizing performances spread like wildfire on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1997 they released The Lonesome Touch (Green Linnet), a recording that has helped take Irish music beyond the world music realm, exposing its inner meaning in an accessible way to listeners of classical, jazz and modern music
The musical rapport between Hayes and Cahill is so strong that it is often said they appear to be playing one instrument, "working on a seemingly telepathic level," as CMJ describes it. While Martin pursues a melody, Dennis explores the harmony and rhythms within the tunes. He seems to intuitively know Hayes's next move, consistently matching it with astonishing skill and grace. Their live performances weave tunes that stretch up to thirty minutes long, in what Hayes describes as "a three-way conversation between the two of us and the music." (From Green Linnet Biography)
    CD NOW     Official Web Site     Ceolas     Celtic Heritage Review "Live in Seattle"
    Celtic Heritage Review "The Lonesome Touch"     Dirty Linen Article     Martin Hayes & Dennis Cahill


   Horslips    Back to Artist List

Recent Album:    Celtic Collections    1997

At one point in the mid-1970s, Horslips bidded to be Ireland's answer to Steeleye Span. But they also had a shot at being the next Jethro Tull (only a better hard rock outfit), or maybe Genesis, or even Yes in its folkier moments. Those events never quite happened, but Horslips released a half dozen superb albums along the way, becoming Ireland's most acclaimed folk-rock and progressive band.
Horslips was founded in Dublin during 1970 as a quintet playing a brand of folk-based rock music whose only parallel could be found in the early work of Fairport Convention, who themselves had only been together for two or three years. Where Fairport freely mixed British and American folk and folk-rock traditions, however, Horslips drew on their distinctly Irish roots, and were capable of playing straight folk material when the moment called for it, but weren't afraid to turn up loud and hard, in the best art-rock style, on the right songs.
Barry Devlin (bass, vocals), Sean Fean (lead guitar, vocals) Eamonn Carr (drums, vocals), Charles O'Connor (violin, mandolin, vocals), and Jim Lockhart (flute, tin whistle, keyboards, vocals) sounded a bit at different moments like either Genesis or Jethro Tull, depending on the moment, and actually had stronger original material to draw from than Tull did. Fean, in particular, was equally good at playing soft folk-like passages and loud, ringing electric runs on his instrument, and could easily have held his own in a guitar duel with Martin Barre or Steve Howe, among others. But where Tull (after their first album) became exclusively a vehicle for Ian Anderson's wild-man flute antics and his complex, pretentious, satiric and scatological lyrical conceits, Horslips, until their final years, had ample room for each player to show what he did best, and no single member dominated the group. They spent three years gigging constantly in Dublin, tightening and honing their sound to a fine point, and formed their own record company, OATS, to produce and release their debut album, Happy to Meet, Sorry to Part, in 1973.
That first album, with its mixture of traditional Irish folk instruments and a hard art-rock sound recalling the sounds of Genesis from Nursery Cryme and Foxtrot, outsold the work of many established acts in Ireland, and led to a distribution deal with RCA and tours of England and continental Europe. With the release of their second album, The Tain -- a concept album built on Irish mythological sources -- in 1973, Horslips began finding an audience on the other side of the Atlantic as well. Their third album, Dancehall Sweethearts (1974), brought them to the United States and Canada on tour, and they followed this up with The Unfortunate Cup of Tea (1975). Neither of these albums was quite as strong as the first two, and both revealed more of a modern rock sound in their music and songwriting. The group returned to Ireland to take stock of who and what they were and what kind of music they would do.
Horslips returned to their roots with a Christmas album entitled To Drive the Cold Winter Away, released in 1976, which was recorded entirely on acoustic instruments. This record put them back in the center of the folk-rock boom of the 1970s, compared favorably with such English electric folk acts as Steeleye Span (with whom they toured) and Fairport Convention. Additionally, as an Irish electric folk-rock band, even though they weren't overtly political, Horslips hooked into the audience of younger Irish-Americans during a period of wide new ethnic consciousness-raising brought about by the renewed strife in Northern Ireland. They were no more than a cult phenomenon in the U.S.A., never remotely as popular as the Chieftains (who had a decade's head start and a ton of soundtrack appearances to promote their work), even with Atlantic Records releasing their mid-1970s albums, but it was a bigger cult than they would have had in the late 1960s.
In England and Ireland, however, Horslips was a highly successful act, sufficiently popular to justify cutting a double live album that perfectly captured their repertory of this period, if not their sound. The group's next studio record, The Book of Invasions (1977), subtitled "A Celtic Symphony," was, like The Tain, inspired by Irish mythology, this time the story of Tuatha De Danann's conquest of ancient pre-Christian Ireland. Released by Dick James's DJM label (which also picked up their earlier albums in England, as Atlantic had in America), this album marked their only entry on the British charts, at number 39, and also found a dedicated audience in progressive and folk-rock circles in America.
It was an enviable string of releases, but one that the group couldn't sustain. Their next album, Aliens, dealing with the lot of the Irish immigrants to America, was less inventive and exciting, and elicited far less enthusiasm from fans and critics. The odds-and-sods collection Tracks from the Vaults, released in Ireland, was a matter of marking time.
The Man Who Built America marked a major change in Horslips, which was now pretty much in the control of Barry Devlin and Jim Lockhart -- Carr and Fean, with their more folk-oriented approach to music, took a back seat to a more mainstream rock sound. Two additional guitarists, Gus Guest and Declan Sinnott, turned up on the album, which sounded more American and less like Irish folk-based material than any of their prior works -- the title track sounds more like John Cougar Mellencamp, or perhaps even Bruce Springsteen (with Lockhart's flute replacing Clarence's sax, and some gratuitous swirling keyboards) than the work of the group responsible for "The High Reel."
By this time, they were trying to compete in a wholly different idiom and arena, and there wasn't much left of the original Horslips. Short Stories -- Tall Tales (1980) was the last of Horslips' original albums, and was followed by one more concert record culled from their final days, the hard-rocking Belfast Gigs.
Carr and Fean later worked together in an R&B-based band called Zen Alligator before reuniting with Charles O'Connor in a folk outfit called Host, and Fean has recorded with Nikki Sudden and Simon Carmody. Meanwhile, Horslips was the object of two retrospective collections
    CD NOW     Link #1 released in Ireland and England. Fortunately for the group, they retained ownership of their music through the OATS label, and this helped facilitate their reissue on compact disc. ~ Bruce Eder, All-Music Guide (From the CDNOW Biography)     All Music Guide Bio


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