In Praise of Andy

One doesn't like to throw the phrase "living legend" around too much, but it's awfully hard to resist applying it to Andy Irvine.
Andy performed at last weekend's Old Songs Festival in upstate New York, starting on the last leg of his North American solo tour (he'll be at The Waldo Theater in Waldaboro, Me., tonight and finish up at the Stan Rogers Festival in Nova Scotia this weekend).
In addition to performing at the Old Songs Saturday evening concert, Andy participated in a couple of special in-the-round type of shows, sharing the stage with the likes of Malinky, Liz Carroll & John Doyle and Priscilla Herdman, among others. He also led a "bouzouki jam" and a workshop on song accompaniment for bouzouki, mandola and mandolin, both of which were open to all comers.
The latter of the two afforded an opportunity to gain some insight into Andy, personally as well as musically. About 10 zouk/mando players (and a small crowd of onlookers) gathered at the far end of the festival grounds to watch Andy demonstrate his playing of "The Dream," the lead-in tune to his reverse-immigration song "Indiana" (from the first Patrick Street album). Andy explained that he tends not to think about the exact nomenclature for the chords he plays, e.g. A minor suspended 7 or the like, just simply puts together whatever seems to work; accordingly, as he went through the tune, he referred to one chord as "Peter" and another as "Oliver."
This is quite the year for Andy: In January he and Paul Brady reunited at Celtic Connections to perform the tracks from their classic late-1970s album that gave us songs like "The Jolly Soldier," "Plains of Kildare," "Mary and the Soldier" and, of course, "Arthur McBride." That album, happily, was re-released just last month on Compass/Green Linnet.
He is nowadays part of an intriguing band called Mozaik, which includes his old Planxty chum Donal Lunny, as well as American roots musician Bruce Molsky, one-man Balkan band Nikola Parov and Dutch multi-instrumentalist Rans Van Der Zalm. Mozaik blends seemingly disparate genres of Irish, Eastern European and American music traditions -- often in the same song or tune set -- and somehow it all makes sense; even more importantly, it sounds just great.
Their recently released second album, "Changing Trains," opens with a particularly distinctive track, "O'Donoghue's," penned by Andy. It's basically a capsule summary of the 1960s Irish folk music revival, with references aplenty to the people, places, events, songs and tunes of that era -- full of sly wit, fond remembrance and not a little wistfulness. You can regard "O'Donoghue's" as a sort of companion piece to Andy's "My Heart's Tonight in Ireland" and a prelude to "Lisdoonvarna," Christy Moore's salute to the famous, and possibly notorious, festival in Clare that launched a thousand tales, some of which may be true.
In a similar vein, Andy has on his Web site a fairly exhaustive autobiography that traces his musical involvement from childhood to present times: Sweeney's Men, the sojourn in the Balkans, Planxty, Paul Brady...all this and more. It's first and foremost a great read, as well as an enlightening portrait of an era whose legacy we still enjoy and no doubt will for some time.

--Sean Smith