THE Savannah Music Festival, as is their tradition, is bringing Irish music to town again this year. 2025 features two main days of performance, this Saturday’s pair of sets by Solas and yesterday’s outstanding show from the all-star trio of Cillian Vallely, David Doocey, and Alan Murray.
The three men built their careers apart – Vallely famously known for his decades with the band Lunasa – but this is their first collaboration as a trio. And a stellar collaboration it is.
While the setting of the Metal Building at Trustees’ Garden is a familiar one for SMF acoustic shows of this nature, the configuration of the room this year is a vast improvement over previous editions.
Rather than setting the stage along the longest, far wall of this very lengthy space – which has made the audience feel squashed and compressed in years past – the stage was nestled, logically, at the far end, taking advantage of the building’s narrowness.
Doocey is a fiddler of great soul and sensitivity, and his flawless melodic sense carries most of the tunes, which generally comprised jigs, hop jigs, and reels.
Vallely is one of the premier practitioners of the uillean (literally “elbow”) pipes, that gawky but beautiful contraption unique to Irish music. Like any great piper, he is equally skilled at accompaniment and at extended solos that show off his virtuosity.
At one point Vallely even offered a quick and humorous primer on this complex instrument for the audience, explaining what does what.
The main advantages of the uillean pipes – in addition to their distinctively evocative tone – are their much wider tonal range than the typical Scottish bagpipes, and their ability to bend or slur notes slightly up or down, almost like a human voice.
Alan Murray, the Scotsman of the group, provided the perfect rhythm guitar accompaniment: dynamic but never overstepping the lead lines of the fiddle and pipes.
Unusually for many traditional Irish sets, Murray sang a few tunes, mostly Scottish/English ballads. He is a younger musician, and sang in a slightly more contemporary style than is often the case in this genre.
I appreciated that breath of fresh air, and that was one of the nice touches that set this show apart from the stereotypical old-school Clancy Brothers-style of performance you sometimes see in Irish music, especially here in the states.
The trio also pushed against norms in this genre by playing the occasional totally original tune mixed in with traditional ones.
Vallely humorously described what he calls the “dicey operation” of gently, almost sneakily, introducing brand-new original compositions to audiences who just came to hear the old traditional tunes.
According to Vallely, the trick is to first play your original composition as if it were a traditional song you might have learned from “the old fellers.”
Then when it’s clear that everyone likes the tune you wrote, you explain it by saying you “just came up with it.” Or alternately, “it came to me while I was sleeping.”
You never, ever, he said jokingly, tell them you “composed” the song.
The audience was a sizeable one for the venue, especially considering that several other SMF events were happening simultaneously.