Concert Preview—

Expect More Than What’s On Rafferty’s New CD At Live Show

By Andrew Carey

Irish flutist and uillean piper Mike Rafferty’s new album, Speed 78 (Larraga Records MOR 1302), is named for both the old 78 RPM records and Mr Rafferty’s own seventy-eighth year, in which it was released.

Unlike the average CD, it’s the product of a house party, not a studio. The concept might sound odd to those accustomed to the overdubbed and studio-tweaked approach of pop music producers, but it works brilliantly for traditional Irish music. Speed 78 took the number two slot in the Irish Echo’s list of the Top Ten Traditional Albums of 2004.

“We just came over to my father’s house for two days,” Mr Rafferty’s daughter, Mary, said. “We had a list of the tunes we wanted to play, but it wasn’t really scripted at all.”

Mary Rafferty (button accordion, flute, and whistles), her husband, Dónal Clancy (guitar and bouzouki), and various guests from the New York Irish traditional music scene (including Joe Madden [button accordion], the father of Ms Rafferty’s former bandmate Joanie Madden of Cherish the Ladies) appear on the CD, which includes not only polkas, hornpipes, jigs and reels but Mr Rafferty’s stories of life and music.

Mike and Mary Rafferty, along with Dónal Clancy, will appear at 8 pm on Saturday, March 5 – yes, that’s this weekend – at Newtown Meeting House as part of The Shamrock Traditional Irish Music Society’s regular series of concerts. 

While the current tour is called Speed 78 and marks the release of the new album, Ms Rafferty says that audience members shouldn’t expect to hear too much duplication.

“My father has a very good habit of learning new tunes all the time,” she said.  “He doesn’t want to just play the stuff that’s on the CD when we’re out.  We have to play new things.”

Although much of  Saturday’s concert will be drawn from the unrecorded bulk of the Raffertys’ vast repertory, listeners familiar with their CDs will recognize a few sets from Speed 78 and the father-daughter duo’s previous releases, The Dangerous Reel (1995), The Old Fireside Music (1998) and The Road from Ballinakill (2001).

Mr Rafferty was born and raised in the town of Larraga in the parish of Ballinakill in eastern County Galway, the heartland of a strain of slower, highly expressive traditional music. He learned to play the flute as a boy from his father, Tom “Barrel” Rafferty, and grew up hearing the music of the  Ballinakill Céilí Band, renowned throughout Ireland and the Irish diaspora.

He emigrated to the United States in 1949, and remains a vital exponent of the lyrical East Galway style to this day. In 2003 Earl Hitchner, one of the foremost Irish music critics in America today, named him the Irish Echo Traditional Artist of the Year.

“A tune is like a conversation,” Mr Rafferty taught his daughter when as a child she first began to play, “and if you play too fast nobody will understand you.” Too many Irish bands of the past couple of decades have taken to playing tunes too fast, as if they were being paid by the note and want to maximize their earnings per minute.

Mr Rafferty and other older musicians have kept alive the moderate pace and expressive phrasing of their youth. Their steadfast dedication has played off as many younger players, Ms Rafferty not the least of them, have rejected maniacal tempi and taken the older styles to heart.

Playing with a band like the all-female supergroup Cherish the Ladies, where all the musicians come from different regional styles, Ms Rafferty said, isn’t much like playing with her father.

“With my dad, I’m more attuned to playing with him, to following him,” explained Ms Rafferty. “It’s sort of like an intimate conversation. People say I play the accordion the way he plays the flute; I know the breaths and the phrasings.

“My dad doesn’t just pick tunes at random,” Ms. Rafferty added. “There’s not only a reason, but a story for every tune he plays.”

The audience at the meeting house this weekend should come away from Saturday’s concert not only entertained and inspired by beautiful music, but with a sense of the history of Ireland and of Irish music as Mr Rafferty sees them.

(To make reservations for Saturday’s concert, call 203-256-8453 or send email to TMQuinn@optonline.net. For directions or more information about the Shamrock Traditional Irish Music Society, visit www.ShamrockIrishMusic.org.

For bios, discographies and other information about Mike and Mary Rafferty, see www.RaffertyMusic.com.)