January 13-19, 2005

music

Music Is a Passport

THE PIPES ARE CALLING: "In my late teens, I ended up in with a bunch of musicians with university degrees," says Paddy Keenan. "I was much more accepted by those people than by the other people who didn't have much."

An Irish piper of Traveller descent, Paddy Keenan builds on tradition with his big bag of tricks.

by Mary Armstrong

As a child growing up near Dublin, Paddy Keenan began playing bagpipes at a time when traditional Irish music wasn't even popular in Ireland. Over a lifetime of developing his own style of playing the ancient folk songs of his ancestors with the help of his father and brothers, Keenan has become one of the undisputed masters of the Irish pipes.

Though he can play the pure old style, Keenan's playing, even of centuries-old tunes, tends to be highly personalized, changing with each performance. "I use music as a release. It's a mood," he says on the phone from his home in New Hampshire.

Uilleann pipes, the kind favored in Ireland, are among the most modern. The air which sounds the reeds is not blown by mouth, but produced by a bellows under the elbow ("uilleann" is Gaelic for "elbow"). Regulator pipes let the player add chords beyond the expected drones, by opening keys on special appendages found only on the uilleann model. The narrow tube with the belled end is the chanter, fingered to produce the melody. Irish pipers like to mix the legato melodies native to bagpipes with clipped, staccato notes. Classicists do this by stopping the pipe on their thigh; many modern players have added a key to the instrument.

Keenan inherited his musical mind directly. "My father was a musician. As [he] once pointed out, "Music is a great passport. You won't go hungry and you will communicate with people.'" Occupations were limited for the traditionally mobile clans of the Travellers, the largest minority group in Ireland, among whom Keenan counts himself.

"In the Travelling world, there were tinsmiths and chimney sweeps, and what we'd call recyclers today — people who collected old clothes and such. And the wagon builders." The latter bunch outfitted Traveller families for the road. Keenan remembers his uncle building wagons with beautiful and elaborate painted decorations on the outside. "All you had between you and the sky was a bit of green canvas," he recalls wistfully. Such was his life till the age of 5.

Keenan's mother, Mary, came from the "settled" world and persuaded his father, Johnny, to give up life on the road for the sake of educating a family that would finally number six children. Ballyfermot was an estate west of Dublin where the Keenans made their first home. But "estate" does not mean Main Line. Think housing projects. "Everybody, no matter how little they have, likes to have somebody to look down on," Keenan reminds us, to give a hint of the hell his whole family caught. "The people across the street were selling crabapples out their front window but looking down on us!"

"Sometimes they made a Traveller feel like you were from another planet. I recall in Galway a woman with six kids desperately wanted to be settled, to get the kids educated. They were stoned by the locals," he says. "When the TV crew came down to film, they were stoned by the crowd, too."

Small wonder when Johnny Keenan got his sons and a few of the neighbors to form a traditional Irish band that called themselves the Pavees. That's the word for Travellers in their own tongue. Another of the original Pavees was the now deceased Johnny Keenan, Paddy's banjo-playing brother, who is immortalized by an annual music festival in Longford, Ireland. "He was the one that put the whistle in my hands when I was 8 or so," recalls Keenan. Pipers typically begin their training on a whistle to learn the common tunes.

The Travellers assert they are more Irish than many who persecute them, tracing themselves back at least 800 years. And they hold cultural memories, like traditional dance and music, to prove it. Of course, the timing for the Pavees was a bit off for Paddy Keenan, coming in the mid-1960s when he was in his teens. Traditional music's popularity was ebbing in Ireland.

His audiences were not always complimentary. ""Ah Jayzus, look at yer man up there with the cats!' said one young guy to his friend in the front row at the pub. I could have crawled off the stage for embarrassment," he remembers.

To maintain his "cats," Keenan had to make his own reeds out of elder. "We were too poor to buy cane. And, back then, pipe making was this big secret, nobody would tell you where they got their cane. I don't know why. Nobody wanted them!" When 17-year-old Keenan moved to London for a few years, he tried to pawn his pipes, but shopkeepers flatly refused to make a loan on them.

On his return to Dublin in the '70s, Keenan earned his first worldwide notice with the Bothy Band, a group of young Irish people who took the traditional ceili tunes and supercharged them with a rocking forward drive. No backbeat, just the old tunes played with youthful glee.

"In my late teens, I ended up in with a bunch of musicians with university degrees," says Keenan. "I was much more accepted by those people than by the other people who didn't have much.

"But I didn't give them a chance to get to know me. I was the one who was feeling the odd person out. I was in this life of partying and closing myself off. Despite [that] I was accepted everywhere I went. People like to see somebody who is [without pretensions]."

The Bothy Band has long since dissolved, but Keenan has remained prominent as an innovative piper recording under his own name. His most recent CD, The Long Grazing Acre (Compass), released in the U.S., is a mutual effort with guitarist/singer Tommy O'Sullivan. It mixes tunes, both traditional and new, with songs ancient and contemporary. Take track 12, a medley of "Kitty O'Neil's, The Kerry Jig." The medley starts straight enough, then O'Sullivan's guitar adds a bit of swing to the beat, and Keenan answers with selected bent notes that make you see the wink and nod in his response, a leaping little honk sounds like a chortled laugh.

"The long grazing acre is the side of the road," explains Keenan. "What was fenced out. It was important for the horses. That was your home for the night, or for as long as you were left there. It was the only acreage you'd have as a Traveller, but for that little 6-foot-by-3-foot plot at the end." Though Keenan has made his home in the U.S. since entering a green card lottery in the '90s, he returns to Ireland to support his favorite cause. Keenan donated his 2002 Irish Television Musician of the Year prize for traditional music to raise funds at an auction for the Long Grazing Acre Foundation to help educate Traveller children.

Paddy Keenan, Sat., Jan. 15, 8:30 p.m., $13-$15, with fiddler Patsy O'Brien, Irish Center, Commodore Barry Club, 6815 Emlen St., 215-849-8899, www.philadelphiaceiligroup.org.