Ré Album Launch Concert

RÉ

A riddle for you: Though they’ve been playing together on stage for years to large audiences, rapturous applause and rave reviews, this group are giving their first ever ticketed concert in the Unitarian Church, St. Stephen’s Green, on Monday, 15 December next. How can this be?

The answer lies in Liam Ó Maonlaí’s collaboration with choreographer Michael Keegan–Dolan called Rian. In that internationally acclaimed production, the Fabulous Beast dancers revealed a new and freer way to respond to traditional music. Now, the Rian musicians – Liam Ó Maonlaí, Peter O’Toole, Cormac Begley, Eithne Ní Chatháin and Maitiú Ó Caiside – have come together to form the band, Ré, and in turn their performances encourage us to become the liberated listeners and to respond in new ways to the music.

Rian captured beautifully different characteristics of traditional music, one of them being its spontaneity – the beauty of things being changed suddenly and everyone going along with it. This can only happen successfully when those involved have a deeply shared sense of what’s going on, where it has come from, and what it can do.

As Ré’s Eithne Ní Chatháin (fiddle, voice) says: “We share a very rich common well of tunes and songs, and dip into it differently each time we play. We have also got to know each other so well over three years playing together and travelling the world with Rian and the dancers, we could just keep going for days and nights.”

To be true to their stage origins, the band decided to make their first album a live one. To this end, they convened in front of an invited audience at St Nicholas’ Collegiate Church in Galway earlier this year, and with only the barest of plans for what they’d play, they recorded what happened on the night. The eponymous album, free of studio manipulation, is one of those handful of stand-out ones that capture the special atmosphere of live traditional music at its best and freest.

Liam Ó Maonlaí says: “Traditional music is amazing. It has a mind of its own. It is a timeline and it is meditative. These tunes have brought us through times of loss and pain and they connect us to that. We have to play this music . Like bees have to make honey or like birds have to sing, whether we know it or not, this music sustains our collective spirit and connects us with people the world over. The music is an expression of our relationship with the land. It has been and still is played not for entertainment, although it truly entertains, but just to be played.”

The CD reflects an incredible array of talent: Three song writers (with one original work each on the CD); three very different singers (– one track featuring all five voices); a wide range of instruments, including pipes, tin whistle, fiddle, piano, organ, bodhrán, bouzouki, guitar, and the full spectrum of concertinas from bass to piccolo; a variety of music from traditional tunes to traditional songs and even one from Peter O’Toole’s pen.

Yet these quantifiables do not capture the essence of Ré’s music. It is a much more intangible thing and has to do with their masterful ability to be spontaneous and entirely at one. Ó Maonlaí says: “I find myself sometimes sitting, playing in the company of these fine players and I just put down my instrument to watch and listen. I feel happy to have been a catalyst in bringing them together. I love them and my heart soars when they sit and play. It is a bonus to actually play with them.”

“I love where we meet in the music and in the songs,” Ní Chatháin says, “and naturally the dancers are never far from our hearts in how we perform the music.”

It is the fulfilment of a long-held ambition for O’Toole: “Since I was young I had a huge love of traditional Irish music, inspired by songs and tunes from the likes of Planxty, The Bothy Band, De Dannan and Clannad. My own musical journey took me all over the world with Hothouse Flowers but it was always a dream to make an album featuring some of that music I listened to growing up. Ré is this opportunity for me and a personal career highlight.”

Ó Maonlaí gets to the essence of it: “People sit together and play allowing the music to become a fire into which they can gaze. This is church. Sometimes a voice will lift and a crowded room will fall into silence to be carried by that one voice into a dreamtime place. We return at the songs end, richer. Sometimes a particular tune will insist on being played again and again bringing us deeper into something we understand but cannot name. Aboriginal people only discuss the sacred in silence. The silent language that all beings understand. Music can guide us to that silence.”