Mick Moloney And The Celtic World

By Gwen Orel

Is there anyone in music that Mick Moloney doesn't know?

Strike that.

Is there anything about music he doesn't know?

After a few hours in his company, you'll know more too. Mick imparts facts, and introduces sounds, so slyly you feel as if you've been chilling over a pint, or cappucino.

It's a great way to teach, and to entertain. His students at NYU are lucky.

This past Saturday, Mick Moloney hosted "Celtic Appalachia II," the second variety concert at Symphony Space that showcased American and Celtic musicians.

On Wednesday, Mick will perform in "Vintage Bowery," at The Bowery Hotel, a benefit to celebrate the designation of The Bowery Historic District to the National Register of Historic Places.

"Every famous 19th Century performer was connected to the Bowery in some way," Mick said. Tickets are available at twobridges.givezooks.com/events/vintage-bowery.

One event celebrates the sound of Celts in Scotland, Ireland, Brittany and America, and the other looks at the glory days of New York's bowery - but they share Mick, who takes the audience on a an exhilarating ride.

Mick has been hosting large variety shows for a few years now in the city.

Earlier offerings have included "If it wasn't for the Irish and the Jews," (reviewed here), "A Tribute to Harrigan and Hart," and "A Tribute to the Famous McNultys." (an interview with him about that one, in Speakeasy, the culture blog of the Wall Street Journal, is here).

At intermission Saturday night, which came at about 90 minutes in, I heard someone enthuse about how Mick had zipped through hundreds of years of history in ten minutes so clearly.

Mick has a Ph.D. in folklore, and has been awarded a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

You see those skills in his ease with reeling out the facts.

He is the mastermind behind Irish Arts Center's invigorating "Masters in Collaboration" program, which has paired Joanie Madden and Seamus Begley; John Doyle and Andy Irvine, and will put together Karan Casey and Aoife O'Donovan on April 5, 6 and 7.

All that knowledge would be frightening if Mick didn't also make it endearing.

One of my all-time favorite moments at one of his concerts was when a jet-lagged Mick introduced a band that wasn't there - Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks, not due onstage yet. "There they were, gone," one could say.

Without missing a beat, Mick found the right place in his notes, said "delete all that," and kept talking. The show must go on. It made everyone smile.

Mick's easy, relaxed style says, "We're all in this together." He reels off a historical fact as casually as if he were telling a taxi driver which side of the street to pull up on.

The show last Saturday will go on again: Irish Arts Center's Artistic Director Aidan Connolly encouraged the audience to reserve their tickets for "Celtic Appalachia III" now.

Celtic Appalachia II

The amount of talent onstage Saturday night was almost comical.

Those performing included the Green Fields of America, Tommy Sands and his son Fionán, English singer John Roberts, Carter family descendant Dale Jett and his trio Hello Stranger, Scottish lowland piper Will Woodson, Owen and Moley Ó Súillebháin, and a Breton ensemble of musicians and dancers that were 92-strong.

Dancers Parker Hall, accompanied by Grammy-nominated cellist Dave Eggar, and Niall O'Leary were there too.

Because St. Patrick's Day fell on Sunday this year, the parade was on Saturday, and Saturday was when a lot of the big parties happened.

Lots of people were wearing green at Symphony Space, including Irish Arts Center Executive Director Pauline Turley.

Mick reminded the audience that when he was growing up, St. Patrick's Day in Ireland was a day of obligation, and all the pubs were closed.

Mick situated us by explaining that the Celts originated at the foot of the Himalayas 2,500 years ago. Because the Celts couldn't agree on anything, he said, they ended up being "pushed from pillar to post" and that's how we find some in Ireland, some in Brittany, some in Galicia. Along with their argumentative nature, the Celts are also known for the arts, said Mick.

And with that, he joined Green Fields of America, who opened the show. Mick originally founded The Green Fields of America in 1978, launching the careers of Eileen Ivers and Michael Flatley, among others.

It was the first band that consciously blended Irish-American and Irish performers.

