Waking up in a daze in the middle of a field has got to be one of the great human experiences but, alas, we've seen the last of festival season for this year. No more guys in summer dresses, thirtysomething women in fairy facepaint, or drunks who wouldn’t ordinarily know Tinariwen from a tin of peas lollopping around to the great North African band. As far as folk at Electric Picnic are concerned the more noise you could make the better – Kila were magnificent – and there were some pretty bizarre moments for those whose material strayed back to the quieter side. Performing in a tent that backed onto the main stage Jinx Lennon and Miss Paula Flynn delivered three astonishing performances but the final evening descended into the surreal when ‘St. Brigid’s Shrine’ turned into a mashup featuring the pulverising sub-bass spill from the Sex Pistols on the main stage.
You won’t be needing the sunscreen for Sligo Live this year as the festival has taken the decision to move indoors. Although there is a fair smattering of straightforward pop, the festival still holds onto its original roots mission and pulls in a couple of world class bands in the shape of Orchestra Baobab, one of Africa’s great iconic outfits and creators of one of the world’s most sublime and truly distinctive sounds. The band first started in 1970, fusing Afro-Cuban rhythm and Creole melodies with Congolese rumba, High Life and a whole gamut of local styles – kickstarting a musical renaissance in their native Senegal, which turned the capital Dakar into one of the world’s most vibrant musical cities and paved the way for bands such as Youssou N’Dour’s Super Etoile de Dakar. They produced more hits in less than a decade than other bands have in a lifetime.
They’ll be joined in the Sligo Radisson on the night of Sunday October 26 by Solas, properly regarded as the most popular, influential, and exciting Celtic band to emerge from the United States.
The festival kicks off on the evening of Friday October 24 with a gig by Sly & Robbie, the world’s most prolific rhythm section. Since they started working together in 1975, they have played on an estimated 50,000 tracks. They have backed and produced virtually everyone in Jamaica, from Peter Tosh to Sean Paul.
For the purists among you, the Friday evening of the festival also provides an opportunity to see Irish music pared back to one of its quintessential combinations of fiddle and flute as Michael McGoldrick and Dezi Donnelly take the stage at Sligo’s Canis Major Clarion. They’ll be joined onstage by Liz Carroll and John Doyle. The ex-Solas guitar maestro and the Chicago born fiddler are no strangers to audiences in Ireland, but as two of the finest exponents of Irish traditional music to come out of the United States there should be no reason not to catch them again.
Friday night’s headline offering at the festival is Quebec’s Le Vent Du Nord, a four piece whose high energy take on traditional Quebecoise music is famed at roots gatherings for its vibrancy, energy and the passion with which they attack each performance.
Back in Dublin, the line-up for this year’s Ace And Deuce of Piping has been announced. As in previous years the event will take place in Dublin’s Liberty Hall and the proceedings, MC-ed by Brendan Gleeson will kick off at 8pm on Sunday September 28. This year’s show is set to feature Seán McKiernan on pipes, Paddy Keenan with Paddy Glackin on fiddle, Seán McKeon with Liam O’Connor on fiddle, Conal Ó Gráda & John Blake on flute & guitar, sean nos singer Jimmy Canavan, and Mairtín O’Connor and Frankie Gavin on accordion & fiddle.
At one of the spoken word events at Electric Picnic, there was a debate as to whether the Arts Council should be involved with funding music. Although there was quite a groundswell in favour of letting the market decide what it wants to hear, the reality is that letting the market know you even exist can be prohibitively expense if you’re staging events in small venues, so it’s interesting to hear that the Arts Council’s Deis scheme, aimed at developing the audience for traditional music, has decided to grant aid Paul Lee, the promoter behind the Musiclee gigs at the Cherrytree and previously at the Cobblestone, with the aim of building up an email and mobile number database so that gigs can be advertised to interested audiences without blowing the entire potential profit up front on advertising in the murky back pages of our nation’s dailies.
Madrid based Garrett Wall and his band will be swapping sunshine and siestas for a couple of days in a beat up Ford Fiesta as they hit these less than sunny shores for a blink and you’ll miss it tour at the start of October. They’ll be playing material from Sky Pointing, last year’s blueprint album on which the band’s hallmark trumpet, bass, cajon and guitar sound is captured live in the studio. The album is now available both from iTunes and from downloadmusic.ie and while Sky Pointing gets a physical release in the United States in January on Cosmic Trigger, you’ll also be hearing some new material as the band are scurrying back into the studio in November to record what I’m told will be a more polished and produced follow-up. The Irish dates start off with a gig in Mullarkey’s as part of Clifden Arts Festival on Sunday September 28. Thursday October 2 brings them to Waterford, where they’ll play Electric Avenue. They’re in Dublin on Friday October 3 for a show upstairs in Whelans, before heading to Rahan in Offaly for a gig in the Thatch on Saturday October 4.