ENTERTAINMENT: Fiddles, sessions and fireside chats

IN a new online series, legendary Bothy Band fiddler Kevin Burke welcomes viewers into his County Mayo home for a good old music session. The setting couldn’t be more perfect, with Burke’s 120-year-old traditional cottage near Aughagower, outside Westport, the venue for some great jams with the cream of the contemporary Irish traditional music scene.
Many of us enjoyed being invited into musicians’ homes during the height of the pandemic, when Irish trad and folk artists like Seán Keane and Ger Wolfe stripped away the metaphorical fourth wall to bring us into the real four walls of their own living spaces. It was one of the time’s silver linings, allowing us to see our favourite musicians – usually ‘othered’ by mic and stage – in a more intimate way. Somehow, seeing people in their own homes, surrounded by their own furniture and knick-knacks, made them seem more real, more tangible.
And so it is with Burke’s ‘Music from an Irish Cottage’. In the opening scenes, a camera slowly zooms in over a patchwork of wild, rushy land and green fields. Croagh Patrick rises in the distance, while a Carrowbeg tributary winds its lovely looping way towards a small whitewashed house with a cheery red door and window frames.
As the we, the viewers, enter the home, the first sound to greet us is the gentle, muffled thud of dry turf hitting the embers of sods settled and glowing in a grate. The fire’s given a poke, sparks fly, and the music begins.

Intimate feel
IN the tantalising trailer for the first episode, Burke is joined by two esteemed guests, Tralee uilleann-piper Leonard Barry and Kilkenny box-player Mick McCauley. Together they launch into a gorgeous rendition of the famous jig ‘Coppers and Brass’ – “one of the first tunes I ever learned,” McCauley tells us when the tune finishes and the chat starts to flow.
The trio converse about various versions of the tune they’ve heard, with Barry tracing the air’s genesis back to the Cashes, ‘travelling pipers from Wexford’. A great yarn ensues – I won’t give it away, but it yields some wonderful insight into the great Willy Clancy’s fluid style and musical ear.
The rest of the episodes in the six-part series follow the same format, with two different musicians joining Burke for each show. The list of those also taking a seat by the stove certainly bodes well for some fabulous sessions – Sharon Shannon (accordion), Seán Smyth (fiddle), Nuala Kennedy (flute, vocals), AJ Roach (banjo, vocals), Seamie O’Dowd (fiddle, guitar, harmonica, vocals), Josephine Marsh (accordion, fiddle), Mick Kinsella (harmonica), John Carty (fiddle, banjo, tenor guitar), Rosaleen Stenson Ward (accordion, concertina) and Rick Epping (concertina, harmonica, vocals).
The evenings of music and conversation are unscripted, giving the whole a natural and intimate feel.

‘Old style’
FROM the fabled Bothy Band to Celtic Fiddle Festival, master fiddler Kevin Burke has been a huge presence in contemporary Irish culture. His many other musical partnerships have seen him collaborate with the likes of Kate Bush, Arlo Guthrie, Tim O’Brien, Paul Brady and Andy Irvine. He has been honored as an NEA National Heritage Fellow and Ireland’s TG4 Traditional Musician of the Year.
Speaking about his cottage in rural Mayo, he says it’s ‘reminiscent of where I learned so much of my music and spent so much of my childhood in the late 1950s’. Growing up in London, Burke would spend summers in the west, at his grandparents’ home in County Sligo.
“There have been many changes since then in how traditional music is learned and presented,” he says, “so I invited some of my musician friends for an ‘old style’ evening of fireside music and chat.”
The fiddle player has a busy autumn ahead. October began with his sold-out Wild Atlantic Music Tour, which he’ll be doing again in 2024, after which he’ll be involved with the making of a documentary film on The Bothy Band. In between all this, he’s off to the US for a solo concert tour of the northeast next month.
The first episode of ‘Music from an Irish Cottage’ is scheduled to drop on Vimeo on Friday, October 27. The pay-per-view streaming series – which is produced by Burke’s independent music label, Loftus Music, with additional funding from the Irish Arts Council – will then release a new episode weekly.

• For more information, follow Kevin Burke on Facebook or visit kevinburke.com. For more on Wild Atlantic Music Tours, see wildatlanticmusictours.com.