Galway-based piano- accordion player Alan Kelly reveals how he overcame a little-known illness to produce his first album in nine years, writes SIOBHÁN LONG.
AT A TIME when the pace of the music business is growing ever more frantic, and artists feel obliged to find ever-expanding ways of reaching their audience (take U2's decision to release their latest recording, No Line On The Horizonin five formats), it seems strange for a musician to let a whole nine years slip by between album releases.
But Roscommon-born and adoptive Galwegian piano accordionist Alan Kelly has had more than his share of curveballs to contend with since the release of his highly acclaimed solo album, Mosaic, in 2000.
Kelly was never a musician to go with the crowd. Having chosen an instrument, the piano accordion, which was about as popular in traditional music as an atlas in Sarah Palin's book collection, he carved an uncompromising niche for himself from the get-go, releasing his solo debut, the aptly titled Out Of The Bluein 1997. The piano accordion has a stronger track record in zydeco music than it has in our own tradition (and his new CD includes a beautiful pair of Louisiana tunes, Sally Ann's Reels, which he got from renowned Cajun fiddler and composer Dirk Powell), but Kelly always resisted the temptation to use the piano accordion to dominate a tune, instead mining its depths, all the better to fully explore the melodic and rhythmic intricacies of a tune or a song.
He's breathing a sigh of relief at the release of his latest and third solo recording, After The Morning– and not just because he's left a gap of nine years between it and its predecessor. Life's tossed a few more complicated challenges his direction in the intervening time, and he's had to expend much time and energy dealing with them before he could contemplate a return to the studio. This business they call music has burnt him financially, and his health has taken a hammering too, although he's well on the road to recovery.
A spell at the helm of a Riverdance-esque show titled Celtic Legendssaw him grow a music, song and dance show from a concept to becoming a major success in France. Ultimately, though, business got in the way of the music, and Kelly parted ways with the show, much to his disappointment and frustration. "We started off in school halls, and progressed over three years to huge venues and festivals," he recounts. "Then it all went sour and went legal, which took up another two years."
Luckily, at that time, Alan got a call from John McCusker, who was putting together a band for Eddi Reader's tour of Japan, and he's been part of Reader's musical caravan ever since. While he recorded a duet album in 2002 with his flute-player brother John, titled Fourmilehouse, his musical career came under even more serious fire with the onset of a condition which took a number of years and countless appointments with chiropractors, osteopaths, physiotherapists and complementary practitioners before it was finally diagnosed.
"I got focal dystonia," Kelly reveals, "which means that I lost control over my fingers. It's a neurological condition, but they [the doctors] reckon it could even be psychological, in that it could be related to some traumatic event. I think that could have been the case with me in that I found what happened with the show really traumatic. With Celtic Legends, I was writing all the music and producing it, tour managing it, liaising with all the French people involved and looking after 12 young dancers. It was chaotic."
The dystonia prevented Kelly’s fingers from hitting the notes he sought out on his keyboard. It was an erratic phenomenon in that he never knew when a finger would seize up. A worrying experience for anyone, but particularly stressful for a professional musician whose fingers are his livelihood.
Eventually, through extensive research of musicians' injuries and conditions, Kelly found himself in the consulting rooms of an international expert on dystonia in New York. Within minutes, he confirmed a diagnosis made at home by Kelly and his partner, flute-player Steph Geremia. From there, Kelly was referred to the Hanover College of Music Medicine in Germany where he now regularly attends for Botox injections into his hand muscles. Two years on, Kelly is able to reduce the frequency of his visits, although it's likely that he'll always have to have treatment for a condition which is thought to affect 1 per cent of all professional musicians. It was this medical odyssey that dictated the pace of recording of his new album, After The Morning. Until now, Kelly wouldn't have wanted to speak of his condition publicly because he feared it would adversely affect his career prospects.
“It was terrifying,” he admits. “I was turning down work and couldn’t do any of my own gigs.” Now, though, after a successful six-week Australian tour to promote his new album, his confidence is growing as momentum is gathering, largely through word of mouth. He’s keen to speak publicly of his experience because he’s sure that other musicians might be relieved to hear his story.
MEDICAL PROBLEMS have done little to dull Kelly's zest for musical exploration. After The Morningis fuelled by a rake of self-composed tunes, from the eponymous opener to the meditative Eolann and the languid waltz, Siena. He seamlessly knits contemporary and traditional tunes, proof that a traditional music willing to embrace new influences will not only survive, but thrive. At its heart, the album is an intimate musical conversation between Kelly's piano accordion and Tola Custy's fiddle. Both instruments revel in one another's company, etching and stencilling their melodies with precision and care, and never succumbing to the temptation to dominate.
The writing process is one that Alan has gradually grown to embrace with quiet enthusiasm. “Since my first album, I’ve been writing, but I never took it very seriously and I used to be very nervous about producing my own music,” he admits. “But now I’m not so nervous. I’ve developed a bit of a reputation for composition and everything I’ve ever written has been recorded by other musicians, and anything I’ve ever written, I’ve recorded myself too.”
There’s a meditative quality to his latest recording that Kelly admits owes as much to the vagaries of his focal dystonia as it does to his desire to compose reflective tunes.
“My whole finger pattern had to change,” he divulges. “It was like a horror show, watching me play, so I began to work out different patterns for my fingering technique. I found myself writing little passages of music and next thing, I had a piece. Likewise, with some of the Breton pieces on the album, I worked really hard on the arrangements, rather than trying to do something really fancy with the tune. I wanted to let the melody speak for itself. I’m a real melody person. I’ve no interest in playing a tune just because it’s technically challenging. It has to move me, because music is all about emotions, and I was going through some horrific emotions at the time, so that’s probably where a lot of the writing came out of.”
After The Morningis out on blackboxmusic.ie. Alan Kelly will tour nationwide in the autumn
