Black Brings Qualities of Irish Ballads to Pop Stylings

The tapestry of Celtic art includes a colorful array of music, dance and story that reaches across nations, culture and languages. The rousing sounds of the Chieftains are vastly different from the electric, Breton-rock music of Alan Stivell, and the Irish soul music of Van Morrison bears little resemblance to the traditional songs of Maire Ni Domhnaill.

Yet it’s impossible to avoid the common links: a kind of earthy rhythmic fundamentalism, a love of verbal byplay and an innate capacity to produce soaring melodies and foot-tapping rhythms. The link emerges in all sorts of unexpected places--notably in country music, whose traditional dances and melodies have been directly germinated from the seeds of Irish music.

Singer Frances Black, sister of Mary Black and a member of Irish music’s well-known Black family, has made the crossover to pop act without sacrificing the sources of her talent. Her singing, even when she is working with an American country tune or a John Lennon song, never loses the pure, slightly mournful quality and emotive expressiveness essential to Irish ballad singing.

Black, who appears at UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall tonight, has just had a No. 1 album in Ireland and arrives here as one of her country’s leading new artists.

Record Shelf: Black’s most recent album, “Talk to Me” (Celtic Heartbeat), is an eclectic blend, clearly aimed at a crossover audience and not far removed from what one might hear in a Judy Collins outing. But there is never any question about Black’s roots, especially when she underscores the connections between country songs and Irish ballads in her poignant rendering of such tunes as Vince Gill’s “Colder Than Winter.”

Maire Breatnach is a fiddle player who has backed both Frances and Mary Black. Her first solo album, “Angels Candles” (Blix Street), is a moody dance through a twilight world of childhood, filled with dancing rhythms and ear-catching melodies. As familiar and comfortable as everything sounds, it is all newly composed by Breatnach, and testimony to her skill at working creatively within the framework of familiar custom.

Surprisingly, there are no Irish performers on the marvelous collection “Global Divas: Voices From Women of the World” (Rounder). Singers from almost every other part of the world are represented, however, in a three-CD set that extensively illustrates the almost endless timbral colorations and expressive capacities of the female voice.

Stuff for the Holidays: Any aficionado of world music will be delighted to find a copy of the book “World Music: The Rough Guide” (distributed by Penguin) under the Christmas tree. Like other Rough Guides, it is practical, down-to-earth and fun to read. The information is grouped into a series of essays covering 13 parts of the globe, from “Celtic World” to “Australia and the Pacific.” Neither encyclopedic, comprehensive nor scholarly, it is nonetheless a constantly illuminating source of basic information about the world’s music.

Another Ellipsis box set, “Planet Squeezebox,” should be given gift consideration only after some careful thought, however. The accordion, or what Mark Twain called “the stomach Steinway,” has been known to rapidly empty entire high school assembly halls in short order. Amazingly, this three-CD set discloses that the squeeze box can be a lot more than a vehicle for a huffing-puffing mauling of “Lady of Spain.” The instrument emerges in a kaleidoscopic array of settings, from jazz and blues to zydeco, Tex-Mex, African, Arabic, Chinese, Russian and good old Bavarian polka music.

Planet Sounds Around Town: Christiane Callil’s “The Girls From Ipanema” revue repeats its colorful music and dance celebration of Brazilian nightclub music every Friday at the Century Club, (310) 553-6000. . . . LunaPark’s December schedule includes a number of interesting crossover ensembles, among them: the Brazilian Meia Noite & the Midnight Drums (next Friday); Caravana, an Afro-Latin funk band, (Dec. 16) and Mast Masr, a mixture of Middle East Dance music (Dec. 22). The club’s New Year’s Eve gala will feature the Brazilian songs of Katia Moraes and the Afro-dance rhythms of Bateke Beat, (310) 652-0611.