Irvine Weaves Spellbinding Tale With Soft-Celt Pitch

Christy Moore, an old singing partner of Irish musician Andy Irvine, has rocked up his sound a bit and become something of a Celtic deity, also garnering a recording contract with a major U.S. label. And Irvine’s other old musical cohort, Paul Brady, is being pushed for pop stardom by Mercury Records.

Singer-instrumentalist Irvine, however, seemed entirely content and fulfilled Monday performing his tradition-based songs on a makeshift stage to a small audience in the rear shop of a South County industrial building.

Despite its somewhat faceless location, Shade Tree Stringed Instruments isn’t lacking for atmosphere inside. The guitar shop has become something of a mini-McCabe’s (the famed Santa Monica music-store venue), doubling as an intimate concert hall where performers can expect attentive, enthusiastic audiences.

And along with the rarity of hearing music without the chatter and bar noise of most clubs, there is the somewhat eerie impression that the audience includes the instruments hanging on the walls, resonating along with the music while, perhaps, hoping that someone will take them home and do likewise with them.

Rather than load the audience with Irvine’s impressive credits--among them, his founding role in Planxty, a band that may be second only to the Chieftains in keeping Irish traditional music alive--Shade Tree co-owner Margie Mirken simply introduced him as “a nice fellow in a green shirt that he says he got for nothing.”

Irvine certainly was that, along with being a fine tenor and a master of his custom-made mando-guitar, a variation on the eight-stringed Irish bouzouki. At the best moments in his two sets, Irvine’s voice and accompaniment combined in a spell-weaving fashion, his story songs so fully animated that it’s easy to understand how some cultures get along just fine without cable TV.

Irvine’s earliest influence, he said, was Woody Guthrie, and that showed in an impassioned reading of Guthrie’s “Tom Joad,” the Oklahoman’s musical rendering of Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.” Irvine’s own “Never Tire of the Road” was an ode to Guthrie and other wandering troubadours, and, like Guthrie, he had his own song about the 1927 executions of Italian-American anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti.

Irvine also clearly found a resonance to Guthrie’s social concerns in the traditional music of his homeland. Several of his selections Monday--”James Connolly,” “Michael Dwyer’s Escape” his own “Forgotten Hero” and others--dealt with the longtime oppression of the Irish. With its four pairs of strings, Irvine’s mando-guitar didn’t have the full harmonic capabilities of a guitar, but it had a rich, resonant sound. On the ballad “You Rambling Boys of Pleasure,” the instrument seemed almost to be a second tenor voice winding around his vocals.

The mando-guitar’s strengths were best shown on several Balkan instrumentals (Irvine spent 18 months living in Bulgaria and Yugoslavia). Using an electronic device to mimic a bagpipe’s drone note, he overlaid snaking patterns and twisting melodies that displayed that region’s penchant for such nearly impossible time signatures as nine-sixteenths, thirteen-sixteenths and other increments more commonly found in socket-wrench sizes. He also applied some of those odd meters to “The Plains of Kildare,” a song about the Irish successes of American racehorse Stewball.

Explained Irvine: “I like to sing this for American audiences because it kind of toadies up to them.”

Not all elements of Irvine’s performance were entirely spellbinding. On some songs, particularly early on, overly busy mando-guitar arrangements seemed at odds with his vocals. Irvine also has a curious habit of explaining his story songs in such detail--as if he were going to be singing them in a foreign tongue--that their actual performance was sometimes redundant, and certainly robbed of any narrative anticipation.

Irvine’s performance was preceded by a set from local musicians Cait Reed and Barry Fisher. To Fisher’s 12-stringed guitar accompaniment, Reed ably spun off jigs, reels and an air on her violin, with a particular knack for mimicking a bagpipe’s glottal stops in her playing.