Nightnoise

Nightnoise were a musical quartet whose career spanned the better part of two decades. Although three quarters of the band came from Ireland, the group was based in Portland, Oregon. Despite backgrounds in traditional Irish music, classical, and jazz, the band's style has most frequently been categorized, for better or worse, as New Age. The band released seven albums between 1983 and 1997 on Windham Hill Records.

Guitarist Mícheál Ó Domhnaill was well versed in the musical traditions of his native Ireland. As part of The Bothy Band, Mícheál was rightfully considered a legendary figure in Irish folk circles, but that had translated to zero commercial success during The Bothy Band's brief but extremely noteworthy career. When the band broke up in 1979, three members -- Ó Domhnaill, his sister Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill (vocals and keyboards), and fiddler Kevin Burke -- relocated to Portland, Oregon. Mícheál made a couple of duet recordings with Burke, while Tríona recorded with the band Touchstone. After a couple of years, though, Mícheál was ready for a change of pace. He met up with Billy Oskay, a violinist originally from the town of Kingston in upstate New York. Despite Oskay's classical background, the two had plenty of common musical interests and started working together.

The duo's subdued, pensive compositions attracted the attention of Windham Hill Records, a label that was big in the genre of New Age music. In 1982, when the Donnegal quintet Clannad reinvented themselves while composing the soundtrack to the BBC mini-series Harry's Game, they swung the door to the New Age market wide open for other Irish musicians to follow. However, and not entirely without justification, the term "New Age" has some negative connotations in popular culture. Nightnoise would have to compete for shelf space in record stores with seemingly anybody with a synthesizer and tin whistle who could record enough tunes with long pauses in the melodies and not too frequent chord changes to make an album, call the album Celtic something or another, and get at least a few people to buy it. There was plenty of room in the genre for genuine artistry, though, and Windham Hill could guarantee Ó Domhnaill and Oskay a base audience. As a result, both the label and the musicians had much to benefit from the partnership that would last the full fifteen years of Nightnoise's recording career.

While the 1983 LP Nightnoise was officially credited to Billy Oskay and Mícheál Ó Domhnaill as a duo, it set the tone for the subsequent albums credited to the group Nightnoise. All the instrumental pieces were composed either by Oskay or Ó Domhnaill. In addition to the guitar and violin, all the pieces had a keyboard part, and most included a flute or whistle as well. The style of the tunes was quiet, sparse, and subdued, providing the foundation of the basic sound that Nightnoise would carry with them foe their career. The main criticism of this record, which also carried over into subsequent Nightnoise recordings, was that it requires a great deal of patience for the listener to distinguish most of the tunes from each other. There were a few exceptions, though. Ó Domhnaill's "Bridges" features a haunting theme on the guitar that lingers in the mind long after the track stops playing. The album closes with a nice extended suite of tune fragments called "The Cricket's Wicket."

The project was put on hold for a couple of years after the first release. Ó Domhnaill joined his sister Tríona in a group called Relativity which also featured the Scottish brothers Phil (accordion) and Johnny (fiddle) Cunningham from the band Silly Wizard. When Ó Domhnaill and Oskay reconvened, they recruited Irish flautist Brian Dunning and officially named themselves Nightnoise. Most of the 1987 album Something of Time was recorded as a trio, with the two founding members taking turns overdubbing keyboard tracks. It was clear that they needed a full-time keyboardist, though, and Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill was the obvious first choice. Tríona played on one piece on the album, her own composition "Après-Midi," but she was a full-time member of Nightnoise from that point forward. The most distinctive track on Something of Time was the opening tune "Timewinds," an Oskay composition. Despite a synthesizer that sounds dated today -- ironically, the folk and classical elements in Nightnoise's sound generally hold up better -- "Timewinds" has a vibrance to it that most of the other tunes lack. Ó Domhnaill's jig "Wiggy Wiggy" showed off his and Dunning's Irish roots. It marked the band's first attempt to blend traditional Irish music in with the basic Nightnoise sound, and it worked pretty well. On the whole, though, Something of Time was a bit too formulaic, and I'd rate it as the weakest CD in the Nightnoise catalog.

The next album, At The End Of The Evening, came out in 1988. Having Tríona on board for the entirety of the writing and recording process made a huge difference. For one thing, her keyboard playing provided a solid instrumental foundation for the rest of the band to build on. The title song, written and sung by Tríona, was the first Nightnoise track to feature vocals and gave the album some needed variety. Tríona's most significant contribution to the album, though, was her classic composition "At The Races." This joyously bouncy instrumental would become Nightnoise's signature track. The other really good tune on this album is Dunning's minor-key waltz "Forgotten Carnival." While not dramatically different in approach from its predecessor, At The End Of The Evening was a clear step forward for Nightnoise.

