Get Ready! Lúnasa Are Coming To Town!

By Gwen Orel

Playing with an orchestra was like waterskiing, said Kevin Crawford.

When the Lúnasa flutist tried to waterski in Australia, he just could never get up on the skis.

"The other guys could do it. I'd just topple over, go forward and swallow a lot of water. At one point I decided, I'm going to do this. I held onto the rope. I thought I could slow the boat down," Kevin said with a laugh from his home in Ennis.

"In my own mind that's what I was thinking. I ended upnearly giving myself a hernia at one stage. I was dragged along. There was no point thinking that on my own I could make it go faster or slower!"

When Lúnasa were playing with the RTÉ concert orchestra, Kevin realized he couldn't change the tempo even if he wanted to. Following conductor David Brophy's baton was like "a comfort blanket," he said said.

"I was taken on the journey, not pulled and dragged. It's what I'm most happy with. It's very smooth, and it doesn't push and pull."

The CD "Lúnasa with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra" comes out April 16, and will be out in time for St. Patrick's Day in digital format. The band is touring this month, and will be at the Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center on Thursday, March 7, for two free concerts, one at 7:30 p.m., and one at 9:30 p.m.

A classic Trad band

Get there early, because those seats will disappear soon. The instrumental group are one of the most popular in trad, despite the fact that they have no lead singer. Their rhythmic complexities and harmonic variations keep their arrangements fresh and fascinating. You know how some tunes, even when played by virtuosi (I'm looking at you, De Dannan), begin to feel long after awhile? That never happens with Lúnasa, even though some of their sets can be seven minutes or more. It's because of the care with which the melodies weave around the instruments, which include Seán Smyth's fiddle, Ed Boyd's guitar, Cillian's pipe, and Trevor Hutchinson's double bass. The band debuted in 1997, and have been deeply influential ever since. The bass adds a kind of jazz beat to the group, or maybe rock and roll. Something about its sound both evokes a mystic past - and their name derives from the harvest festival that honors the god Lugh (same festival that Brian Friel called out in his play "Dancing at Lughnasa") - and an ultra-modern vibe.

Classical and trad?

We talked with Kevin and Cillian about the new CD, and the challenges of putting it together. While they are touring the States without an orchestra this time, the fit is so good that we're hoping they will begin playing with symphony orchestras in future, the way Cherish the Ladies and other bands do routinely. For more details on their tour and planned orchestral dates in Ireland, visit the band's website.

Even though the orchestration had been done by Niall Vallely, Cillian's brother and a trad concertina player himself, Kevin wasn't too enthusiastic about the project at first, he said.

"I was pretending to be excited about it, but secretly thinking, 'I've got no interest in playing with a bunch of classical musicians who don't get what we're doing, and I don't get what they're doing,'" he said. "It was like, 'Tell me when to show up at the rehearsals, and it will be fine.'"

Then when he went into the studio to rehearse, "It was like a 'Eureka' moment. As soon as that wall of sound hit... I have to put my hands up and say I knew nothing about the orchestra, the power of the orchestra. I was just totally ignorant, thinking, 'That's for a different world, for movies, or a classical score,' but by God when I heard the sound that was coming from the orchestra around the Lúnasa instrumentation I instantly thought, 'Oh my God, this is really great, this is massive.'"

Cillian was less surprised by what an orchestra could do, because he played in youth orchestras growing up.

"Earlier in my life, I spent years playing classical music, and learned it alongside Irish music from a young age," Cillian said on a break from the Sunday session at The Brass Monkey.

"I spent probably six or seven years playing flute in the South Ulster Youth Orchestra at home. I did flute and saxophone in classical music. So I'd done that." Cillian left the classical world behind completely when he was 18, but, he said, "you always think about it." And unlike Kevin, he can read music easily.

Kevin said about "the dots," or staff notation, "I may as well be looking at a hole in a road."

But reading music isn't all that significant, really, Cillian said. "A child can read music. The bad players can read. Reading is not the sign of a good musician. In traditional music, the tunes are very simple and very repetitive. It's all about how you interpret and actually play it."

Before the collaboration began, Kevin was worried about how it would work. "I did have a fear about the fast, up-tempo music. Bits I'd heard with an orchestra didn't work for me. Some of the parts were less by adding more. I was afraid.

"The secret was that we were lucky enough to have Niall, who understood our music 100 percent, and a conductor, David Brophy, who was able to communicate between the two groups very well.

"The RTÉ orchestra are used to collaborating, but generally they are singer-songwriter based. Mary Black, or Paul Brady. Altan did it, but they worked on the songs predominantly."

Trad and Classical!

What won Kevin over was the way that Niall arranged the music to support the Lúnasa players, rather than mimic them. "Instead of a twee, pretty part, a lot of the time he has them doing a nice rhythmical counterpoint, which leaves room for Seán's fiddle to be in front," Kevin explained. "A lot of time the double bass or fiddle get lost, because there are multiples in an orchestra."

Cillian knew that Niall had been arranging music for trad groups, sometimes chamber groups or 12-piece orchestral groups, because he had played in some of them.

"I came full circle this year, doing Lúnasa and the orchestra. It was completely different playing pipes with the orchestra. It was kind of like being a soloist." Niall, Cillian said, "totally understands our style of playing traditional music. He did a degree in music. He has been writing music in the last few years that is a hybrid." During the two-day rehearsal period, Kevin found that "there was no us and them" between the orchestral players and the band. "It's like we were one big band and enjoying the buzz coming from it."

With such a short rehearsal period, there was no time to listen to the recordings, Kevin said. They rehearsed, recorded twice, and moved onto the next thing. Those two days were even shorter, because they were unionized two days, with coffee breaks every 90 minutes and a 90 minute lunch break, and a day that ended at 4:30. When Kevin spoke with me, he lovingly recalled when each and every coffee break took place.

"Those rules should be put in place for traditional musicians too," he sighed. As should the wonderful food. "We were dining like lords above in RTÉ. The starving artist thing is good for composing, when you need a bit of pain to come up with tunes that will tug at the heartstrings, but when it comes to performance, you need a good feed in your belly."

Along with the food, there were some nuggets of info about Lúnasa music Kevin got to digest by playing with RTÉ.

"We possibly overplay stuff in terms of ornamentation," Kevin said. "I found we had to strip stuff back to make it groove with the orchestra. Some of the embellishments we would naturally throw in were cluttering up the sound."

And then there was that security blanket of letting the orchestra, and Brophy, set the pulse of the rhythm.

Cillian said he played a solo piece that he had to read, that had been arranged for him. Though he left classical music behind, his training helps him "Every bit of knowledge is good. Learning classical music gives you things that help your musical development as a whole. I apply things from both to my teaching," he said. Music theory, chords, time signatures and rhthyms all help open up possibilities in music, he said.

But Irish music is something he can play anywhere. "You can go anywhere and meet people and play, old or young. You can move to a new city in Ireland, England or America, and if you didn't know a single person, you can find an Irish bar with traditional music and meet people, and make friends," Cillian said.

For Kevin, some of those new friends are the musicians in RTÉ. Playing with them "broke down a lot of barriers and removed a lot of stigma I had out of only ignorance.

Lots of the conversation during coffee breaks was, 'How do you guys remember five minutes of music without having any notes in front of you,' and we were the same with them. 'How can you get it right every single time?'"

A true blend of the styles, with trad musicians becoming a bit more set and classical musicians loosening up, could be genius, he said.

Some collaborations are just meant to be.

The David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center is at 61 West 62nd Street.
For more information visit their website.

Gwen Orel runs the blog and podcast New York Irish Arts