The Green Fields line up last night included Mick on banjo and vocals, Brendan Dolan on keyboard, Dana Lyn and Athena Tergis on fiddle, Liz Hanley on fiddle and vocals, Billy McComiskey on accordion, and Joey Abarta on uillean pipes. They were joined by tap dancer Parker Hall, who was in "Riverdance," and Irish stepdancer Niall O'Leary.

Standouts from the Green Fields set included Liz doing "The Bonny Light Horseman," a track from her new solo CD "The Ecstasy of St. Cecelia," and dance-offs between Parker and Niall.

Parker also did a duet with cellist Dave Eggar, whom Mick said had not been on the bill until just a few hours before.

Eggar's playful virtuosity was unforgettable, as was watching him riff with Hall's quick-moving feet.

Mick explained that American tap dance blends English clogging, Irish step dance and African shuffle, and when Parker said to Dave, "Give me one last hoe-down," the audience leaned forward in anticipation.

Mick singing "McNally's Row of Flats," a funny song by Ned Harrigan about the lower east side, written for the musical "McSorley's Inflation" (a sigh and then a little cheer went up when Mick mentioned McSorley's Ale House in his introduction) brought us the Irish in America, as did a patriotic Civil War song called "The Irish Volunteer."

Athena Tergis played Scottish fiddle growing up, and she accompanied Scottish border piper Will Woodson for, as he put it, "the quest to play all Scottish tune types in 10 minutes."

It was very clear how much Scottish fiddle imitates the pipe when they played together - the ornaments are different, the styles are different. Will is an American who studied in Glasgow.

Mick said that he found him when Will emailed him, so Mick brought him to his class. "I was blown away," Mick told me. "He has a very deep knowledge of the music."

After Will Woodson's nimble performance, Mick introduced the group Hello Stranger by talking about his own time visiting The Crooked Road, Virginia's Heritage Music Trail.

Dale Jett is a descendant of The Carter Family, Alvin Carter (1891-1960), his wife Sara Carer (1898-1979), and his sister-in-law Maybelle Carter (1909-1978) who began recording in the 20s. Jett's trio included Jett on vocals and guitar, his wife Teresa Jett on double bass, and Oscar Harris on autoharp.

"We're the Appalachian part of the evening," Dale said in a strong and charming twang. "We thought we'd fool you with our accent, but..."

His quip brought up for me one of my few critiques of the show. The connecting thread of the story of the Celts was Mick's narration.

Engaging though it was, the narration is still telling us, instead of showing us. The slide-shows that accompanied earlier extravaganzas sometimes made me feel like I should have a little desk on the chair, but I missed them here.

What Mick says about how Scots-Irish settled in Appalachia and became hillbillys, named for William of Orange, is fascinating stuff - and it goes by too fast. Could we not have a little moving arrow?

Many Appalachian songs have their roots in Celtic ones, including the "broken token" song (I personally knew Flatt & Scruggs' "Soldier's Return" long before "Dark Eyed Sailor"), and it would be enlightening to hear a song make its journey too.

But these observations take nothing away from the strength of Saturday's performances Hello Stranger played several Carter Family songs, including "Poor Orphan Child," which has a fascinating counterpoint between lead singer and accompaniment, as they sing "Lead him by the hands" twice as fast underneath the lead singer's sustained words, and "No Depression."

That image of a transcendent Heaven is something you don't hear much about in Irish songs. The Jetts had a low-key friendliness that won over the whole crowd.

The second half of the show was equally strong, beginning with John Roberts, whom Mick said he'd been teasing for years as the token Brit, but who turned out to be solidly Welsh.

He has a folk-English voice which sent home the comic lyrics of "Seven Wonders," and also the race through history in "Wheels of the World."

For that number, John played concertina, accompanied by Dana Lyn and by Mick on mandolin.

Limerick brothers Owen and Moley Ó Súillebháin entered through the house singing an old Irish Christian song a capella, going into a Gregorian chant, and once onstage, they eased the chant into a song of their own, with Moley doing beatbox, then breaking into rap, as Owen accompanied him on guitar.

"As you know, St. Patrick invented rap," Moley said. Their voices blend sweetly together, and the leap from the pure, monkish sound to an Everly Brothers type of folk-rock makes the ancient songs contemporary.

