Trad Beat Irish women to the fore

By Earle Hitchner

KARAN CASEY and SHARON SHANNON. At Symphony Space, NYC. March 18.

Imagine the courage, even the impudence of it: to sing on stage without accompaniment "Strange Fruit," the signature song of one of the greatest jazz singers ever, Billie Holiday, a song Time magazine selected as the best of the 20th century, a song that shatters listeners’ hearts and minds through vivid, horrifying imagery of a lynched black man "swinging in the Southern breeze."

Undaunted by Holiday’s classic recording made in April 1939 and unfazed by the many weak renditions made in more recent times by Sting, Tori Amos, and UB40, Karan Casey rooted herself in the spotlight and sang "Strange Fruit." And she nailed it. It was the kind of spellbinding emotional performance that demonstrated why, along with Maighread Ní Dhomhnaill, she is the best singer in Ireland now.

Backed masterfully by Niall Vallely on concertina and less so by Robbie Overson on guitar, Casey showed impressive vocal range and command during her set. To Ewan MacColl’s "Ballad of Accounting" and Woody Guthrie’s "Pastures of Plenty," she provided snap and snarl; to "Buile Mo Chroí" ("Madness of My Heart"), tantalizing jazz inflection; to "Eppie Morrie," fierce determination; to "She Is Like a Swallow," a chilling, aching beauty. Her interpretive ability, grounded in both traditional and jazz vocal techniques, is unique and without peer in Irish music today.

Vallely got the chance to show his prodigious concertina skill in a pair of piping tunes, "The High Drive/The Clumsy Lover," and in an inspired instrumental flourish during the song "Eppie Morrie." A competent, seasoned guitarist, Overson had occasional difficulty in finding the rhythmic seams to Casey’s singing, and in those instances his playing seemed distracting and dispensable.

No less distracting and dispensable were the electric bass and full drum kit that are now part of Sharon Shannon’s Woodchoppers. For a button accordionist fronting an all-instrumental band, the challenge is to keep the performance fresh and interesting without resorting to novelty or falling into the bigger-must-be-better sound trap. No doubt the talented Clare-born box player thought the bass of Ronnie O’Flynn and the drums of Lloyd Byrne, both exceptional players, would be a bottom-end boost out on the road in support of a new album, "The Diamond Mountain Sessions," featuring many guest vocalists who couldn’t come along. But more proved less this night, as the extra percussion and rhythm became an encumbrance.

Still, the inner-core playing of Sharon Shannon on accordion, fiddle, and tin whistle, sister Mary on mandolin, tenor banjo, and fiddle, Liz and Yvonne Kane on fiddles, and Jim Murray on acoustic guitar was tight and tenacious. The Shannon sisters’ accordion-mandolin duet fueling Ian Carr’s "Diamond Mountain" tune was spot-on, and the four-fiddle front of the Kane and Shannon sisters on Peter Ostroushko’s "Bonnie Mulligan" tune was exhilarating.

The one guest vocalist from the album who appeared this evening was Dessie O’Halloran, reprising the song he recorded with Shannon, "Say You Love Me." In a leathery voice, O’Halloran sang to the Irish/country swing mustered by Shannon’s band, and together they gave this thin slice of Americana a fat, fun-filled performance.

Also energetically delivered by the band were "Rathlin Island," "Mouth of the Tobique," "A Costa de Galicia," and the "Bag of Cats" encore, which had O’Halloran completing a frontline of five fiddles.

The World Music Institute billed this concert by Karan Casey and Sharon Shannon as "Women in Irish Music." A more accurate label would have been "Women in the Forefront of Irish Music," for that’s what they are.