Chieftains, Tops in Irish Folk Music, Celebrate Their Silver Anniversary

While Dublin, the jewel of Ireland, is celebrating its millennium, the Chieftains, who are the jewel of Irish traditional music, are celebrating their silver anniversary with a worldwide tour.

And if Paddy Moloney has anything to say about it, that leaves only 975 years to go before the next big bash.

“Well, we got to the 25 years, which was brilliant,” said Moloney, the Chieftains’ founder and guiding spirit. “At the millennium in Dublin, they went a little bit mad, and Trinity College made me an honorary doctor of music. I’m not making any house calls, but I will be taking the ladies’ pulses after the concert.”

Given the Chieftains’ exhilarating meld of sprightly jigs and reels, elegant airs and haunting ballads, those pulses should be racing.

“Well, I hope so,” Moloney said with a wink in his voice. “That’s what we came for.”

They have been called the greatest exponents of Irish traditional music, and with the passion of their commitment--one critic wrote that “they gave me memories I never had”--the Chieftains are almost single-handedly responsible for the resurgence of interest in that folk tradition over the last decade.

“There certainly was music happening on a small scale before, but it was not very well known,” said Moloney, who truly resembles an overgown leprechaun and has the enthusiasm of a dozen of them. “I remember coming to the States in 1968 and doing some radio programs in New York and Boston, but as far as Irish music and folk music, there wasn’t much to hear. Even in Ireland, country-Western was the big thing.”

There had been spurts, particularly with the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem in the early ‘60s, but that music was more of the boisterous pub variety, crowd-pleasing but unauthentic.

The Chieftains’ approach was pure, their commitment total. For almost a dozen years, they played the music strictly for the love, for what Irish musicians call “the crack,” slowly evolving into one of the more accomplished small instrumental ensembles in the world.

Moloney plays the tin whistle and the uileann pipes, a less abrasive cousin of the bagpipes. Martin Fay and Sean Keane, both founding members, are extraordinary fiddlers. Derek Bell is one of the world’s great harp players, Matt Molloy a superb flutist, and Kevin Coneff a master of the bodhran, a goatskin-covered drum.

Individually they are dazzling virtuosos, but it is the blend, of both instruments and personalities, that sets the Chieftains apart.

“The music was composed for these instruments, and therefore the music fits perfectly,” Moloney said, which doesn’t really explain how the Chieftains were able to stay together so long before success dribbled in their direction.

“We all held our own jobs up to 1975,” said Moloney, who worked as an accountant in Dublin. “Some of us were putting up telephone poles, others were civil servants and engineers. We were just biding our time. In 1970 we could have gone the other way and made a lot of money. The record companies suggested Celtic rock, adding guitars and drums. I wasn’t interested because I had more respect for the sound, and for the music itself.”

So the Chieftains started their own label, and the accolades started to build like the rolling rhythms of a jig. Their first ever “promoted” concert was in 1975 at London’s Albert Hall and sold out in three weeks. “To me that was a sure indication it was time to have a go,” said Moloney.

That same year, they were voted top group in Melody Maker’s annual poll, winning over Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones and, obviously, everybody else.

Since then, the Chieftains have led a charmed life, taking the message of Irish music around the world, setting a record for performing before a live audience when they played to 1,350,000 people at Dublin’s Phoenix Park during the visit of Pope John Paul II (“It was the Pope’s gig,” Moloney has conceded; “we were just the opening act”) and managing several significant breakthroughs: They were the first group to perform live inside the Capitol, at the invitation of former House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill, and the first Western group to perform in ensemble with a Chinese folk orchestra on the Great Wall of China.

The Chieftains have continued to advance the cause of Irish traditional music in many ways: through their 16 albums, including last year’s collaboration with flutist James Galway; sound tracks for various films--including “Barry Lyndon,” which won an Oscar, “The Grey Fox,” which won the Canadian Genie, the National Geographic’s “Ballad of the Irish Horse” and the recently completed animation feature, “The Tailor of Gloucester,” with narration by Meryl Streep (“It’s not just for children,” Moloney said); many television appearances (on April 8, PBS will show their concert with Galway as part of its “Onstage at Wolf Trap” series); and constant touring, which forces Moloney to do most of his writing on planes.

