A tribute to the renowned Irish musician, composer and educator who died on 7 November 2018.

The Galway Jazz Festival has a new momentum and was bigger again this year – Toner Quinn attended a mix of concerts, from the Radio String Quartet to Peter Broderick, plus a debate on Brexit.

The Galway Jazz Festival jumped from 40 to over 60 events this year. It reflects the ambition of the new team (Ciarán Ryan, Ellen Cranitch and Matthew Berrill) and their determination to establish the festival not just in Ireland but on the international map. For those in the west, the volume of events meant a sense of carnival in early October, just as the winter clouds were settling in. Galway is small and medieval, a handful of thin criss-crossing streets. Add in several dozen musicians for four days and you will change its artistic climate. This is the immediate achievement of Galway Jazz 2.0 – it has created a new identity for itself, an autumnal buzz, separate to the summer festivals for which the city is known.

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In the world premiere of Jennifer Walshe’s ‘The Worlding’ at the Model in Sligo, her ‘Aisteach’ project comes alive, writes Toner Quinn.

Jennifer Walshe’s Aisteach project was launched in 2015. It is an imaginary history of the Irish avant-garde, a group of sound artists, musicians and composers inserted into the cracks of history. They invented drone music, they were the improvising Guinness Dadaists, or the elusive Caoimhín Breathnach and his Golden Cassette, or a nun performing avant-garde music on Church organ.

Aisteach – meaning ‘strange’ in Irish – is not the first group that Walshe has created; Grúpat from 2007 to 2009 consisted of a 9-person collective of sound artists, all Walshe. She said in a recent talk that Irish culture is fertile ground for such re-interpretations – ‘It doesn’t seem imperialistic’ to play with Irishness. Everything has happened, and anything could happen, in our history. Continue reading →

The first All Together Now festival took place on 3–5 August on the Curraghmore Estate in Waterford. It’s where the new Irish generations come for freedom – or is it order, asks Toner Quinn.

‘And will you know it when you find it? And do you know you’re looking for it?’ –  ‘By My Demon Eye’, This is the Kit

A man in his twenties is in a purple dress, his head half-shaved. He and some female friends land with a bolt of energy at the Belonging Bandstand and start dancing to the Dublin-based Afrobeat group Yankari.

Two children are beside them and the man holds their hands and starts dancing with them too. Then he and his friends sense action elsewhere and start to rush
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A tribute to the great Irish fiddle-player who died on 3 August.

It was 1992. I was 18 and booked into Tommy Peoples’ fiddle class at the Willie Clancy Summer School. As we arrived, he sat on the edge of a table, his fiddle case on one side and on the other a small tin case in which he placed the rolled cigarettes he was working on. Then, when the lesson was to begin, he would shut the tin case with a ‘snap’, and the fiddle case would open.

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Singer-songwriter David Kitt is leaving Ireland because of the housing situation, and music writer and DJ Nialler9 is ‘stressed and broken’ by it. Boom after bust after boom, the lot of the Irish musician never seems to change. There is a way to change this, writes Toner Quinn.

In 2006, a strange thing happened: like canaries in the coal mine, musicians and artists began to leave Dublin. Nobody announced it publicly – there was no social media – but I noticed the pattern because I was one of them. The Celtic Tiger was difficult to navigate economically if you wanted to focus on creative work, so artists left. Years later, when I came across an economic chart for the 2000s, I noticed the moment of maximum overheating was the year when the creatives vacated the capital. From that point, the economy started to unravel. Two years later it collapsed.

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Irish National Opera continues to experiment and excite with a production of Gluck’s ‘Orfeo ed Euridice’ in Galway and a spectacular performance by Sharon Carty, writes Toner Quinn.

Last year, the Galway International Arts Festival presented the world premiere of Donnacha Dennehy’s opera The Second Violinist – the tale of a musician who struggles to find meaning in life and art. This year, GIAF hosted Irish National Opera’s production of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice – the tale of another emotionally tortured musician.

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The Irish Government has launched a new initiative, ‘Global Ireland’, with international aspirations – but what does it mean for Irish music?

The debut album from The High Seas trio.

Fiddle-player Conor Caldwell’s diverse new album is inspired by both the historic work of collector Edward Bunting and the sounds of contemporary Belfast, writes Toner Quinn.

Conor Caldwell’s 2016 fiddle recording with Danny Diamond, North, was edgy and meditative, the emphasis on raw, spontaneous, unaccompanied duets.

Albums such as North appear to be a response to what writer Alex Ross calls the ‘cult of precision’ in modern recorded music; scrapes and the sense of a live performance are in, concern about technical perfection is out.

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