Concert Review—

A Full House Was Treated To Great Musical Things

By The Brothers Vallely & John Doyle

By Andrew Carey

February 18 was a lovely Friday in Newtown. All day long there was unseasonable warmth and unexpected sunshine, with cyclists and equestrians and walkers taking to the roads to enjoy the respite from cold and snow.

Then after sunset, Niall and Cillian Vallely and John Doyle took the stage at Newtown Meeting House for the latest offering sponsored by The Shamrock Traditional Irish Music Society. Every seat was filled, and there was a feeling that great things, in the sense of world-class Irish traditional music, were about to begin.

And great things did happen, from the first note onward. The brothers from County Armagh and their Dublin-born colleague opened the show with a fierce set of classic reels: “The Old Bush,” “The Pretty Girls of Mayo” and “The Eel in the Sink.”

Cillian Vallely played the uillean pipes (the Irish bellows-blown bagpipes), which he first learned to play from his father, and his brother Niall played the concertina, the hexagonal free reed instrument on which he has made his name as one of Irish music’s great players and composers. John Doyle played guitar, in the driving style that is instantly recognizable as his to fans of Irish traditional music and which immediately pulls in new listeners.

“I think we’ve worked off a good bit of the dinner, there,” Cillian Vallely said as he introduced the next set. “Allistrum’s March,” a tune in jig time (6/8) like many ancient Irish marches, composed before armies marched in step, is one of the older pieces of music in the Irish repertory, commemorating a battle fought in County Cork during the 17th Century. The extended version illustrates the course of the battle, from the march to the field to the violent struggle and the sad aftermath; the Vallelys and Mr Doyle chose two sections from the earlier and more cheerful part, following them up with the slip jig “Johnny Loves Molly.” Mr Doyle switched from guitar to bouzouki for this set, and proved himself equally a master of his second instrument.

It was time for a song, and Mr. Doyle was just the man for it. He kept with the bouzouki and sang “Her Long Hair Flowing Down Her Back,” a new song of his own composition about an Irish prospector during the California Gold Rush thinking of home and missing his sweetheart, with Cillian Vallely providing a subtle bit of accompaniment on the pipes.

The vast majority of Irish bouzoukis are eight-stringed instruments shaped like giant mandolins; the one Mr Doyle played, built, like his guitar, by Kevin Muiderman of North Dakota, has a guitar-shaped body and an additional pair of strings in the bass. Unlike a 12-string guitar, the instrument is strung in unison pairs and tuned in fifths, for a sound that is warm and rich rather than jangling.

The next set featured two of Niall Vallely’s own tunes, “The First of August” and “The Second of August,” which he wrote at home in Cork City, Ireland on two “fairly typical wet, miserable summer’s days.” Afterwards, Cillian Vallely put down the pipes and took out his low whistle for the hornpipe “The Humours of Tullycrine.” Both Vallely brothers play this tune, but they learned very different versions from different people. Therefore, rather than squash them awkwardly together, they played sequentially, with the low whistle dropping out, the concertina taking its place, and the bouzouki to bind the set together.

Mr Doyle sang “Captain Glenn,” an old song about “why you should never ever go sailing with a murderer,” with his own guitar and some tasteful low whistle and concertina for backing. Before the break, the trio played another set of reels from the brothers’ 2002 CD Callan Bridge, “The Singing Stream,” “The Dowser’s Favourite” and “Callan Bridge.”

The second half of the concert opened with “Muireann’s Jig,” written for Niall Vallely’s young daughter. John Doyle played guitar, and Cillian Vallely started off on the low whistle but switched to the pipes for the final time through. The next set of tunes, with bouzouki and pipes and concertina, were also Niall Valley compositions, originally recorded with the band Buille, which includes a third Vallely brother, the pianist Caoimhín. “The Bull’s Track” is named for a stone said to bear the track of a bull thrown there by Saint Patrick for knocking down the walls of a chapel the saint was building, and “Annie’s Tae” is named for the poitín (home-distilled whiskey) served from a teapot in a publican’s kitchen after closing time.

“The SS Arabic,” a song written by Mr Doyle, tells the story of his great-grandfather, who tried to emigrate from Ireland to America and sailed out of Queenstown (modern Cóbh) as a steerage passenger on the ship of that name. The First World War was on and the SS Arabic was torpedoed by a German U-boat. Mr Doyle’s great-grandfather barely escaped with his life and, upon his recovery, walked home to County Roscommon.

After the song came another set of reels, “Once in a Blue Moose,” named for a shop which Niall Vallely noticed in Anchorage Alaska, and the traditional “Over the Moor to Maggie.”

The Vallely brothers’ mother was a fiddler from County Donegal, and in her honour Cillian Vallely played a set of Donegal fiddle tunes on the pipes: “Hiudaí Gallagher’s March,” “The College Groves” and “The Glen Road to Carrick.” Niall Vallely then took a solo on the concertina, playing a set of much-beloved reels: “Rakish Paddy,” “Colonel Fraser” and “My Love is in America.”

After “Liberty’s Sweet Shore,” a contemporary song written about Famine-era emigrants by John Doyle, the concert drew to an official close with “The Reel of Rio,” “The Black Haired Lass,” and “Dan Breen’s.” But the audience was not about to let the musicians leave without an encore, and the sea shanty “Billy O’Shea” with its singable chorus of “Fall down Billy O’Shea,” led nicely into the jigs “The Golden Ring” and “The Hearty Boys of Ballymote.”