March 13–20, 1997

cover story|music

The Afro-Celtic Kick

The latest wave in Irish music mingles world cultures with a techno beat.

By Steve Winick

Celebrating St. Patrick's Day doesn't have to mean scratchy old Clancy Brothers albums, teary-beery choruses with the Wolfe Tones, howling your throat sore with the Pogues, or even the staid and steady Chieftains at your local symphony hall.

There are new and exciting currents in Celtic music that add a touch of gloss and an air of world music fusion, which should appeal even to relatively mainstream tastes while satisfying cultural explorers as well.

This particular fusion has a long and happy history.

Rock and roll is to some extent Afro-Celtic music, a product of culture contact in the seething stewpot of America. The Anglo-Celtic folk tradition, transformed by technology and commercial forces into country music, and African-American folk tradition, similarly refashioned into rhythm and blues, were the spark and the fuel that ignited rock and roll. In the old world, African and Celtic sounds have also been interacting for a long time. South African Kwela and Mbanqanga is played on European pennywhistles, and Zulus play Celtic-influenced concertina music. The banjo and bones, borrowed from African traditions by way of American minstrel shows, are now a part of Irish music.

But in the 1990s the musical mixmaster has been cranked up another notch; Celtic and African musics are meeting head-on in the postmodern technoscape. One of the first acts to experiment along these lines was Mouth Music, which began as a collaboration between producer Martin Swan and Scottish-American singer Talitha MacKenzie.

MacKenzie is a talented performer of mouth music, waulking songs and other old Gaelic vocal forms. Swan is a producer and musician who has worked with both African music and high-tech sounds. They spent a year exploring Afro-Celtic fusion before MacKenzie left to pursue a solo career in which African, Celtic and dance musics blend with other European influences, like Balkan, German and Bulgarian music. But the emphasis in MacKenzie's solo work is still on Gaelic singing and layered percussion with deep bass lines and sampled sounds adding aural richness — Afro-Techno-Celto music at its best.

MacKenzie, a New Yorker who fell in love with Gaelic music at an early age, considers herself a traditionalist despite the novelty inherent in her art, but some purists don't agree. Pointing out that purists got mad in the early 20th century when the accordion entered Celtic music, she concludes that "every time you take a step up, there is always going to be a group of people who wish that wouldn't happen. As if there was a static state at one time, a traditional state, and you have to get back to that."

MacKenzie, who is trained as an ethnomusicologist, knows better.

"Tradition is always in a state of flux," she explains. "It's always changing. Traditional musicians always use whatever they have around them. When you have synthesizers and computers around you, that's what you use."

MacKenzie's theories certainly describe the current state of Celtic music, and her comments could be expanded to include African instruments as well as synthesizers. Though there are rare exceptions, most bands use some form of computer technology, and African percussion is quite popular among today's Celtic bands. For example, the Scottish group Capercaillie have been exploring techno-Celtic music with African influences for about a decade. They may be the only Celtic band with an album made up mostly of remixes, a sure sign of the hand of hip-hop. Their concerts and albums make regular use of African and Afro-Cuban drums. Fronted by vocals in Gaelic and English by Karen Matheson, Capercaillie's music is a mixture of old and new, Celtic, African and pop. A whole host of Scottish artists including Shooglenifty, Old Blind Dogs, Deaf Shepherd, and Iron Horse have followed their lead, combining traditional music, world music, jazz and rock, while a more scratched-and-sampled sound is mixed with genuine jigs and reels by acts like the duo of Simon Thoumire and Fergus MacKenzie.

The most recent, and perhaps the definitive, contribution to this developing style was made recently, by a band called Afro-Celt Sound System.

A world-music supergroup that brings together well-known African and Irish musicians, the System features the Pogues' James McNally and piper Davy Spillane alongside Baaba Maal's bandmates Kauwding Cissokho and Masamba Diop. Centering on Celtic harp, flutes, uillean pipes and accordion and African kora, talking drums and percussion, the System also makes liberal use of bass loops, drum programming and studio special effects.

While there's now talk of a tour, the group was first put together in the recording studio as part of Peter Gabriel's Real World stable of musicians. Producer Simon Emmerson, known for his work with Baaba Maal and other African superstars, presided over the sessions, recording the musicans acoustically and then adding electronic effects. The results are a sexy, pulsating beat behind both upbeat and mesmeric Celtic melodies.

This trend is not limited to Ireland and Scotland; among the Celtic musicians borrowing from African music and hip-hop, few are harder, funkier or hotter than Wales' Llwybr Llaethog. Though they've been around for a decade their music has only recently been released in the United States. And an odd mixture it is, touting "Trip-Hop, Acid-Jazz, Jungle, African and Heavy Bass Reggae influences," with a bit of mandolin, banjo and whistle for Celtic flavor, plus vocals in Welsh.

Continental Celts are also getting into the Afro-Celtic act.

The group Dao Dezi, from Brittany in western France, is a product of the same team who put together the Deep Forest albums, which featured Pygmy music fractured and spliced back together with a dancehall beat. Dao Dezi does a similar thing with (or to) Breton music, presenting it within a house music/rave technoscape.

Vocalist Denez Prigent sings old traditional songs with mesmeric rhythms thumping away and sampled voices singing eerie choruses. Like Afro-Celt Sound System, Dao Dezi was initially put together just to record. But there have since been concerts featuring a pared-down version of the band. One day they might even make it over here.

Finally, for a home-grown version of the Afro-Celtic groove, check out the Irish bars in New York. During the early 1990s, a sizzling, if undisciplined, band formed there featuring fiddler Eileen Ivers, guitarist John Doyle, multi-instrumentalist Seamus Egan (a Philadelphia native who will be appearing Sunday night at International House) and percussionist Kimati Dinizulu. Though that formation rarely plays together anymore, look for the individual musicians and their various musical projects. You're likely to hear something as new and exciting as rock and roll was in the '50s; Afro-Celt may be a new recipe, but it uses some tried-and-true ingredients.