Entertainment

Trad/Roots: Jiggy dancing to their own tune

Standfirst in this style, no bigger than 20pt

Jiggy bring their high energy performance  to Belfast  this month
Jiggy bring their high energy performance to Belfast this month Jiggy bring their high energy performance to Belfast this month

IF you're going to the Jiggy and Kíla gig in Áras Mhic Reachtain on July 23, bring an extra T-shirt because these two trad bands could borrow the old adage from the showband era – "send them home sweatin'."

As you all know, Irish music is essentially dance music but when you add it to rhythms and time signatures and instruments from other cultures around the world, it becomes irresistible.

Kíla have been doing it for the past 35 years but Jiggy are a relative new kid on the block, coming together as a band in 2017.

Led, if that is the right word, by bodhrán player Robbie Harris, the band is an ever-changing amalgam of musicians all over the world with Harris's bodhrán the heartbeat of the music.

It's an instrument that has always had a bad press but Robbie was always intrigued by percussion, even as a boy.

Apart from the human voice, it's probably the most primeval form of music, being something with a stick to make different sounds long before stringed instruments, which developed from hunting bows, were invented.

"I was always into drums, any sound that came on the radio that had good jazz drummer or a rock drummer or Ó Riada sa Gaiety, with Peadar Mercier going 'dum-dumba-dum-dumba dum' – and I was drawn to that tribal sound," he says.

"So I joined a local pipe band, St Kevin's Pipe Band in Bray, and when I was about 13 or 14, I got a bodhrán and I got a drum kit. And yeah, just I just I kind of taught myself and then just start watching other people that I'd see play and kind of tried to pick up tips or if you bump into another player, you'd share a few beats."

This was in the mid-1990s, when there was a vibrant busking scene in Dublin City centre where people who later went on to bigger and better things cut their performing teeth.

"Yeah, that was amazing because there was just a great scene," recalls Robbie.

"You had the Hothouse Flowers, the Frames, Kíla... loads of people on the street, Mundy and Paddy Casey later on, and if you had a bodhrán on on your back, sure, it was be handier than dragging a drum kit around," he laughs.

But Robbie's inquisitive mind didn't stop there. He started to explore other frame drums, as he says, one of the simplest instruments that culture makes.

"It's just a frame and you pull a skin over it all over and you find it all over the Mediterranean, the tamburello from Italy, the pandeireta from Spain, the tar from Morocco and so on," says Robbie, whose musical ear hears on a global scale.

"At home, the bodhrán has really evolved since the 60s when it was brought into ensemble playing with Ó Riada sa Gaiety and then the likes of Dónal Lunny and Johnny McDonough and then everybody added something over those decades, it's just transformed the instrument."

Back in pre-internet days, it needed trips to Virgin Records in Dublin to hear what he was looking for, trying to read German record labels to find out which Indian or African percussionists were playing on what but then Peter Gabriel founded Real World records which opened up a "real gateway into world music" for Robbie who swapped Grafton Street for European capitals when he went busking in 1992/3.

"Yeah, that was great because I met a lot of different percussionists from around the world and I got to meet some great percussionists from West Africa and jam with them," he says.

"I also loved Indian classical music but then I met the Dhoad Gypsies from Rajasthan when they came to a great but now defunct World Music Festival in Dún Laoghaire.

"One year, they were putting bands together like local bands with visiting bands and just threw myself, Derek Hickey, Emer Mayock into a room with the Dhoad Gypsies and said, 'Now, go for it'.

"We just jammed it out and I realised that their folk rhythms were so close to ours, The cycle of their folk rhythms immediately sat on our reels. When we start playing tunes, they knew exactly what to do."

And that is why Jiggy works so well, with their eclectic mix of Irish traditional music and song, Indian Konnakol singing, tablas and dance grooves to get you on your feet.

"Jiggy came together with myself and Éamonn de Barra who I met through busking and over the years we put some tracks together, some of them would be like have electronic beats in them, others were very folk-based," recalls Robbie.

"And it just evolved into the line-up that it is now but it's very organic. People came and went and then we decided to do an album back in 2017 but we had no grand plan.

"I suppose we were coming in the tradition of Martin Bennett, the Afro Celts, that kind of that sound of mixing contemporary beats with folk rhythms and trying to sort of blend trad tunes or to write tunes to work with them.

"But, as I said, the line-up kept evolving and changing but we weren't really too concerned. we're trying to find a sound I suppose and letting things evolve naturally."

Since 2017, Jiggy has recorded two albums, Translate and Supernova, and a third one is in the pipeline but the band's reputation is grounded in their live performances. Does the band get as much joy out of performing as the audiences gets in bopping along to the music they play?

"Yeah - I mean, Jiggy was set up to be a band that brought joy and happiness," says Robbie.

"We are completely unambiguous about that. We're on party time. We're here to make your dance. Irish music is dance music and, to be honest, I'm a little raver. I love dance music of all of all of all types.

"Folk rhythms from around the world to get people dancing."

That was wonderfully illustrated in the Jiggy video of Silent Place, featuring dancers of all ages from all over the planet enjoying the ecstatic joy of dancing, which has notched up something like 50 million views on various platforms.

With Kíla also on the bill, don't say you haven't been warned - bring an extra T-shirt and your best dancing shoes.

:: Jiggy and Kíla are appearing at Áras Mhic Reachtain on the Antrim Road in Belfast on Saturday July 23 as part of Scoil Samhraidh Mhic Reachtain. The previous evening, Moya Brennan, the 'voice of Clannad', ill be on stage as well as breakthrough singer, Sibéal Ní Chasaide.

Full information from mhicreachtain.com/scoil-samhraidh-mhic-reachtain/