Concert Review—

Irish Musicians Filled The Meeting

House With Music And Anecdotes

By Andrew Carey

On August 30 — two years and seven months since the last time they played at Newtown Meeting House — fiddler Liz Carroll and guitarist John Doyle returned with a new album In Play (Compass Records 2006), and a heady mix of songs and tunes from both their own composing and the deep well of the Irish tradition.

After a brief introduction from the Shamrock Irish Traditional Music Society’s Gregg Burnett, the evening began with a set of recently composed reels, “Fremont Center,” “The Vornado” and “Minutemen.” The first, named for the Chicago suburb in which Ms Carroll lives, and the second, whimsically named for “our favorite fan,” were written by Ms Carroll; the third was written by the duo and given a name inspired by the Dublin-born Mr Doyle’s exploration of American history.

Next came a set of jigs, “The Dennehy Dancers,” which Ms Carroll named for the Irish dancing school she attended as a child on Chicago’s south side, and “The MacSweeney Side,” to which she gave the maiden name of her mother-in-law.

The first two sets alone offered abundant proof that Ms Carroll and Mr Doyle are ideal musical partners. The drive and verve of Ms Carroll’s fiddling was perfectly matched by Mr Doyle’s smooth alternation between percussive chording that lifted the fiddle’s melody and nimble single-note picking that matched it as neatly as another fiddler might.

Mr Doyle’s first song of the night proved to be one of the finest of the many powerful songs supporting the Scottish and Northern English coal miners’ struggle to win decent wages for their hard and dangerous work. Ed Pickford’s “The Pound A Week Rise” is often played by folk-rock bands with electric instruments, drums and bagpipes, but Mr Doyle’s passionate voice and skillfully-played acoustic guitar and Ms Carroll’s sensitive fiddling gave the song as strong and emphatic a presentation as any more amplified version.

The next set comprised two of Ms Carroll’s tunes, the reel “The Ronan Boys,” named for the four sons of her friends Pauline and Johnny Ronan, and “Ralph’s 2-3-5,” written for her friend Ralph Flores, a three-part tune with the first part in 2/4 time, the second in 3/4, and the third in 5/4. Many guitar players would be tempted to sit out such a piece of rhythmic humor, but Mr Doyle’s backing gave the odd yet compelling tune a solid base from which to raise the roof of the meeting house.

“The Island of Woods,” a slow air to which Ms Carroll gave an ancient name for Ireland, was soft and slow and lovely, a change in pace from the earlier sets of dance tunes. After that came a furiously-paced set of jigs, opening with the session favorite “The Battering Ram,” continuing with one of the many unnamed tunes that float about the vast Irish traditional repertory, and ending with one of Mr Doyle’s recent compositions.

“That was only a bit slow,” Mr Doyle joked, before singing “Coal and a Candlelight,” a story of love and murder from Francis James Child’s vast collection of ballads. “That was a killer song,” Ms Carroll joked, before beginning a set of her own reels – “Tractor Driver” and “A Tune for the Girls,” which some audience members might have remembered from the duo’s 2004 performance in Newtown.

Mr Doyle recently received a copy of a hard-to-find album by The Halyard, an English folk band of the Seventies that launched the career of one of his musical heroes, Nic Jones, a singer and guitarist who gave up performing after being badly injured in a car crash in the early Eighties. From that album he learnt the song “Lancashire Fusiliers,” telling of a man “Off to fight for the army, love, as a Lancashire fusilier/ Rolling my musket in my arms instead of my Ginny dear.”

“Ceisel’s Sword,” a reel written by Ms Carroll, was named for her old roommate Patrice Ceisel, a fish photographer and tai chi practitioner, and was followed with “The Monasteryedan Fancy,” first recorded by the Aughrim Slopes Céilí Band in the 1930s.

The concert “officially” ended with a set of reels: “Tuttle’s,” “The Moving Cloud, and “The Dawn.” But thunderous applause demanded an encore, and one was provided in the form of “The Hare’s Lament” a song which Mr Doyle found in Sam Henry’s collection The Sounds of the People, followed with a nameless jig and the ever-popular reel “Drowsy Maggie.”