The Tap Room Trio are reluctant to tour at the best of times, but they'll be bringing their spirited approach to trad to the Tradition: DL festival, writes Siobhán Long.
Whatever about the vagaries of the weather this summer, those in search of a decent tune or three can hardly complain about lack of choice. The truth is that the country's falling down with summer schools and festivals, from the furthest reaches of the Inishowen peninsula to the southern depths of Bantry Bay.
With the raging success of two Temple Bar trad festivals (scheduled in the perhaps dryer month of January for the past two years), Dublin audiences have proven themselves ripe for the picking when it comes to ponying up for the best that the tradition has to offer.
Dún Laoghaire has decided to muscle in on the summer festival season with its very own inaugural (and rather self-consciously titled) Tradition: DL, a boutique festival which runs from August 3rd to 5th in the Pavilion Theatre. It's a music listener's dream date: Frankie Gavin, the irrepressible Máirtín O'Connor, Tim Edey, Róisín Elsafty, Siobhán Armstrong and Slide are just some of the players who've booked their seaside B&Bs for the weekend.
The Tap Room Trio (TRT), a title more reminiscent of a languid jazz combo than a straight-as-a-die traditional outfit, take up position as guests of Tradition: DL, and if punters are lucky, will rekindle the spirited magic of their eponymous debut and, as yet, sole CD.
Individually, Harry Bradley, Jesse Smith and John Blake have been quietly carving out impeccable reputations for technically brilliant, musically complex playing. Having bagged the laurels in their TRT incarnation, they promptly disappeared from view, occasionally cropping up at local festivals, sessions or summer schools, but rarely seeking out the limelight.
These days, Jesse Smith, TRT's fiddle player, is ensconced in Leitrim flute player John McKenna's old home in Drumkeeran, as artist in residence. A native of Baltimore, US, he's the son of Donna Long, pianist with Cherish The Ladies, and a graduate of Danú, a powerhouse band who go to considerable lengths to ensure that the tune reigns supreme, regardless of how riotous their arrangements might be.
Harry Bradley and John Blake work in Na Píobairí Uilleann, a society that promotes trad music and piping in particular, on Henrietta Street, Dublin. Bradley has been lauded for taking the musical inheritance of Sligo fiddlers Michael Coleman and James Morrison, not to mention the effervescent flute playing of John McKenna, and rendering it afresh for a new generation. Interestingly, neither Bradley nor Blake are burdened with a family history steeped in the tradition, and perhaps that absence of inheritance goes some way towards explaining their lightness of touch when it comes to tackling the music.
Blake, born and raised in Harrow, is on intimate terms with an unseemly array of instruments, from flute to piano, saxophone and guitar, but it's with the latter instrument that he's carved a reputation for subtle, incisive accompaniment in recent years. A student of the great Brendan Mulcaire in London, he was also a huge Beatles fan. His first guitar was electric, and he didn't progress to acoustic until he was 16. For Blake, early kudos came from managing to ferret out what he describes as "an old shneaky tape" of someone who'd never been commercially recorded. It had as much cachet as bagging a Lennon bootleg. "There was always a bit of a buzz of excitement around that," Blake smiles.
THE GUITAR HAS COME a long way in the world of traditional music - some would say too far - but contrary to some guitarists' penchant for hogging the limelight by imposing a vigorous rhythm on top of a tune, John Blake is more than comfortable in the role of accompanist, leaving the limelight to the melody makers. "I'm very comfortable being a backing musician. I'm subservient to the tune and to the player. My default is to sit in the background, although of course that's dictated also by the people I'm playing with. With the Tap Room Trio, I play a more attacking style, whereas when I play with someone like Peter and Angelina Carberry, who are very gentle players, I'm a lot more in the background."
Bradley's Belfast roots are audible in his playing, although he had scant awareness of the rich Belfast flute tradition that preceded him, when he was growing up there. Frankie Kennedy, Gary Hastings and Desi Wilkinson, had all moved away (or "gone for refugee status", as Bradley pithily remarks) and anyway, his attention was focused elsewhere as a teenager. From die hard punk rocker to Pogues fan, Harry Bradley navigated a circuitous path to the tradition, and his playing might just be all the better for it. He's certainly not sold on any notions of regional playing style as a defining element of his playing.
"I think the whole regional style thing is overstated," he declares. "I'm not convinced that it was ever as strong as people like to think it was. For example, Michael Coleman and James Morrison [ the two revered Sligo fiddlers who made their reputations in America in the 1920s and 1930s] were two totally different players who lived only a few miles up the road from one another, and were very influential. There's a risk in classifying music in that way that you wash over the more important aspect, which is individual musicality, which as far as I'm concerned is the bigger part of the equation. You can have so many Sligo fiddle players, but not so many James Morrisons or Michael Colemans. It's not really about where the tunes come from, but how they're played. Hackneyed tunes in the right hands aren't hackneyed any more."
The Tap Room Trio owe a debt to John Carty, a renaissance man whose clear-lined fiddle, banjo and flute playing they sought out, along with Frankie Gavin's recordings of the music rescued from old 1920s' and 1930s' recordings. It's music that the three musicians love, but they have no desire to take it on the road on a permanent basis. They're adamant that their innate enjoyment of the music won't be compromised by the travails and perils of the never-ending road.
"Touring? I can't do it," Harry Bradley declares in a hearbeat. "I just can't get my head around playing the same set night after night. It seems thoroughly unnatural to the way that I got into music in the first place. I think it's reached saturation point anyway. I don't know that there's much more to be explored, from a band point of view. I think it's run its course. Now, if something very interesting happens in the next while, I'll be happy to review that. But it all seems a bit tired and saggy."
These days, Bradley's enjoying an altogether more virtual relationship with fellow musicians, as he teaches over the internet. "I upload MP3 lessons on a server, and people download them when they're ready," he explains nonchalantly, as if it were the most natural next step from a flute workshop in Miltown Malbay at the Willie Clancy Summer School.
"It's almost better than a live teaching session, because I and the student can take the music away and listen to it in our own time. It's a very responsive way of listening and playing. Real time doesn't interfere at all. Most of my students are in the States, and they have a huge interest in technique, but of course they don't have to do what we did, to find the tunes. There are huge banks of tunes on the internet now, although many of them aren't even written in traditional music notation, so it's hard to pick up any feeling for rhythm and phrasing off of those." John Blake muses on whether the avalanche of traditional music on CD, on the net and in concert has in fact undermined the music in some ways. As Patrick Kavanagh said, "through a chink too wide comes in no wonder".
"I wonder if it's devalued the music, not having to chase it?" he says. "Having a prized recording in your hand is no longer something you have to search for? I don't know."
• Tradition: DL runs from August 3-5 at the Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire.
