Renewal and regeneration are the drivers propelling Altan towards their 40th year together. Still on the road, with gigs around Ireland over the next few months, they played their first gig at Listowel Writers’ Week in 1985, anchored by the spine-tingling union of a musical and personal nature between Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh, the group’s fiddle player, and Frankie Kennedy, its flute player.
Much water has flowed under the bridge since those heady early days, including the death of Kennedy, from cancer, in 1994, but Altan’s incandescent energy has been continually replenished by the band’s openness to change.
Their latest album, simply titled Donegal, reveals yet another facet of the band’s fluidity, with one of its tune sets mined from a 19th-century manuscript belonging to James Tourish, an ancestor of the band’s piano accordionist, Martin Tourish, who excels at arrangements that weave effortlessly in, around and between each member. His arrangements cast light on both the strength and the subtlety of the band’s members, the latest of whom is the Scots-Donegal fiddle player Claire Friel. Guests on the album include Steve Cooney on bass, Jimmy Higgins on percussion and Graham Henderson on keyboards.
Ní Mhaonaigh, fresh off a flight from the United States, is excited at where the band find themselves now, all those years after they first stepped out on stage. “It’s a new us,” she says. “We took so much time with this album because we had the time from 2020 onwards. I love that idea of being able to say, ‘No, we’re not going to play that tune. Let’s find something else instead.’ We had the time to do that, and we wanted that, because we’re on the road now 40 years and we just wanted something that was outside the box, especially when we’re producing it ourselves.”
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Six years had elapsed since the release of Altan’s previous album, The Gap of Dreams. “It’s been that long since our last album because we just didn’t have time,” Ní Mhaonaigh explains, sanguine about the demands of making a living that keep a band on the road. “We don’t want to rush something, and yet we still want to have a new album, because once you have that you’ll always get work, and everything else falls into place.”
Though live performance is at the heart of who Altan are, it has never been more front and centre than it is today, as album sales no longer offer the income that they once did.
“The only way a band can survive these days, with Spotify and all those other streaming companies, is by being on the road,” Ní Mhaonaigh says. “In another way, Spotify gives us access to a younger audience, but, when you think about it, we’re paying an awful lot for that. No other career has to deal with that.”
The freshness of Altan’s approach is writ large across Donegal, an apt title for this latest collection, which oozes a sense of place and a sense of adventure. The band’s treatment of the opening tune set, The Yellow Tinker, speaks volumes about their desire to recharge tunes that have been part of their repertoire for decades. It’s the ebb and flow between band members that generates that excitement about new ways of hearing a tune’s potential.
“We like to look at ourselves as democratic,” Ní Mhaonaigh says with a smile, “but some people have more of a surge of creativity on one day and someone else the next, so we always try and bring everybody’s ideas to the table. I chose the songs and most of the tunes on this album, but Martin Tourish had collected these old tunes that were really interesting. We had recorded the opening track, The Yellow Tinker, before, and at soundchecks Ciaran Curran plays it nice and slow. It’s just a beautiful approach to that tune and it’s nice to showcase the stringed instruments too.”
Altan have opted for a rich balance of local and international when it comes to the sound of this latest album. Manus Lunny, who recorded the album at Stiúidió na Mara, “knew right away what we were looking for. The collaboration of Garry West at Compass Records [in Nashville] “was nice”, says Ní Mhaonaigh, “because there were fresh ears listening”.
“And of course Nashville is the home of acoustic music. They get great sparkle going, which gave the album a great freshness as well.”
The band’s confidence in composition has been growing steadily; this album includes a number of original tunes that bridge past and present seamlessly, including a tune composed by Ní Mhaonaigh and her daughter, Nia, called Scread na Bealtaine.
“I’m always on the lookout for new tunes that haven’t been recorded,” Ní Mhaonaigh says, reflecting on the depths the band mined in preparation for this album. “I composed a few tunes myself. Mark [Kelly, Altan’s guitarist] is always composing. We’re all thinking in a different way, which brings colour to the sound. I’m really traditional and Martin [Tourish] has all of these orchestral sounds in his head.”
For Ní Mhaonaigh, music has been her solace and her saviour through the darkest as well as the best of times. “Music is like words that haven’t been invented, experiences that you haven’t had before and that you don’t have the words for,” she says. “The expression of making music helps that and it brings you to a higher place. I always find musicians generous and peace loving. There aren’t many musicians saying, ‘Let’s start a war.’ Music brings you to that higher plane where you want to get on with people and not segregate people. Musicians have always been about making this world a better place.”
Continuous evolution is in Altan’s DNA. “I think you have to change. You have to have a rebirth and renew the sound every so often,” Ní Mhaonaigh says. “So the sound of the two fiddles with Claire and I is different to the sound that Ciaran Tourish and I would have made together. It’s a different style, and equally as exciting. It’s just fun. She takes the pressure off too, when I’m singing and then playing. But, overall, I really love the sound of the double fiddle.”
Altan are in good company these days, as a sense of adventure now characterises so much of what is happening in the tradition.
“There’s more experimentation going on, but in a less crass way,” Ní Mhaonaigh says. “It seems to me that people who are innovating now have better knowledge of the music. In the past it often was just about simple fusion with rock or jazz, but that sometimes sounded like it was stuck on with Sellotape, whereas now it’s just much more sophisticated.
“I’m thinking of Moxie and Skipper’s Alley and The Bonny Men. I love Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin’s singing. He’s got an amazing voice; he’s writing some fantastic stuff and he’s a sean-nós singer as well. Then there’s Séamus and Caoimhe Uí Fhlatharta, Cormac McCarthy – there’s so much diversity there.”
Altan play at the Old Courthouse in Lifford, Co Donegal, on Saturday, August 17th, and Town Hall, Newry, Co Down, on Sunday, August 25th; plus Clifden Arts Festival, Co Galway, on September 24th; and Féile Liam O’Flynn, in Naas, Co Kildare, on October 6th
