With half a dozen gigs under their collective belt since a first impromptu performance, Moonlighting's repertoire is evolving into something with shape and substance SIOBHÁN LONGreports

IMPROMPTU GATHERINGS ARE the bread and butter of traditional music. Sessions are its beating heart, and even the merest hint of protectionism when it comes to sharing a tune would see a musician ostracised by the company in, well, jig time.

Festival hall backrooms can be melting pots for musicians waiting in the wings. Left with little else to do, while they await their moment in the spotlight, the lure of the tune can sometimes be too much to resist.

Glasgow's Celtic Connections festival, fast becoming the international standard-bearer for folk and traditional festivals, prides itself in its fostering of unlikely collaborations and spontaneous alliances. Last year's event nurtured the embryonic couplings of a brace of musicians who have now formed a loose enough coalition to allow them to come together whenever their hectic respective schedules allow.

The brainchild of Baltimore Fiddle Fair's Declan McCarthy, Moonlighting is the aptly chosen moniker for a five-piece on fiddle, guitar, accordion, flute and bodhrán - with a tincture of vocals occasionally tossed into the mix. Having witnessed their fleeting collaboration at Celtic Connections last year, McCarthy coaxed and cajoled them together for sporadic periods of rehearsal and performance, all with the aim of tapping into that part of each player's musical identity lurking in the shadows. Supported by the Arts Council's Touring Experiment funding, the quintet are revving their engines for a pair of gigs in Donegal and Dublin at the end of this month.

Moonlighting is populated by Altan's Ciaran Tourish and Dermot Byrne, Flook's John Joe Kelly, Capercaillie's Mike McGoldrick and former Solas guitarist, accompanist and increasingly busy producer, John Doyle. After 18 years on the road with Altan, Ciaran Tourish is tickled by the excitement of a new collaboration, although his first allegiance will ever remain with Altan.

"There was a spark there at Celtic Connections for sure," he says, "and everybody knew it. But of course, the reality is that everybody is so involved with their own bands already. Myself and Dermot are obviously with Altan, but Mike McGoldrick, at last count, played with something like 10 bands! I don't know how he does it - it'd fry my brain just to keep up - but he's such a great musician that he takes it in his stride."

With half a dozen gigs under their considerable collective belt since that first impromptu performance, Moonlighting's repertoire is evolving into something with both shape and substance, at one remove from the set lists of each of their bands of origin.

"It's definitely different", Tourish nods, "in that we do tunes from Brittany, John Doyle sings some contemporary songs, and it has probably a more modern feel than what I would be used to. It allows everyone the chance to throw their bit into the pot and it's all taken very seriously. John Joe Kelly and John Doyle have played quite a bit together before anyway, and both of them have played with Mike McGoldrick before too, so it's worked out really well when we all get together."

Most musicians these days have carbon footprints worthy of small corporations, and Tourish's is not insignificant either. Having once flown to the US and back in the same day, he's no stranger to the labyrinthine intricacies of tour schedules that seem to assume musicians have mastered the art of bilocation. What's the Atlantic Ocean there for anyway, if not to be blithely straddled in the name of a tune or three?

"Well, that US trip was a great way of beating jet lag because you don't have enough time to get used to the new time zone," he laughs.

The fact is that collaborative opportunities such as this offer musicians a chance to polish up the silver and reflect on their musicianship against a different backdrop, a challenge sometimes as daunting as it is refreshing.

"There's an element of getting too cosy within the band, so it's important to do things outside of that", Tourish admits. "Otherwise, it's in danger of just becoming a job, of just becoming 'airport at 4 o'clock - okay, I'll be there'. You have to keep yourself fresh, by doing solo projects or playing with others, or else you risk becoming very safe. You just do it for the pay-cheque, and I don't think that's good for the head at all."

LIVE PERFORMANCE IS still the backbone of professional traditional musicians' career paths. Even in their heyday, CD sales figures rarely reached the heights achieved in other genres, and even musicians such as Paddy Moloney of the Chieftains decry the insistent cry of the road. Tourish is sanguine about the realities that drive traditional musicians' livelihoods, and he foresees little change in the pattern of extensive touring that rules the lives of Moonlighting's members.

"Most traditional musicians rely on the live work," he says. "Very few musicians are selling huge numbers of CDs any more. The industry isn't in good shape because nobody seems to know what the next step is, in terms of distribution, and in terms of what the actual product will be: will it be a CD or something else that you'll hold in your hand, or will it be all downloadable? Record companies are not investing money because they don't know whether they're going to get it back, so from a purely business point of view, there's a big slowdown, because nobody wants to be the first to make the wrong decision."

The dominance of iTunes aside, Tourish acknowledges the importance of ensuring that traditional music is as available as any other music, whether via CD, MP3 or whatever alternative formats emerge over the coming years.

"There's no doubt that music up to now has been expensive," he says. "When we all moved from LPs to CDs, the production costs came down, and we were all promised that the CD cost would come down too, but it never did. So it's payback time, in a way, for the big boys now. As for downloading tunes, I think that's a good thing, because I don't believe you should have to buy an entire album to get one track.

"It can open doors too, in that if you spend 99 cent buying a track, that could lead to bigger things for the act in question. You might go to hear that musician live, or buy more of their music. That's the reality of the music world these days, and I don't see any point in denying it."

• Moonlighting will play at Buncrana's Ar Ais Arís Festival on Sunday and in Whelan's, Dublin, on Mon, Mar 31