Irish Voice

Home is where the Hearth is

TRALEE musician Benny O,Carroll says it was frustration that made him do it. The 36- year-old guitarist was leaving a local pub last summer with a group of traditional music fans who had just sat through anIrish ballad-session. They were, O'Carroll says surprised that the session had provided a standard of musicianship that was actually lower than what they could experience back home in Italy. It was a moment that stuck in O'Carroll's mind.

"Having played Irish traditional music in Italy and all across Europe I understood that the level of expectations tourists have when they come to Ireland to hear music is very high," he says. " But unless they're in the know as to where a good traditional session can be found, they don't find music at the level they expect. Ifballads are all they here there's a danger tht Irish music is misrepresented." O'carroll decided to do something about it. Drawing on over 20 years experience playing around the coutry with the cream of Ireland's traditional players, the classically-trained musician began planning a series of performances that would offer tourists and traditional fans the opportunity to hear high-quality authentic Irish music in a setting that recalled sessions from the era before music relied on amplification and electronic trickery.

The immediate result was a series of concerts at Siamsa Tire, the National Folk Theatre in Tralee. Featuring what amouted to a super-group of young traditiolal players, the concerts were recorded, and have been released by O'Carroll on a self-produced new album, Sessesions from the Hearth.Traditional music, O'Carroll says, is best experienced in a live setting, where audience and musicians feed off each other, and this album is as close as you can get to the assense of a real session without actually being there. The CD's Fourteen pieces attempt to trace the thread of a session from start to finish, which means that included alongside a strong selection of reels and jigs are examples of sean nos singing and often humorous introductions by the musicians themselves. Given that the musicians met as a group just minutes before they were to go on stage, the performances are remarkably coherent and fluid.

According to O'Carroll, his intention with Sessions from the Hearth was to replicate as closely as possible the sort of well rounded traditional entertainment that would have been common a generation or two ago. "We've lost a lot over the years in terms of entertainment in general, and in terms of music in particular," he says. "This is the way people used to enjoy themselves before hte advent of television and electricity. It's warm, it's real, it's intimate and it's tremendously exciting. These musicians are the best in the business, and because you only get one shot when you're recording live, they're all on top form.

But the Sessions from the Hearth CD is only the first step in O'Carroll's long-term plan to raise and maintain standards of Irish music so that Irish and foreign fans - of which there are many, he says - can experience the real thing. To this end, ther are plans to take the Sessions on the road in America and Europe in the coming months.

By Colin Lacey
Irish Voice, New York, September 29, 1998