"I think New York loves discovering new talent," Mick told me. "It likes big names, but it even likes better young talent on the rise. People nobody's ever heard of."

The Ó Súillebháin boys are that, he said. A new album will be out soon,

Moley told me-their first was recorded with their mother, Nóirín Ní Riain, who is an expert on plainchant and Sean-nós. Their father is composer Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin. The brothers also sang a version of "St. Patrick's Breastplate" that went into a rap. They are really something different, in a good way. I'm really looking forward to their album.

Mick introduced the great Northern Irish singer-songwriter Tommy Sands as someone who grew up in a troubled place and "decided not to write songs that keep people apart."

Sands began with an a capella song about inclusion, and got the audience to sing with him in a very subtle way - by just waiting. It was gently effective.

Sands always seems somehow to be whispering, no matter how loudly he sings. He described an Irish wake and how a sad song wasn't meant to make you sad, but to "take the sadness out of you, to leave a space for the dance of life to return."

He was accompanied by his son Fionán on banjo and mandolin.

Particularly effective was Sand's reading from his memoir "The Songman," about a series of messages between his father and the father of Harry McCarry, the one

Protestant child in his Catholic school, which were a hilarious combination of strong-worded debate about Catholics vs. Protestants and congenial messages about meeting up for a pint and borrowing a tool.

The evening came to a close with a colorful, and loud, performance from several Breton ensembles, presented by BZH New York (The Breton Society of New York).

Ensembles presented included Bagad Moulin Vert, Eostiged ar Stangala, Armel an Hejer and Alan Lecler (Kan ha diskan). I don't know who was who, but it began with two men singing what is called "call and response," Mick explained.

In overlapping French they sang to each other, and then were joined onstage by musicians who played the bombard - like a medieval oboe - and the biniou cult, which is a kind of bagpipe. They just kept. Coming. There were over 40 people on stage. Then the lights came on and we saw dancers, costumed in some kind of period peasant attire, joined hands and coming down the aisle - 40 or more of them. They began pulling people from seats to dance with them, too.

"There is no other tradition in the world where two people sing for a whole community of dancers," Mick told me. "Celtic Appalachia II" coincided with Fez Nost, Mick said to the audience, which is a traditional holiday in Brittany where the whole community comes out to dance, drink wine, and have fun.

I saw Liz Hanley dancing down the aisle with her mother. It was an invigorating way to end the evening - but there was more, a grand finale with everyone joining together to sing "Will the Circle Be Unbroken," a hymn the Carter family recorded.

"Audiences love thematic performances," Mick told me. "There's excitement. It's a little rough around the edges, but it's very entertaining. These things are edgy. The potential for boredom is greatly reduced."

Not reduced.

Erased.

Vintage Bowery

You can catch some of the players from Saturday's concert, as well as some other outstanding New York artists, at "Vintage Bowery" Wednesday night, presented by Two Bridges Neighborhood Council, the Bowery Alliance of Neighbors and the Vintage Bowery Host Committee.

The Bowery, Mick said, is "not as well known as it should be. It is the place where American popular entertainment started off. Stephen foster died in the bowery. Long before Broadway ever became associated with American entertainment, the Bowery was where it's at."

Wednesday's event will celebrate various aspects of that. "Minstrelsy, for better or worse, began in the Bowery as well," Mick said.

Parker Hall and Dave Eggar will appear. "He will be celebrating tap in the Bowery, which is where American tap became exposed to a wider audience," Mick said.

Poor Baby Bree, the vaudeville performer who appeared in "The Famous McNultys," will perform. Tamar Korn, a jazz performer who also performs Yiddish music, and who has performed with Mick at The Irish Arts Center in the "Irish Christmas" shows, will do some songs from Yiddish theatre associated with the Bowery.

Lenny Kaye, the '70s punk-rocker, will perform. Irish author Peter Quinn is also slated to appear.

Mick intends to sing "McNally's Row of Flats." With its lyrics about "Ireland and Italy, Jerusalem and Germany" and "a paradise for rats," the song tells the story of the lower east side. What better place to hear it than at the new historic landmark of the Bowery?

Gwen Orel runs the blog and podcast, New York Irish Arts