In some ways the Chieftains are spiritual kin to the Duke Ellington band, an analogy first made by The London Times’s music critic Derek Jewell, who pointed out that like Ellington, they have depended on a core of musicians over several decades to give their ensemble its essential character (only two players have ever left).

Since it is largely instrumental, the music travels well and offers plenty of room for improvising. And like Ellington’s band, the Chieftains have served as musical ambassadors for their music and their country.

When he is composing, Moloney said, he is “trying to tell a story through the music and the arrangements. Exciting things happen with different combinations of instruments--mixing the flute with fiddle chords, or pipes, fiddle and tinpans--and bang, you’re off into another tantrum. All of the time there’s experimenting with new ideas, new overtones, new sounds coming into your head. It all leads to something.”

If anyone thinks the Chieftains are rigid in their attitudes, a look at the list of people with whom they have recorded (Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Art Garfunkel, Dan Fogelberg, Mike Oldfield) or jammed (Jerry Garcia, Eric Clapton, Jackson Browne) should put that notion to rest.

They have recently finished a single with Canada’s rising rock group Glass Tiger, and Moloney chuckles when he talks about another collaboration, with Irish rock guitarist Gary Moore, a platinum seller in Europe. “ ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’ was the single, the video for which, incidentally, they dressed me up in black leather. I looked like Napoleon gone wrong.”

To this point, the Chieftains’ best known extracurricular project was with Galway. BBC did a documentary on it, which in turn led to the Chieftains’ most recent collaboration when it was seen by the reclusive and difficult but often brilliant Van Morrison. That helped Morrison decide it was the Chieftains with whom he would like to do his Irish album.

“He’s an extraordinary character, and it took me months to break the barrier of personality just to get around to settling down to talk about the music,” Moloney said. They finally settled on nine traditional songs (including “My Lagan’s Love” and “She Moved through the Fair”), as well as two new Morrison originals, “Celtic Ray” and “Irish Heartbeat.” Moloney did the “shapes and arrangements” and co-produced the album with Morrison.

“We had our falling-outs, but the album’s finished. There’s a lot of what we call the nya; it’s like the old style of singing, what’s referred to as sea-nos singing. It comes out as cadenzas to certain songs where Van goes into a totally unrehearsed tantrum, different every time, but very traditional. It was an amazing get-together.”

A European tour is planned for May, and if that goes well, Morrison and the Chieftains may come to America, as well.

Despite all these side trips, Moloney insisted, the Chieftains will never abandon the main path they have chosen. “I don’t think we would ever depart from what we’re best at and what we started off doing 25 years ago--the real traditional Irish music arranged, and in some cases, recomposed just for the band.”

Which doesn’t mean he is not astounded that time has passed so quickly. “Somebody mentioned it last year, and I thought, ‘Good Lord, it can’t be 25 years because there’s so much coming up and so much to be getting on with, I feel I’m just starting.’ We’ve a lot to offer yet.”

That includes going back to China (“This time I know more what I want to get into”), and plans to visit Japan and parts of “Roosia and certain South American countries,” as well as Greece and Spain. Down the line there may be a project with Moloney’s next-door neighbor, film director John Boorman.

One senses that for the Chieftains, all music is possibility. This past week’s concerts with the National Symphony are in fact part of another expansion, with the St. Patrick’s Day concert in Washington having become something of an annual ritual.

“We’re coming down to play with a fantastic orchestra,” Moloney had said before the concert. “Twice. They’re devils for punishment. . . .” In discussing a new piece of music, “Planxty Mozart,” he said: “One of the great Dubliners, a fella called Michael Kelly, was Mozart’s own favorite tenor, and the first one to perform in ‘The Marriage of Figaro.’ I’m convinced that he gave Mozart this great jig that we play, called ‘The Piper’s Chair,’ because his Horn Concerto is almost identical.

“As we all know, all the music came from folk music in the first place, and I think the great man himself, if he was here, would admit that he did use some old folk tunes in some of his compositions.

“It’s a fun piece, a mixture between the two tunes, and then it goes haywire. It’s like scrambled eggs at the end. There’s a big gong comes in, and everybody starts going berserk, and the jig wins out in the end, of course.”

Of course.