Musicians who take inspiration from their own roots are the ones we want to listen to, writes Siobhán Long
WHAT IS IT that draws a listener to a musician? Is it the distinctiveness of the voice? The originality of the music? The comfort zone it evokes? The sheer genius of the player? Chances are that there are as many reasons as there are listeners on the planet, but one thing's for sure: players who choose the road less travelled: those who take their musical direction from their own roots - whether they be Yossou N'Dour, Miriam Makeba, Omara Portuondo, Bess Cronin or Seamus Ennis - celebrate their local accent above all else. It's that distinctive, indigenous identity that drives their music, and it's about as far removed from the vagaries of the music business as sleán-cut turf is from the low slung hum of a hybrid engine.
The north west corner of this country has produced more than its share of superb musicians. The fiddler, John Doherty (1900-1980) has long been recognised, his recordings reflecting the essence of his bare-boned, spare style. Later, the late Francie Mooney, father of Altan's Mairéad Ni Mhaonaigh, made his mark, sharing his passion for that same instrument with generations who flocked to his doorstep for a whisper of a tune. And this year, two more young Donegal fiddlers, Ciarán Ó Maonaigh and Aidan O'Donnell, have imbibed the tunes of their home place and made them their own on their magnificent debut, Fídíl.
As with any tradition though, there are players who elude the efforts of the sound engineer, who, mystifyingly, wend their way into the collective local imagination with barely a whiff of a recorded tune to their name.
Teelin in South West Donegal was the home place of Frank Cassidy, first cousin of the renowned fiddler, Con Cassidy. In a county falling down with fiddle players, Frank was the gold standard, a virtuoso who stood head and shoulders above his peers, in an environment as competitive as anything that New York's Juilliard School of the Performing Arts could boast. Although he died in 1971, Cassidy's legend had been well-established, albeit in the absence of any comprehensive recordings being released.
It wasn't just Frank's style that caused sharp intakes of breath. It was his unique tone, his distinctive articulation and his formidable technique. Seamus Ennis crowned him "the best (he'd) ever heard". According to Cairdea na bhFidiléirí, who have just released a magnificent collection of his recordings, Níl Gar Ann: Traditional Music From Donegal played by Frank Cassidy, this was a musician whose inimitable style stands up to the closest of scrutiny in the 21st century, over 100 years after Cassidy's birth.
As elusive as Frank Cassidy was, this collection speaks loud and proud of the man's virtuosity. Dermot McLaughlin, CEO of Temple Bar Cultural Trust, sees Cassidy's music as a reflection of the man's personality, with none of the preoccupations we associate with players in search of that elusive thing we call fame these days. "He put an awful lot of his intellectual energy into the music", McLaughlin contends.
"I don't think that trying to describe his style according to the county that he came from does his music or his playing any kind of justice at all. It's a bit like describing individual speech patterns, I think. How we talk about the music, in this art form, is very under-developed, in comparison to jazz or classical music. There's more vocabulary for discussing the aesthetics of hip hop than there is for Irish traditional music. In some ways, it seems that our traditional music is more documented than discussed, and if you listen to Frank's music, you can hear a complexity that will make you question: where did that sound come from? Where did that tone come from?"
THESE DAYS WE revel in boxing music in, in labelling it with a degree of anal retentiveness that does it no favours. We tend to cling to romantic notions that so-called "traditional" musicians from the middle part of the last century had little or no exposure to other art forms, and that, consequently, their music was a pure distillation of life as they lived it, far removed from the formality of classical music or the free flowing improvisation of jazz. Nothing could be further from the truth, insists Dermot McLaughlin. Musical boundaries were far more porous in the past than they are now.
"The thing that always struck me, talking to the ould boys around home, was that the sound world was just 'music'," he says. "It wasn't seen as jazz, popular music or classical music. It was just music that was played, and it strikes me that that must have been a very liberating aesthetic platform to come from: taking a tune in all its glory and letting it come out some other way, not being processed through a traditional music filter all the time." McLaughlin is convinced that there's a huge value in focusing on the intricacies of the personal style, rather than tiredly clinging to well-worn (and often groundless) assumptions about the regional influences that impacted on that style.
"We want to focus on the individual, personal, idiosyncratic genius of the man, and the fact that he lived in Donegal is not the beginning and end of his contribution to the music", he offers. "It's placing the emphasis on the personal too, rather than the geographical. Frank's sound is unique. One classical trained musician who I played him for said that he could only hear Bach when he heard Frank play slow airs."
Cairdeas na bhFidiléirí's primary motivation for releasing this CD is to bridge the gap between the musical genius of Frank Cassidy and the generations of players who've grown up without ever having heard a note of the man's playing themselves. It's that line of sight that Cairdeas na bhFidiléirí are seeking to restore, so that players of today and tomorrow can trace their music back to its roots, and not depend solely on a second, third and even fourth hand account of what it might have sounded like in the hands of such musical giants as Cassidy.
Níl Gar Ann: Traditional Fiddle Music From Donegal, played by Frank Cassidy (and in duet with John Doherty) is available on Claddagh Records.
