ACCORDION MUSIC is not the most popular among traditional music purists, but one of the great Irish exponents of the instrument, Alan Kelly, is well aware of “the pitfalls of traditional music”.
Alan grew up in Roscommon and it was from his father that his love of Irish trad and his introduction to playing music began. However the instruments he was surrounded by - the flute and fiddle - were not the ones he was ultimately going to choose to play himself.
“We were surrounded by the feckers!” Alan tells me. “Actually not by the fiddle tradition though because that was a little weaker when I was growing up. Though there were flute players everywhere. It’s a very distinctive sound and it’s unique to that area.”
However Alan was attracted to an instrument which he also felt had a “distinctive” sound and one which had a solid, if less respected, presence on the Roscommon trad scene.
“The accordion has a very distinctive sound and it’s almost entirely played in the region I grew up in,” he says. “My father played it in Roscommon and that’s what inspired me to play it.
Prejudice
Alan eventually gravitated towards the accordion and found it the perfect instrument on which to express himself. He also quickly noticed how other trad musicians tended to look down on the instrument.
“I suppose after a few years of playing and going off to play competitions I began to realise that there was actually a prejudice within the inner traditional world,” he says. “I was lucky in that my father had a very eclectic taste in music and I suppose the instrument lends itself to that.”
Piano accordion is popular in Zydeco, traditional Spanish, and East European musics but Alan does not see any difference in any of the genres.
“I stated researching and found albums of Buckweed Zydeco and the like and that’s what brought me in to different genres. Through that I got into Continental European music in terms of the waltzes and all that,” he says.
“I never had any difficulties with dealing with the limitations of the accordion. I realised the problems early on. I realised the difficulties of playing piano accordion early on and so I set my mind to blending with other people.”
When Kelly moved to Galway in the early 1990s his main focus was how he could fit in to the thriving scene already here.
“My focus was always how I could play with pipers and fiddle players and flute players,” Alan says. “I wondered how I could amalgam that and how I could blend it in terms of changing minds of how traditional music could be played.”
Trying to fit in could lead most people towards a stifling conformity, but in Alan’s case he found it a positive challenge, one which encouraged him to stretch himself as an artist.
“I think it’s always important to have different branches in order to push yourself,” he says. “At the end of the day you’re playing traditional/folk music and it’s unlikely you’ll be playing Carnegie Hall.”
One of those challenges he set himself was to become involved with a professional theatre show in Galway.
“I’d met Brendan O’Regan in Belfast and he said he’d been working with Druid,” he says. “I got a job working on The Black Pig’s Dyke. I toured that about two and a half years and it was really my first professional.”
Collaborations
Alan has played with a number of the main exponents on folk and traditional including Scottish singer Eddie Reader, who will join him at his forthcoming Galway Arts Festival show in the Radisson next week.
“We did the Celtic Connections with her in January and then we opened for her during her UK Tour in February,” says Alan. “It’s funny because whenever she introduces me as ‘Alan Kelly from Galway’ people come up to me afterwards and give out to me for not saying I’m from Roscommon.”
Nonetheless Alan is proud to call Reader his friend. “It’s been a relationship that’s been there for many years and it has just grown and grown over the years,” he says.
As well as Reader, Alan will also be joined by Tola Custy, and former Lúnasa guitarist Donogh Hennessy.
“When I first moved to Galway in 1993 Donogh had just moved here a couple of weeks before and we sort of gravitated towards each other,” he says. “We used to play The Lisheen three or four nights a week to develop our craft.”
Another noticeable presence in Alan’s band is flute player Stephanie Geremia, who grew up in New York and had a very different introduction to music.
“I never made a conscious decision to move to Ireland,” she says. “My connections are all in continental Europe and I lived in Italy for a while. I then travelled around for a bit and lived in Scotland and India for a little while.
“I came to Ireland for St Patrick’s Day and didn’t really think about it. It’s amazing to think that 12 years later I’m still living here. I loved the whole flute and fiddle tradition of Sligo/Roscommon and I stayed. I just love being surrounded by flute players.”
The Alan Kelly Quartet with special guest Eddie Reader will play the Radisson Live Lounge on Saturday July 24 at 8pm. Tickets are available from the festival box office, Galway Tourist Office, Forster Street, and www.galwayartsfestival.com