1990's The Parting Tide was a bit anomalous for the band. In general the composing responsibilities on Nightnoise albums were distributed more or less evenly between the members, but for this album, five of the nine pieces were composed by Tríona. By contrast, founding members Mícheál Ó Domhnaill and Billy Oskay composed only one tune apiece. Still, the album showed some good variety. Dunning contributed a pair of strong tunes in the waltz "Bleu" and the extended suite "The Kid In The Cot." Tríona started to lead the band into a more Irish direction with the Gaelic song "An Irish Carol" and the tune "Jig Of Sorts." Oskay's lone contribution "The Tryst" was his strongest for the band, but it would also prove to be his last. Oskay had set up his own recording studio called Big Red Studio, and he left the band to give the studio his full attention. The 1992 compilation A Windham Hill Retrospective neatly summed up Nightnoise's career up to that point. While it did mark the end of an era for the band, Nightnoise were still far from finished.

Johnny Cunningham had played with Mícheál and Tríona in Relativity, and while his speciality was the more aggressive variety of Celtic fiddle music, he was somebody that the members of Nightnoise knew well and knew they could work with. Besides, the 1993 album Shadow of Time clearly indicated that the band had become eager to work their Irish roots into the Nightnoise sound to a much greater degree than they had up to this point. Dunning's edgy jig "Silky Flanks" is arguably the one Nightnoise tune you might hear at a pub session. Tríona sang "The Rose of Tralee," a well-known Irish standard, on this CD. Mícheál's composition "The March Air" concludes with a Gaelic song whose melody had been performed at President Kennedy's funeral. And in his one lead vocal on any Nightnoise album, Mícheál reprised "Fionnghuala," a classic bit of Scots Gaelic mouth music from the repertoire of The Bothy Band. While the basic elements of Nightnoise's established sound remained firmly in place, Shadow of Time was both the most diverse and energetic Nightnoise album to date.

Nightnoise returned in 1995 with A Different Shore. While a bit more subtle than its predecessor, this album did have a few fine waltzes in Cunningham's "Morning In Madrid" and Dunning's "Clouds Go By," a nice instrumental from Ó Domhnaill called "For Eamonn" that evoked the early Nightnoise sound, and Tríona's best vocal contribution to the band in "Falling Apples." My favorite track, though, is Dunning's "The Busker on the Bridge," which features a peculiar but fun vocal interruption in the middle. Following closely on the heels of A Different Shore came the live album The White Horse Sessions, recorded mostly in a studio in front of a small Portland audience in March 1996. Most of the material came from previous recordings, but the performance included three solid new tunes and a great Celtified adaptation of Van Morrison's "Moondance." The concert had solid energy throughout, and the band seemed to finally find just the right balance between traditional and modern musical arrangements. The White Horse Sessions was arguably Nightnoise's finest recording.

It also proved to be their last. Mícheál, Tríona, and Brian Dunning returned home to Ireland, while Johnny Cunningham remained in the States. Nightnoise re-convened occasionally in Ireland with John Fitzpatrick handling the fiddling over the next few years, but the band never sat down together for long enough to record a full-length album. The recent past has been horribly cruel to the band members. Cunningham suffered a fatal heart attack in December 2003. Then, in 2006, Mícheál Ó Domhnaill passed away from a fall in his house. Any chance of Nightnoise returning to action almost certainly died with him.

How you view the legacy of Nightnoise depends a lot on your perspective. For a fan of New Age music, Nightnoise were a flagship band who brought quality and credibility to a genre that didn't always enjoy the best of reputations otherwise, and whose popularity has waned considerably in the intervening years. As a folk music fan familiar with the other work of Mícheál and Tríona and of Johnny Cunningham, I consider Nightnoise to be a worthy endeavor by some world-class performers, but most of their music fell a bit short of these musicians' best work. There were some exceptions, though. Certainly "At The Races" is a very memorable tune, and a lot of Dunning's contributions were subtly effective. To those not familiar with Nightnoise I would certainly recommend The White Horse Sessions and A Windham Hill Retrospective, followed by Shadow of Time if they decide they want to hear more.

reviewed by Scott

Reprinted with permission from The Green Man Review
Copyright 2008 The Green Man Review

The Bothy Band

With St. Patrick's Day this weekend, I thought it would be a good time to write about traditional Irish music. In particular, I decided to look at the history of the greatest of the traditional Irish bands, The Bothy Band. The Bothy Band only produced three studio albums and one live album in their short history, but all traditional Irish music that has come since bears their influence.

