Long the poor relation of Leeside celebrations, the Cork Folk Festival strikes up this week with its most varied line-up to date, one which suggests there has been a definite shift towards the eclectic.
This opening-up of the proceedings, which is allowing funky young pretenders to share the bill with practised old hands, mirrors a trend in the folk world at large. The realisation has dawned in tradster circles that this might not just be a music of the past, it could also be one for the future. The festival runs from next Thursday to the following Sunday. There's the usual Guinness Pub Trail, with fiery, porter-fuelled seisuins in hostelries big and small; there are set-dancing master classes with hyper-accomplished jiggers and reelers (I'm tempted, sorely, sorely tempted) and, of course, there is the nightly Roman-Orgy-With-Fiddles-And-Bodhran that is otherwise known as the Festival Club at the Metropole Hotel.
The Metropole, as it happens, will be the scene of one of the first highlights of the Festival when Kila performs on Friday night. For the uninitiated, Kila is a seven-piece act which takes the traditional rhythms and melodic shifts of Irish folk and flavours them with everything from the looping beats of acid house to the synthesised squelches of neo-classical Detroit techno to the spine-shuddering basslines of Jamaican dub. As one would fear, it's not always entirely successful - but when it works, it works well and Kila is one of the folk ensembles most instrumental in mapping out a path to a future groove. From wild-eyed, dreadlock'd innovation, we skip happily back to the canny craft of good, old-fashioned songwriting. At The Brewery Tap on Saturday, two of the country's foremost folk figures, Mick Hanley and Jimmy Faulkner, will be risking a trial marriage. Faulkner has been a key player on the Dublin folk circuit for some 20 years and is a traditional guitarist with the most deft of touches. Hanley is an internationally loved tunesmith whose ditties blare from transistors everywhere from Nashville to Navan. With luck, the show will click and catch fire and leave the expected throng well past the point of rescue. On Sunday, Sharon Shannon will give fans a chance to catch up with her latest experiments in trad fusion when she plays an early evening show at the Everyman Palace. The bould Shaz has been displaying definite magpie tendencies of late, thieving musical gems from Chile and California and more besides and using them to embellish her riotous accordion playing. This one is already looking like a sell-out so advance booking is advised.
Finally, the ultra-hip Cafe Orchestra round things off at the Festival Club late on Sunday with their trademark definition of a boombastic jazz-folk thang. They blend ancient gypsy music with modern jazz notation and cunningly-concealed classical influences and are now hugely popular in folk clubs everywhere. Strange days on Planet Trad.
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