Concert Review—

Sold-Out Performance Heated Up

Newtown Music House

By Andrew Carey

It was a testament to Chicago’s Irish fiddle heroine Liz Carroll and Dublin-born guitar wizard John Doyle that their concert last weekend sold out Newtown Meeting House. Fans drove from as far away as New Hampshire to see the duo, who are well on their way to becoming one of Irish traditional music’s great fiddle and guitar pairings, on a level with Kevin Burke and Michael O Domhnaill or Nollaig Casey and Arty McGlynn.

The audience began to show up on January 10 not only before the artists arrived at their venue but also before the bulk of STIMS’ volunteer staff had arrived, while the sound system was still being set up. No artist likes to do sound check with an audience, but the bitter temperature made it impossible for the early arrivers to step outside.

With master sound engineer John Brennan (who himself played guitar at the meeting house one year ago, with accordionist John Whelan) running the board, a perfect balance was quickly reached and maintained throughout the evening.

In addition to being perhaps Irish America’s finest woman fiddler, Ms Carroll is one of the most notable composers working in the tradition today. Therefore it was only appropriate that she and Mr Doyle began the night with a pair of her own reels, “Tractor Driver” and “A Tune for the Girls.”

Mr Doyle’s accompaniment showed off the guitar’s versatility. Although all too often stereotyped as a singer’s prop or a chordal metronome, at its best the guitar simultaneously provides percussive drive, harmonic richness, and a strong bass balance to the high-pitched melody instruments.

As STIMS’ Gregg Burnett said in his introduction, when John Doyle left the band Solas it took three new members to even approximate replacing him. His powerful playing is given additional weight by his unique guitar setup. Like many Irish guitarists he tunes the low E down to D; however, he has gone a step further and replaced the conventional string with an extra-heavy one tuned another octave lower.

Mr Doyle’s reputation as an accompanist has sometimes overshadowed his skill as a singer, but Saturday’s concert gave full scope to his vocal talents. He first recorded “A Miner’s Life,” with Solas, but the strength and commitment of his voice on this classic labor union song were, if anything, clearer with only his guitar and Ms Carroll’s tastefully restrained fiddling in place of the full band.

“Anna McKinney’s” and “Mind the Dresser” are illustrative of the slippery side of traditional music.

“To me they’re kind of jiggy,” Ms Carroll said, “but I could be wrong.” Many accompanists would have forced such tunes into being either 6/8 jigs or 12/8 slides, but Mr Doyle straddled the space between without sacrificing any rhythmic pulse.

Next was a set of waltzes, the first recently composed by Mr Doyle and as yet nameless, the second by Ms Carroll and called “After the Morris Minor,” referring to the small car which was a commonplace in the Ireland of the Sixties and Seventies. Ms Carroll has a knack not only for writing tunes but for naming them, as witnessed by “A Long Night on the Misty Moor,” which derives its name from a line in Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf.

Mr Doyle learned “Willy Riley,” a less-common version of “The Plains of Waterloo,” from the great north of Ireland singer Len Graham. Phrased as a returned soldier’s tribute to a comrade killed in Wellington’s victory, told to the dead man’s sweetheart, the song has not only a lovely melody but fine lyrics, mournful and masculine without any trace of vainglorious machismo.

A mixed set of tunes began with the slipjig “Catherine Kelly’s” and went into Ms Carroll’s “Lake Effect,” named for the influence of Lake Michigan that produces Chicago’s notorious winter weather. From there the set continued with the reel “The Laurel Tree” and ended with “The Wild Irishman.”

“The Did-dah” and “The Flying Dodger” were favorite tunes of the noted Scottish fiddler Johnny Cunningham, who died the past December. Ms Carroll and Mr Doyle both toured with him at times, and spoke not only of his consummate musicianship but of his unique sense of humor, which ran to buying his tourmates odd gifts, such as garden gnomes.

Ms Carroll’s Scottish-influenced take on these tunes was a worthy tribute to Mr Cunningham, and Mr Doyle’s backing showed off his gentler side, trading percussive strumming for smooth, cleanly picked riffs.

A nameless air written by Ms Carroll was played in a manner similar to the opera-influenced vocal style of the tenor Frank Patterson: swoopy and dramatic and without the ornamentation and melodic variation of traditional Irish music.

Like most young traditional musicians, Ms Carroll said she despised this “sentimental [stuff],” but she’s come to appreciate it more as she’s grown older. That’s not a bad thing, since this air not only pleases Ms Carroll’s mother but won over even the most hardcore traditional fans in the house.

After such a night of fine tunes and lovely songs, a standing ovation and demands for an encore were inevitable. So with one last blast of reels to warm them, the audience left Newtown Meeting House, climbed back into their vehicles, and made their separate ways home, the music of Liz Carroll and John Doyle still ringing in their ears.