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New
Traditional
By
Glenn Weiser
Niamh
Parsons and Graham Dunne
Old
Songs, March 10
Winter was giving way to spring in the night air as Niamh
Parsons, a 40ish Irish singer, stood with a handful of people
smoking a cigarette outside of the Old Songs building in Voorheesville
after her show. “The first half seemed like five minutes,
and the second half seemed like five minutes,” she said with
visible pleasure in her Dublin brogue.
It’s doubtful that time dragged for many of the 90 or so listeners
in the deconsecrated church either during a memorable performance
of Celtic music last Friday by Parsons, who began singing
old Irish ballads at age 8 and grew up in the midst of Dublin’s
thriving folk music scene, and Graham Dunne, a rock-turned-acoustic
guitarist from County Clare who accompanied her. In an evening
of musical shape-shifting, traditional songs became contemporary
and vice-versa as Parsons’ warm, clear alto floated over Dunne’s
jazzy, flamenco-tinged guitar. Although the purists in the
house might not have approved of Dunne’s dissonance-laden
chord choices, there was no quarreling with the quality of
his elegant playing and Parsons’ rich, ornamented singing.
Wearing a sleeveless, ankle-length red velvet dress, Parsons
offered two sets of songs dominated by the themes of love
and war. The duo opened with the Scottish “The Rigs of Rye,”
which tells of how a young man tests the love of a maiden
who is about to elope with him, and it was quickly obvious
that she was both an expressive and technically strong singer
as Dunne fingerpicked rolling arpeggios on his nylon-string
ax. Following was Sigerson Clifford’s plaintive “The Boys
of Barr na Sráide,” a song about bird hunters who leave their
seacoast paradise to fight the English and end up dispersed
to foreign shores, and “Clohinne Winds,” a lovely dream ballad
by Briege Murphy, which, owing to the descending chord line
in Dunne’s arrangement, happened to sound like the old pop
tune “A Taste of Honey” at the beginning of each verse. More
traditionally styled was “Ye Rambling Boys of Pleasure,” which
the Irish poet W.B. Yeats once heard sung by an old man, and,
unable to remember it all, famously rewrote it as “Down by
the Sally Gardens.”
Other standouts were the grim medley of “Blue Murder” and
“He Fades Away,” two songs about workers from the U.K. who
went to work in the asbestos mines of Australia and, lungs
befouled from the job, perished, and “John Condon,” a lament
for both the Irish boy who at 14 was the youngest Allied solider
to fall in WWI and for the futility of war itself. Dunne also
took a few solos, including “Cape Clear,” a slow folk melody
set against jazz chords, and a pair of straight-up flatpicked
jigs, “The Southwest Wind” and the saucily titled “The Petticoat
Loose.”
Niamh Parsons is a fine, real-deal traditional singer, and
with Graham Dunne’s forward-looking accompaniment, you could
call their time-melting music old Guinness in a new bottle.
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