A handful of developments helped to make the Bothy Band possible. First, while groups like The Clancy Brothers and The Dubliners were popularizing the Irish singing tradition in the sixties, The Chieftains began revitalizing the instrumental tradition, especially with regards to the fiddle and the uilleann pipes. Second, the band Planxty incorporated a number of Eastern European influences into their sound, most notably modal chord structures and a Greek plucked instrument called the bouzouki, when they emerged onto the scene in the early seventies. Perhaps the most important influence, though, was the growing cultural impact of rock and roll, which had begun to leave its mark on other musical styles as well. At least a few rock musicians in England were aware of Irish music; for example, The Beatles took a day off from recording Abbey Road so that The Chieftains had a place to record their second album. A couple of bands took their interest in the traditional music and folklore of the British Isles a bit further, though. Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span used fiddles and performed a lot of traditional material in a style that was always more rock than folk. These two bands have never had a huge following among rock audiences, but their repuation in folk circles remains enormous. Indeed, Mícheál Ó Domhnaill (guitar and vocals) cited Fairport's 1970 LP Full House, and the playing of their guitarist Richard Thompson, as major influences on the development of his style. So with a handful of bands incorporating folk music into their rock arrangements, it made sense that somebody would come up with the idea of bringing the energy and spirit of rock and roll into traditional music.

The impetus for the formation of The Bothy Band came from bouzouki player Dónal Lunny, famous in traditional Irish circles as a former member of Planxty. He was already developing a reputation for wanting to work with just about everybody in the scene, and he assembled a backing band to accompany an accordionist he was working with on some radio broadcasts. This group originally included Paddy Keenan on uilleann pipes and Matt Molloy on flute. Soon Ó Domhnaill and his sister Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill (clavinet and vocals), both from the band Skara Brae, had joined up as well, and a new band had clearly started to take shape. By late 1975, legendary fiddler Tommy Peoples had been recruited, and the sextet were ready to record their debut album.
The energy level of the playing on The Bothy Band 1975 had not been heard on any traditional Irish recording that preceded it. The band members were all masters at their particular instrument, and the notes always rang clean and true no matter how fast they were being played. Lunny and Ó Domhnaill provided a driving rhythm for the lead instruments to work with, and Tríona provided some balance to the band's sound with songs like "Pretty Peg." The genre of Irish traditional music had been reinvented overnight.
Unfortunately, there was no money to be made from Irish music at the time, and the long touring with little reward took it's toll. Peoples left, and Kevin Burke quickly stepped in to take his place. Peoples' reputation as a fiddler is impeccable, but I feel that Burke's style meshed better with the group. As America celebrated its 200th birthday in July 1976, The Bothy Band recorded the definitive Irish album, Old Hag You Have Killed Me. Once again the playing was superb, but the band showed real growth in its arrangements. The title tune, a three part jig, starts out simply with the melody played on clavinet, but simply soars once the second part begins. The opening tune "Music in the Glen" features a funky clavinet riff on the third parts that evokes Stevie Wonder more than anything Irish. "Sixteen Come Next Sunday" combines some exquisite guitar/bouzouki interplay underneath Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill's sweet vocals. But the most noteworthy track was a short, ninety-second piece of a capella Scottish mouth music that Ó Domhnaill brought to the band and sang lead on. "Fionnghuala," with its frenetically alliterative, oddly harmonized chorus, sounds quite literally like nothing else, and stands as one of the genre's all-time classic recordings.
1977's Out of the Wind, Into the Sun didn't quite match the same heights as its predecessor, but remained quite solid nonetheless. The band continued to push the envelope on a couple of tracks. "The Maids of Mitchelstown" begins by alternating between two distinct melodies that fit the same chord structure, and ends with the two melodies being played simultaneously. On the second part of the set of bagpipe jigs "The Pipe in the Hob/The Hag on the Churn," Ní Dhomhnaill plays a driving bass line on clavinet while Keenan crunches out the melody and Molloy and Burke produce some strident, outside-the-box harmonies. Despite the band's creativity remaining firmly intact, the money just wasn't coming in, and the band began to unravel. The following year saw the release of a live album After Hours, recorded in Paris, but The Bothy Band never returned to the studio, and played their last show in 1979.

The band members have all kept busy over the years, especially Lunny. Lunny was part of the band Moving Hearts in the eighties, and has an enormous resumé of credits as a producer and guest musician. He has worked with some top Celtic acts, including Ireland's Altan and Scotland's Capercaillie, but he's helped add an Irish flavor to plenty of rock records as well. Elvis Costello's Spike, Mark Knopfler's Golden Heart, and Loreena McKennitt's The Mask and the Mirror all feature Lunny on bouzouki. His most noteworthy session work, I think, has been with Kate Bush. Songs like "Night of the Swallow" off The Dreaming, and "Jig of Life" and "Hello Earth" off Hounds of Love, are groundbreaking, genre-bending recordings that benefited enormously from Lunny's contributions. Ironically, these particular songs sold me on Irish music well before I knew who Donal Lunny was or heard of The Bothy Band. Of the remaining members, only Matt Molloy has reaped any huge commercial reward for his playing; he took up an offer to join The Chieftains in 1980, and has been playing with them ever since. Paddy Keenan relocated to Boston and tours periodically. If you'd like to see the best player at his particular instrument in an intimate setting at a local pub, Keenan is well worth checking out. Burke has played in the band Patrick Street, and has toured on his own and as part of the Celtic Fiddle Festival. Mícheál Ó Domhnaill and Tríona Ní Domhnaill have had many projects between them, and played together in the bands Relativity and Nightnoise. Regrettably, Ó Domhnaill died suddenly of a fall in his house last July.

