Putting Some Blues in Emerald Isle’s Songs

Eileen Ivers is a certified champion of traditional Irish fiddle playing, adept in every aspect of the music. She can play a stirring set of reels or a plaintive ballad with the best.

But when Ivers steps on stage holding “Wild Blue,” her eye- catching, electric-indigo instrument, the slim, dark-haired fiddler could just as easily pass for a rock star. Dipping and weaving, knocking out rapid-fire lines that owe a bit to Irish jigs, a bit to the blues, she is one of the foremost figures in a new approach to Irish music--an approach that is receptive not just to tradition, but also to influences from a wide variety of other musics as well.

As she has for the past year and a half, Ivers plays a prominent role in “Riverdance--The Show,” the Irish song and dance musical at the Pantages Theatre.

Performing with the onstage musical ensemble and in several solo passages, she steps forward in a particularly fascinating number called “Trading Taps,” in which a group of Irish dancers engages a group of American tap dancers in a contest of skill. As the dancers exchange increasingly complex steps, Ivers’ strong, rhythmic violin accompanies the Irish performers while a saxophonist backs the tapsters in a musical duel that parallels the escalating intensity of the dance.

“It’s really a cool number,” she says. “I like the spontaneous feeling it gets, and the way we can sort of play off each other, as well as the dancers.”

The American-born Ivers, who joined the show for its London opening, only had a week to learn the score, doing so while she was finishing off a busy schedule of one-nighters. “I actually wound up on the plane to London learning the music by listening to it on my Walkman,” she recalls. “Fortunately, it all finally came together the night before the opening.”

Despite the sterling credentials that brought her to the attention of “Riverdance” composer Bill Whelan, however, Ivers refuses to be limited by the mantle of traditionalism. Long before her performances with “Riverdance” she was raising hackles among devotees who believe that the only right way to play Irish music is the pure way.

“I had a great teacher, Martin Mulvihill,” she says, “and I was strongly grounded in tradition. But I also spent a lot of time playing with rock bands and doing jazzy type things, too. And for me, Irish music lends itself very well to the use of a few blue notes here and there.”

Ivers has recorded and toured with Hall & Oates, and played on the soundtrack of “The Brothers McMullen.” She was one of the participants in Monday night sessions at Paddy Reilly’s bar in New York that mixed Irish music with jazz, bluegrass, African rhythms and a grab bag of other styles, and she works whenever she can with a Celtic/hip-hop/rap group called Paddy A Go Go.

Her latest Green Linnet album, “Wild Blue,” finds her performing in a bubbling stew of instrumentation that includes everything from traditional uilleann pipes and flute to djembe, conga drums and electric organ.

When she speaks of the urgent importance of rhythm, she sounds almost like a jazz musician, stressing the vitality of what she describes as “swing.”

“It’s what my teacher used to say: ‘You ain’t got a thing if you don’t got the swing.”’ (Duke Ellington, who wrote “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing,” would undoubtedly be the first to agree.)

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Ivers was born in 1965 in New York to immigrant parents from County Mayo. She won her first all-Ireland medal in a competition at the age of 9 for banjo playing. Since then she has been awarded a total of 35 all-Ireland medals in such esoteric violin categories as “slow air playing,” as well as in trios, duets and solos.

Although she firmly believes in the value of bringing new sounds and attitudes to Irish music, Ivers stresses the importance of keeping them within an appropriate creative context.

“It has to come naturally,” she says. “Then it’s OK. But you can’t do contrived things with traditional music, because if you do, people will see right through them. Interestingly, I’ve found that Irish music and African music seem to work very well when you place them together.

“I got a lot of flak when I started experimenting,” Ivers says, “and sometimes even I questioned what I was doing. But finally I just said, ‘Look, Eileen, it’s as simple as this. You gotta play what’s in your heart.’ The tradition has to move on.”

* “Riverdance--The Show,” through Dec. 1 at the Pantages Theatre, 6233 Hollywood Blvd. Tues.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 7 p.m., Sat. and Sun. matinees at 2 p.m. $46-$66. (213) 365-3555. All performances sold out.