My letterbox is a wondrous thing, and although I can occasionally be found grumbling about getting too many CDs and not having enough time to listen to them all, I really shouldn’t be such a grumpy old git because every now and then I’ll receive a real treat.

A few days ago I lifted the green lid and inside one of those squishy envelopes was a disc from Dual, the new collaboration between Danu’s Muireann NicAmlaoibh and Eamon Doorley and Scottish singer Julie Fowlis and Ross Martin, whose pervious guitar wrangling credits have included Roddy Woomble and Bonnie Prince Billy.
It’s a funny thing that we tend to take the differences between the two national traditions in our strides without thinking about how our cultures and recent histories have coloured both the music and the way we think about it.
Our own tradition all but went under at one point as we tried to prove our modernity by stepping out from beneath the shadow of the empire in the middle of the century. In fact, it was only dragged back from the edge by the good offices of Ceoltas and Gael Linn. Those dual influences, though, have coloured how we perform traditional music, and Muireann NicAmlaoibh’s vocal style, for example, can be traced back to the recordings and production of Sean O Riada and the Cor Cuil Aodha.
The Scots, on the other hand, yielded to a union with England at a time when what we call traditional music was still at a relatively formative stage. Having signed up for union, the Scots by and large ignored its existence and their musical tradition has breathed pretty freely along the way. This free-breathing approach can be heard in the singing style of Julie Fowlis, which has a comparatively informal off-handedness about it. Although all four participants are credited equally on the cover the joint forewords (by Cathal Goan and Alex MacDonald, convenor of the council of the Western Isles) make it fairly clear that the singers are doing the running here and indeed most of the lead instruments are also played by Muireann and Julie.
Again, the instrumental music is very definitely rooted in the two differing traditions with Julie Fowlis playing the small pipes which mark out a very distinctively Scottish sound, lacking the raw power of the uileann pipes but bringing a more melodic bristle. Muireann contributes a frothy bubbling flute which washes through the album, leaving the two men to propel the songs and tunes with bouzouki and guitar.
From another folk tradition entirely, but once again a woman not afraid to assert herself musically or politically, South Africa’s Miriam Makeba died on November 9, having suffered a heart attack on stage during a protest concert against the fatal shooting by local drug dealers of six immigrant workers in Italy’s Campania region.
She was no stranger to political controversy and, having recorded her first cuts in South Africa in the late 1950s (where she was denied royalties), she left, first for London and subsequently, with the assistance of Harry Belafonte, for the United States where she testified against apartheid. As a result of this she found herself barred from her native South Africa when she tried to return for her mother’s funeral. Her marriage to Trinidadian civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael saw her career in the US curtailed as her tours and record deals were cancelled. She later lived in Guinea for a time before being invited by Nelson Mandela to return to South Africa in 1990. In all, through her life, she held passports from nine different states.
Although she was widely regarded as a pioneer in combining jazz forms with traditional African melodies, her generation of artists like Harry Belafonte an Hugh Masakele are equally significant as pioneers socially as they dragged the musical establishment into a modern era of racial equality. Fittingly, she was heralded towards the end of her life as one of the creators of ‘world music’, winning a Grammy for her 2000 album Homeland.
Our own most vaunted contributors to world music, Kila, will be celebrating the end of another action packed 12 months with the broadcast of their live concert film Once Upon A Time at the very start of next year as RTÉ are screening it on New Years Day. Meanwhile, the band’s ubiquitous Christmas concert will be in Vicar Street on Sunday December 21.
Before that, anyone with kids should use them as a shameless excuse to go and catch the band at the Ark, the children’s cultural centre in Temple Bar where they play two shows, at 2pm and 4pm on Sunday November 23.
Next year will also see the guys return to the screen as their collaboration with French composer Bruno Coulais on the soundtrack for Cartoon Saloon’s feature length animation The Secret Of Kells goes on general release around Europe.
Following hot on the heels of her second album I Won’t Go Home ‘Til Morning, Sarah McQuaid will be rounding out the year with the release, under the name Mama, of Crow Coyote Buffalo, her collaboration with singer Zoe.
The pair met at the gates of the school to which both their children go in the depths of Cornwall. Since recording her mammoth hit ‘Sunshine On A Rainy Day’ back in 1990 Zoe Pollock has absorbed a huge range of musical influences and this record, her first release in over a decade, reflects an exotic blend of eastern musical forms and nuances of Mariachi jazz to which Sarah McQuaid’s folk based rhythms offer a solid bed. As well as their similar lifestyles and similar musical outlooks the publicity shots that accompany the release also point up another odd similarity – the two look disquietingly alike and could plausibly pass for sisters.