IT IS a lovely thought that Irish music is a citizen of the world. The inferiority complex is long gone and its confidence means that it can take on jazz or rock or classical arrangements and still be true to itself.
The fiddler Andrew Finn Magill is a fine example of this phenomenon. Born and raised in Asheville, North Carolina, his lineage through his father goes back to the fiddle stronghold of Broughsane.
Jim Magill has been the director of the Swannanoa Gathering since it was founded in 1991 to provide folk arts workshops in the Swannanoa Valley near Asheville in the heart of the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains so young Andrew of course was able to avail of some A-list tuition.
“I know how rare this is, but as a kid, I got free lessons, because my dad was the director, from people like Tommy Peoples, James Kelly and Kevin Burke. How many kids would get to do that?” he asks.
But it wasn’t just traditional Irish music that attracted Andrew. He is also a master of old-time and bluegrass and while he knew he was always going to be making music it is only recently that he has decided to make it his career, playing and composing in different genres.
That variety is what has led him to produce two superb but very different albums last year, charting his musical progression over the years. First up was Roots, which is a joy for dyed-in-the-wool trad fans.
“I wanted to pay homage to my roots – hence the title – so the repertoire and the musicians who joined me on the album were fundamental to my development. Therefore the tunes are ones I’ve been playing since I was 10 years old, although there are some lesser-known tracks on the album which I found when I was doing research on the Irish Traditional Music Archive," he explains.
If Roots is where Andrew has been, Branches is where he is going, featuring Irish music in excitingly different settings.
“I play jazz and I play a lot of American styles but I specifically set out to write tunes with an Irish or Scottish accent, so I tried to keep the tunes in the Celtic idiom so that they were connected to the Roots album but also branching out in different directions at the same time.”
As you go through the album, the playing becomes more and more adventurous so jazzy tunes like Relapse and December are a pointer to the direction Andrew is going in at the minute where he is exploring harmonic and melodic ideas. Thus far it has been a thrilling journey.
Andrew also has a strong interest in public health, and one of the most interesting things he did was a musical project in Malawi, centred on the tragic prevalence of AIDS in the country.
He managed to fundraise more than $60,000 for a two-year public health project which supports sustainable music and education programs for AIDS orphans in the country, a project endorsed by music channel MTV which resulted in a Fulbright Fellowship.
“I’ve always had an interest in public health, probably because we don’t have national public health care here in the United States, so growing up in America you are constantly hearing stories of people who couldn’t pay their health care, who lost a hand or who had died because they didn’t have the proper health care so public health was always an interest of mine.
“After I studied abroad in Ghana, I got interested in African public health which led me to Malawi which is one of the countries hardest hit by the AIDS epidemic.
“The Fulbright/mtvU funding I got helped me go there for a year to co-produce Mau a Malawi, an album about AIDS where all the tracks were inspired by real Malawians who had been affected by HIV and AIDS in some profound way.
“The infection rate in Malawi is about 50 per cent and we heard some incredible stories.”
But is disease an appropriate subject to sing about, I ask.
“Every society expresses itself through music and song in a cathartic way, emotionally speaking so each song on the album is based on a particular person and we basically turned their own words into lyrics. It was very powerful,” he replies.
At the minute, Andrew has also two Brazilian bands on the go – he lives part of the year in Rio de Janeiro – and in March, he is heading back there to record his own self-penned Brazilian music which is based on choro, a popular Brazilian instrumental genre, with American and Irish elements added to the mix.
So Andrew, like Irish music itself, is also a citizen of the world.
