Number Nine

Just eleven days to go and time for the second installment in my Top Ten Things Not To Miss At Irish Fest This Year.Number 9: Challenging Perceptions.

What's "Irish" music? What kind of music belongs at an Irish festival? Or more precisely, an Irish festival in America? When we meet at our festival director conferences, like the one held in Kansas City this past April, those questions invariably come up. There are those who think that the answers are narrow and well defined: that traditional music of Ireland played by musicians from or descended from Ireland is what we ought to be presenting. A bigger camp would add acts that take that music and tradition and turn it on its ear. Gaelic Storm. The Elders. Black 47. But how about beyond that?

At the Kansas City Irish Fest this year you'll hear a band from Germany (Cara) play traditional Irish and original music with as much soul, passion and skill as you'll find anywhere in Ireland. You'll hear a quartet of French speaking Acadians (Vishten) playing some of the best acoustic traditional Celtic roots music anywhere. And you'll hear a man from the rolling green hills of Donegal (Danny Burns) play funk-infused blues and rock. Is it "Irish" music? You tell me. Does it belong at an Irish festival? Obviously we think so. The Irish diaspora spread far and wide has brought the music of that tiny island with it, and as music should do it's grown, changed, adapted and absorbed.

Barry Stapleton, director of the incredible Ward Irish Music Archive in Milwaukee gives a great talk on Irish traditional music that you should hear sometime if you get a chance. In it he tells you that what we think of as "traditional" music in Ireland in fact dates not much farther back than the mid 19th century. The instruments you'll hear at any good Irish session come from all over the globe. The banjo, brought to America by African slaves and to Ireland by minstrel shows. The bouzouki from Greece. The fiddle from Italy. For that matter the people of Ireland itself, every single of one of them came from somewhere else if you go back far enough.

Anyway, you get my point. I hope you'll come to the Irish Fest stages with open ears and an open mind. In just eleven days, you'll hear what I mean.