Irish Times writers review the latest shows and arts events.
Grant Lee Phillips
The Village, Dublin
Country roots was always at the core of Grant Lee Phillips's work. Growing up in California, the grandson of a Southern gospel singer, in his early performing days he would sing country standards as a solo act. His influences at that point in his life - this was in the mid-1980s - were the various musical strains of America from the 1930s to the 1960s: country, blues, jazz; nothing too exploratory, just the kind of music that drifted into people's homes across the airwaves.
Storytelling, too, has been a primary influence, which is why Phillips's work, from his much-touted 1990s band, Grant Lee Buffalo, to his current solo material, is dotted throughout with the names of characters: Mighty Joe Moon, Jupiter and Teardrop, Mona Lisa, Calamity Jane, Susanna Little, Josephine of the Swamps, Lily-A-Passion. Each has a separate life of destiny, circumstance and detail, and Phillips sings of their woes and their secrets in a manner that befits his troubadour status.
Monday night's show was the closing gig of Grant-Lee's "cross-Atlantic excursion", and while he says - with a smile on his face, daring you to disbelieve him - that he and his band have been saving their energies for the Dublin show, one gets the impression that every gig on the tour was as good as this one.
Firmly rooted in the tradition of rock as a direct extension of country music (obvious, non-accusatory reference points would include Ryan Adams and Bruce Springsteen), Phillips makes the most of tracks from his latest solo record, Virginia Creeper; wordy, Southern Gothic imagery ("Oh, the slough winds all serpentine, full of black Delta peat, yellow bronze grapes of Muscadine, growing wild and sweet," he sings in Josephine of the Swamps) is mixed with boisterous rock/roots swings and curves.
Some Grant Lee Buffalo tunes are given an airing, too, but compared to his recent solo work they seem distant and reserved, albeit somewhat more familiar. Unlike many others in his position, Phillips now has two distinct musical lives - before and after Buffalo. On the strength of this show and of his recent solo albums, what's the betting the afterlife takes on a life of its own and makes him even more successful?
Tony Clayton-Lea
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Rhythm in Shoes Earthquake International Dance Festival
Island Arts Centre, Lisburn
They may call themselves Rhythm in Shoes, but these five dancers and four musicians based in Dayton, Ohio, have rhythm oozing out of every pore in their bodies. Although artistic director/choreographer/dancer Sharon Leahy's family hails from the Irish midlands, this is the first time the ensemble she founded in 1987 has ventured across to Ireland - or, indeed, any part of Europe. But it is clear that this sentimental journey back to the old country is a cause of great joy and celebration, vividly reflected in a non-stop 75-minute blend of virtuoso dance, close harmony songs, instrumentals and tongue-in-cheek humour. It's a family affair - Leahy's husband Rick Good plays guitar and banjo, recites and sings in a gentle, laid-back style, while daughter Emma, tall and willowy like her dad, is an outstandingly powerful and engaging dancer. The other band members bring years of experience and expertise to their mellow repertoire of jazz, blues, spirituals and mountain music. Likewise the dancers, whose dazzling command of tap, hoedown, clogging and swing is only equalled by their seemingly limitless supplies of stamina.
Emanating from both the urban and rural folk traditions of the midwest, each routine is a glorious example of how complex music and dance can be created from the most basic of sources - the human body and a few simple instruments. Without being saccharine sweet or touchy-feely, Rhythm in Shoes is all about good, wholesome pleasure. Not for them flashy light shows and stagey routines, trashy costumes and painted on smiles. It's about apple pie and gingham, raindrops on roses . . . all that kind of stuff.
It's a breath of fresh air, which should be available on prescription.
Jane Coyle
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Composers' Choice - John McLachlan
NCH John Field Room, Dublin
John McLachlan, the man behind the third of this year's Composers' Choice concerts at the National Concert Hall, talked on Tuesday like someone who's got himself drunk on ideas.
In contrast to the first two composers in the series, he came prepared with a script for his pre-concert talk. The obvious thrill that thinking provides him - whether it's about relationships between painting and music, or flatness, or complexity -didn't always translate into readily communicable thoughts, and the voluble presentation was at times more disorienting than illuminating.
Happily, the actual compositions have a directness and clarity that the composer's words rarely rival. That may well be because in composing he appears concerned to pare things down, whereas in speech he does the opposite. His compositional strategies are clear, almost as if it's not so much the idea or ideas that came first, but rather the analysis of the piece, after which followed the actual composition.
The pieces appear to be simply, almost mechanistically driven, whether in the "diptych form" of Nuance (2003) for piano (Owen Lorigan) and Ghost Machine (2004) for violin (Egidius Streiff) and piano, a commission from the NCH, or in the elaborate movement-within-movement structure of Neo-plastic coloured shapes (2003) for string quartet (the Antipodes Quartet).
The bluntness of McLachlan's approach is risky when the timing of events doesn't quite work - what he's doing can be a lot clearer than why he spends a particular length of time doing it - but he was well supported by the sympathetic advocacy of the visiting Swiss players.
The other composers he represented in his programme were Bach (a Prelude and Fugue from the Well-Tempered Clavier), Stravinsky (the Concertino for string quartet), Kurtág (the impeccably timed Officium breve and the Argentinian Alejandro Viñao, whose Phrase & Fiction, for string quartet and computer, plays games by blurring the distinctions between acoustic and electronic reality. It was, I suspect, the triple re-appraisal of its material in a manner not unlike McLachlan's diptych form that prompted its inclusion here.
Michael Dervan
