Ceol: Ryan reaches the crest

Since leaving Cherish the Ladies as their lead vocalist a decade ago, Ryan has forged a solo career difficult in its ambition. She has pursued a style of singing and songwriting that spans Irish music and contemporary American folk, and the challenge, in commercial terms, is to attract the partisan audience for each without estranging either. It is not an easy task, but on the strength of “The Farthest Wave,” Ryan might knock down the stubborn wall separating them.
In the past, Ryan’s songwriting frequently tapped into or reflected her Detroit upbringing as a first-generation Irish American daughter of a Tipperary father and Kerry mother. In the Motor City she was exposed to Irish ballad, Irish traditional, Motown, jazz, and other music in and out of the house.
Ryan’s sympathy for and understanding of the Irish immigrant experience in America were expressed in the title song she wrote and sang for Cherish the Ladies’ 1992 album, “The Back Door,” a song she “dedicated to all undocumented Irish aliens.” In “The Missing Piece,” a song Ryan composed and sang on Cherish the Ladies’ 1993 recording, “Out and About,” an Irish immigrant couple living for several decades in the American Midwest come to a hard-won realization. The husband and wife ponder retirement and a return to Ireland, but the dream drifts away in these lines: “For neither wants to say what they both know / They’d only
be ‘the Yanks’ at home / And they’d miss their grandkids growing.”
Sometimes Ryan’s interpretive approach to songs allowed sentimentality to overtake sentiment. A clutch in the voice to clinch an emotional moment, a slight trill or rise in vibrato to convey heartache or passion: these could push Ryan’s technically superior soprano voice to a level of cloying sweetness or gaudy affectation. When they did, more became less, and the songs suffered as a result.
Cathie Ryan began to sing inside, not outside, herself on “Somewhere Along the Road,” her third solo CD and first with John McCusker at the helm. That 2001 album was an improvement in almost every performance aspect for Ryan and was shining proof that here, finally, was an album commensurate with the vocal ability she indisputably possessed. McCusker’s clear-eyed production and gentle prodding helped her slip inside the skin of those songs, and the achievement of that CD can now be regarded as a foretaste of an even more impressive one, “The Farthest Wave.”
On this new album, another musical collaboration from the previous CD sparkles: Cathie Ryan and John Doyle. The opening song, “What’s Closest to the Heart,” was written by the two, and the kinetic, rhythmic-percussive guitar playing of Doyle is the instrumental pulse behind Ryan’s lively vocal. Doyle also shows a more delicate side of his guitar accompaniment in “The Farthest Wave,” a song of contemplative tenderness and longing, composed by Ryan and Scottish musician Karine Polwart.
As she did on “Somewhere Along the Road,” where she sang Olla Belle Reed’s classic old-time/bluegrass song “High on a Mountain,” Ryan sings in an intriguingly slow tempo another American roots staple, “Don’t This
Road Look Rough & Rocky,” memorably recorded in 1954 by Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, and the Foggy Mountain Boys and in 1979 by Emmylou Harris. The lap steel of Johnny Dickinson adds just the right bluegrass tinge to the song’s arrangement on Ryan’s CD.
The risks Ryan takes on her recording pay off handsomely in “Gabhaim Molta Brighde,” where only Phil Cunningham’s plaintive piano accordion playing backs her soft, supple vocal in Irish; “Peata Beag Do Mh_thar,” another song in Irish featuring McCusker’s “Joseph’s Reel” tucked in for further piquancy; and even “Home Sweet Home,” in which Ryan’s convincing vocal and Cunningham’s alteration of the choral melody prevent this song, written in 1823, from submerging into customary hackneyed emotion.
The vocal duet by Ryan and Caherlistrane, Galway, singer Se_n Keane in “What Will You Do, Love?” mostly has the pair trading quatrains in a kind of call-and-response pattern until the last quatrain, in which they harmonize. It is a spare, lovely performance.
Just as effective is Ryan’s singing of “As the Evening Declines,” in which Irish poet Francis Higgins’s words are set to music by Ryan’s first husband, Dermot Henry. It is a wistful, cleverly discerning song of erotic recollection, for the very old woman at the center of it recalls “soft talk and kisses” as well as “husbands in plenty,” and she laments the lack of them now. As she says, “I am old, yes, I’m old, but I’m not a dry nettle / All I need is a man who is high in his mettle.”
How refreshing it is to hear a song of calm craving for physical intimacy by an elderly Irish woman-in a poem, no less. And why not?
Singer Karan Casey has called the songwriting team of John Spillane and Louis De Paor “the Gaelic hit factory,” and no better evidence of that was their song “You Brought Me Up,” sung by Casey on her “The Winds Begin to Sing” CD. It was the best song on that album.
On Ryan’s new album, chock-full of fine songs and singing, the most shatteringly beautiful song is also one of the simplest and subtlest, “The Wild Flowers,” composed by John Spillane alone. His lyric describes flowers that “blossomed in the ditches,” “flowered by the roadside,” and “banished from the garden / they made their own way in the world / they sang their own songs in the spring / wore their own colors in the sun.” Unlike the lily and the rose, these wild flowers were not “taken and broken / and bred by men,” nor “grafted and lamed / twisted and tamed.” As Ryan states in her brief comment about the song: “Here’s to
flowering, not merely surviving.”
In many respects “The Farthest Wave” is just that: a flowering, not merely a case of surviving. There’s an unmistakable air of melancholy–perhaps from a yearning thwarted, a dream dashed, or a pain endured-wafting through several of the songs Cathie Ryan sings here. Yet this album is neither disconsolate nor despondent. Its spare shimmer and fervor convey hope, not despair.
“I see how wisdom begins to come from accepting that I can’t resolve everything,” Ryan is quoted as saying in the press sheet sent with her
CD.
That wisdom, coupled with a first-rate selection of songs and mature, masterful, at times magnificent singing in the service of those songs, makes “The Farthest Wave” not just Cathie Ryan’s most accomplished recording to date but one of the most accomplished examples of Irish American singing to date. It is a revelation.
“The Farthest Wave” (Shanachie 78062) is available from Shanachie Entertainment Corp., 37 E. Clinton St., Newton, N.J., (phone) 973-579-7763. Also visit www.cathieryan.com and www.shanachie.com.
Upcoming concerts by Cathie Ryan and her band will take place at Diana Wortham Theater, Warren Wilson College, Asheville, N.C., at 8 p.m. on May 13; Neighborhood Theater, Charlotte, N.C., at 8 p.m. on May 14; Eddie’s Attic, Decatur, Ga., at 7 p.m. on May 15; Barnstormer’s Theater, Tamworth, N.H., at 8 p.m. on May 20; Cape May Convention Center, Cape May, N.J., at 8 p.m. on May 22; Jack Frost’s 19th Annual Irish & Celtic Festival, Poconos, Pa., from 3:45 to 5:15 p.m. on May 28; Lyceum, Alexandria, Va., at 8 p.m. on May 29; Municipal Complex, 2400 Byberry Rd., Bensalem, Pa., at 8 p.m. on June 1; and Festival of Fountains Outdoor Concert, Longwood Gardens, Kennett Square, Pa., at 7:30 p.m. on June 2.

OTHER NEW ALBUMS
Ballyhar, Kerry-born button accordionist Paudie O’Connor, playing in the Sliabh Luachra style, has self-issued a solo CD, “Different State.” Joining him on the album are guitarist Paul De Grae, fiddlers Aoife N