If you look into Irish traditional music at all over the past 40 years, you'd be hard-pressed not to come across Tony MacMahon, button accordionist, long-time RTE producer and archivist. Some people call him a purist, while his tendency to speak his mind has earned him a reputation as a thorny ould buzzard. But a lot of what MacMahon says is eminently sensible, even if his spat a few years ago with the River of Sound TV series about Irish traditional music came across, to some, as a tad reactionary.
You should listen to his music: the generous, hypnotic thrash of his dance tunes, almost putting words to such tunes as the Colliers Reel; and the big, emotional swells of his slow airs. And he was a hugely innovative broadcaster in the monotheistic Ireland of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, in work such as the iconic radio programme, The Long Note, to the TV series, Aisling Gheal, The Pure Drop and, more recently, The Blackbird and the Bell.
MacMahon continues to make archive material part-time for RTE, as a one-man sound-recordist and cameraman. "I tell you, it's multi-skilling gone mad." The front-room in his house in Dublin's Liberties, is like a madman's office: with piles of papers, cassettes, DV tapes, LPs, CDs, chaotic notes in his violently spiky scrawl. I spotted a small, unusual accordion hiding behind a chair, and the walls are hung with photos of musicians who visited his family home in Ennis: Joe Cooley, Felix Doran, Willie Clancy, Seamus Ennis . . . MacMahon played me part of a tape of his show for the Dublin Theatre Festival, The Well, with its poetry segueing into big, introspective melodies from the Irish and Scottish traditions.
By the sound of it, this'll be a deeply affecting show, a marriage of music, song, dance, poetry and prayer, devised over two years of literary research by Caroline Williams, and in workshops with director John Comiskey. Interestingly, it's being bankrolled by John McColgan's Riverdance company, Abhann Productions.
It's a vindication for MacMahon because, he says, "the broadcasting work always pushed my own playing to the margins. I've always wanted to play music surrounded by people who had a deep understanding of music, people whose music I love every molecule of."
So in The Well, there's the Leitrim piper, Neillidh Mulligan; the great Scottish piper/scholar, Allan MacDonald; Scots harpist/storyteller, Fiona Davidson; Cape Breton fiddler, John Pellerin and pianist, Barbara MacDonald-Magone; sean nos singers, Kathleen MacInnes from Scotland and Sean Craith from Ring; and Connemara sean nos shuffler, Roisin Ni Mhainin.
The poetry themes shift between nature, childhood, war, slavery, emigration and happy clergy-bashing, tracing a noble tradition from Brian Merriman to Paul Durcan. There are also many excerpts from ancient Irish texts collected by Scottish folklorist Alexander Carmichael (1832-1912).
"We're trying to show that a lot of the old music has spirits floating around between the notes. That's especially true about our music and Scottish Gaelic music. It's like delving down into sweet, clear water. There are messages of comfort there, of understanding and communication" - then he returns to the old sparring match - "you don't need to be blasted with bouzoukis and guitars and synthesisers, with a million volts coming at you like gunfire."
Mind you, you'll know all about gunfire when McDonald gets up with the Highland pipes to play MacNeill's lament. The wild chanter work will turn your head sideways, as will his rendition on the Scottish smallpipes of the Lament of Duncan MacRae of Kyntail, a multi-part tune which overlaps significantly with the Irish March of the King of Laois.
Yet another musician is the 74-year-old Sligoman, Kevin Henry, long resident in Chicago, but with an eloquent time-capsule style with its own stonking, woofing, internal rhythm section. Other flashbacks involve flutes made from cattle-femurs and eagle wing-bones, ancient instruments borrowed from the Kilmartin Museum in Scotland. MacMahon is obsessed with the project, as well as with preparing a retrospective CD of his own music, from new recordings with his old mate Barney McKenna, to music which goes back 35 years to London and Reg Hall's Paddy in the Smoke album and Sean O Riada's programme on Radio Eireann.
And fortune smiled recently when someone in RTE found "some diddlyeye in a cupboard" - the original quarter-inch tapes of Joe Cooley playing three weeks before he died of cancer in 1973, including a duet with MacMahon. MacMahon's mind is drenched with memories of musicians such as Cooley, West Clare fiddler Ellen Galvin, and Travellers Michael and Christy Dunne who taught him The Broken Pledge reel.
Sean Coilin O Conaire, a Connemara singer, was another inspiration: "Sean died in an old people's home in Lough Rea. And funny enough, he died the day before Diarmuidin O Suilleabhai n. Everyone knew Diarmuidin, but there was nobody at Sean's funeral, and he was buried in a grave in Lough Rea. So I got a committee together in Connemara, and I applied for permission to the county council to exhume him and rebury him in his own place.
"So we got a plot and we gathered money, and we had him dug up and brought back to Rosmuc to a great funeral and a great feast of music and song. That's something I'm quite proud of . . . "I'm hoping this show will make a powerful connection with the past for people, a healing connection, like that litany to the Blessed Virgin there, there's beautiful poetry in that liturgy. We're not making a joke of it."
I remarked that it made me ache to hear that Connemara hymn, Caoineadh na dTri Mhuire, and he pounced on the word "ache": "Now, that's a missile word. In life, we need to ache occasionally to be comforted, because we do hurt, we do all bleed inside."
Later, he pulled out his veteran Paolo Soprani accordion, and went straight into the Caoineadh, bringing his enormous resources of emotion to it, as he dragged open the big maw of the bellows, groping back to the ancestors in a great sea of feeling.
The Well runs at Vicar Street, October 5th-7th and 9th-14th at 8 p.m.
