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Date Posted: 18:43:08 03/04/04 Thu GMT
Author: Lynn
Subject: Can the Chieftains save the world? (Miami Herald)

Posted on Thu, Mar. 04, 2004

MUSIC
Spreading Irish charm and musical diplomacy
BY ROB HUBBARD
Knight Ridder News Service

Can the Chieftains save the world?

To you, they may be merely the most famous band in Irish traditional music. But this band has long been negotiating peace settlements among a wide array of musical styles, which may explain why they performed at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony for Iran's Shirin Ebadi last year.

To hear the group's leader, Paddy Moloney, tell it, they're using music as a tool for international understanding.

''I remember being in Bali four years ago on a holiday,'' the brogue-bearing Moloney said from his winter home in Naples on Florida's west coast. ``By the entrance of a temple, there was a guy lying on a bench with a whistle, just stretched out, playing away. I stood for a while, listening to what he was playing, a simple local tune.

'After a while, I said, `May I try your flute?' and he jumped up and handed it to me. I played him back the same tune, and he was blown away. How would I, a Westerner, know his music? But then I played a little bit of Irish music and that explained it to him. He didn't speak any English, but he understood. Music transcends.''

Moloney and his bandmates have long been known as Irish music's foremost ambassadors, hauling their jigs, reels and airs across every continent but Antarctica.

The Dublin-bred Moloney formed the group in 1963 with the idea of not only preserving his country's folk music traditions but also finding open ears elsewhere.

''I wanted to be able to do a kind of music that brought in the tradition,'' he said, ``but made it a little more exciting, particularly to the uneducated ear.

``And you don't have to be Irish to enjoy it. We've played it all over the world, and it fits in with every kind of folk music you can imagine. We've done it with Chinese, South American and Cuban music, from Galicia right across to Japan. It just has that special thing that makes people happy and sad at the same time.''

The Chieftains' latest album revisits a recurring theme in their work: the common ground shared by the folk music traditions of Ireland and the United States. A set of sessions in Nashville with country artists and singer-songwriters has now yielded two albums, Down the Old Plank Road and last year's Further Down the Old Plank Road.

'I call the last two albums our `bluegrass/green grass' connection,'' Moloney said, 'which really started back in '92, when we recorded Another Country. I came away thinking, `OK, we made a great album there,' but I always wanted to explore the connection more deeply. So I collaborated with Jeff White, a member of Vince Gill's band, and we started listening to a lot of tapes of traditional American folk tunes and finding a lot of links to Irish music, be it in the lyrics or the melodies.

``We went to Nashville for 10 days and came away with 24 tracks, enough for two albums.

``For us, it was like going to another part of Ireland and meeting up with our country cousins there. These guys and girls, you don't have to spell it out for them dot and dash. They clearly hear the connections there.''

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