Much contemporary Irish music aims for fast playing and energetic live shows. Bands like Altan and Lúnasa are great to see live, but haven't made albums that do their concerts justice. While I obviously never got the chance to see The Bothy Band perform live -- I've seen all of them, Tommy Peoples included, play separately -- their greatness on record keeps them at a level above all the Irish bands that have followed. It also ensures that everybody can still enjoy them today, as they were in their prime.

Two Noteworthy Passings

Unfortunately, the past couple of days have seen the deaths of a pair of musicians who left indelible stamps on their respective genres. The first, Syd Barrett, was a prominent musician in England's burgeoning psychedelic scene in the mid-1960's. He named his band Pink Floyd, after his favorite bluesmen Pink Anderson and Floyd Council. Barrett sang and played guitar, and wrote most of Pink Floyd's early material, including the first two singles "Arnold Layne" and "See Emily Play" and much of their 1967 debut album The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn. Barrett mixed spaced-out imagery in songs like "Astronome Domine" with naive, childlike sentiments in songs like "Bike." The playful whackiness of his music had its appeal, but it came at a very heavy price. In hindsight, Barrett most likely would have faced serious mental issues even without the LSD, but the combination of psychological imbalance and copious amounts of hallucinogens proved disastrous. By the end of 1967, Barrett was barely playing a note on stage, and the rest of Pink Floyd brought in David Gilmour to fill in the gaps. Within a few months Barrett was gone for good. Roger Waters assumed the role of the band's chief songwriter, and Pink Floyd eventually became one of the world's biggest and best bands. Barrett, despite leaving his mark not just on Pink Floyd but on subsequent performers like David Bowie, R.E.M., and Robyn Hitchcock, managed to record two solo albums before retreating entirely, spending most of the rest of his life in his mother's house and making very little contact with the outside world. He has always maintained a cult following buoyed by the air of mystery surrounding his life, but he was one of rock's tragic figures long before he passed away this week at age 60, due to complications from diabetes.

The other musician who passed away this week was not as well known to rock audiences as Barrett, but was a legendary figure in Irish traditional music and had a greater, and more direct, impact on me personally. Like most young traditional Irish musicians coming of age in the late sixties and early seventies, Mícheál Ó Domhnaill (pronounced MEE-haul O'Donnell) felt the pull of rock music, citing Fairport Convention and their lead guitarist Richard Thompson as major influences. He cut his musical teeth in a highly regarded but short-lived outfit called Skara Brae, which also featured his sisters Tríona and Maighread Ní Dhomhnaill and fellow guitarist Daithi Sproule, who now plays with Altan. Mícheál and Tríona had bigger things in store for them, however; in 1975 they teamed up with Donal Lunny, Paddy Keenan, Matt Molloy, and Tommy Peoples to form The Bothy Band. Despite a brief four years of existence, the Bothy Band are widely regarded as the very best and most influential of all the Irish traditional bands. Ó Domhnaill's guitar and Lunny's bouzouki supplied the band with an energetic, driving, heavily rock-influenced rhythm, the likes of which had never been heard on any traditional Irish recording before. Ó Domhnaill also co-produced the Bothy Band's albums and sang a handful of songs, the most notable of which was "Fionnghuala," a short, rapid a capella pice of Gaelic mouth music. Featuring frenetic alliteration and unique harmonies, it became an instant classic. After the Bothy Band's breakup, Ó Domhnaill moved to Portland, Oregon and participated in a number of different projects, including the bands Relativity and Nightnoise with his sister Tríona. Before a Nightnoise concert in 1994 at the now defunct Bottom Line in Manhattan, I spent close to a half-hour in conversation with Mícheál Ó Domhnaill. Among other things, this was the first conversation I ever had with a recording artist. I had only recently discovered the Bothy Band at that time and didn't really know anything about Nightnoise, but he happily indulged all of my questions about his past, and left a lasting favorable impression with me. Mícheál and Tríona returned to Ireland in the late nineties. I kept waiting to hear of new work from them, and secretly hoped that I would live long enough to see a Bothy Band reunion concert, but I guess that won't happen now. Mícheál Ó Domhnaill was found dead after a fall in his home on Saturday. He was only 54.