Chieftains bringing Celtic all-star team to St. John’s
Alan Doyle to perform with Irish legends
The Chieftains are Celtic music’s equivalent of an all-star team.
The beloved core of founder Paddy Moloney, singer and bohdran player Kevin Conneff (a member since 1976) and flutist Matt Molloy — now celebrating his 40th year in the group — remains the same, with some of the brightest lights in traditional music and dance signing on for a time before going on their own established careers.
Along the way, tin whistle and pipes player Moloney, who also serves as the team’s coach (just to keep the baseball analogy rolling), has built one of the longest contact lists in music. How can you not admire a performer who can count giants like the Rolling Stones and Van Morrison, indie acts the Decemberists and Bon Iver, and the best-known Celtic artists in Atlantic Canada as collaborators?
This week, the Chieftains work their magic in Halifax and Cape Breton as part of the group’s ongoing Irish Farewell Tour, which makes its way across Canada before circling back for shows in Fredericton, Charlottetown (with guest Joel Plaskett) and St. John’s (with Great Big Sea’s Alan Doyle) toward the end of the month.
Moloney’s memories of Nova Scotia date back to the group’s earliest visit in the late 1970s, and include recording the collaborative album "Fire in the Kitchen" with the best and brightest in Atlantic Canadian trad music circa 1998, with Natalie Macmaster, Rita Macneil, the Barra Macneils, the Rankins, Ashley Macisaac and Laura Smith among the artists taking part.
“I remember walking to the Public Gardens, and I ran into Denis Ryan just walking down the street, so it’s like being in a town in the south of Ireland or someplace,” says Moloney, who enjoyed an extended stay in Halifax during the recording and mixing of "Fire in the Kitchen." “You know everybody and you see everybody.
“So you wouldn’t want to be caught doing anything unusual or anything like that,” he adds with a lilting laugh over the line from Dublin.
Moloney says he hopes to have Ryan, formerly of the Irish folk trio Ryan’s Fancy, come by the Halifax show for a number. He also plans a Halifax guest spot for Cape Breton singer/fiddler Rosie Mackenzie, whose former band, the Cottars, spent time on the road with the Chieftains.
“I bumped into Rosie someplace in the States last year. She was performing somewhere, and we got her on to do our finale, which was terrific,” say Moloney, who is always happy to reconnect with old friends who’ve continued to flower in their careers like Mackenzie has with her Ecma-winning album "Atlantic."
Friday night’s show in Cape Breton will be an even bigger blowout, with frequent Chieftains guitarist Tim Edey chiming in before he tours Canada with Natalie Macmaster.
Moloney also expects sparks to fly in Sydney when former tour mate Ashley Macisaac turns up for a tune or two.
“I suppose we’ve got to do our penance,” he says with a chuckle, failing to hide the admiration he feels for the ferocious fiddler, who the Chieftains took to China in the 1990s.
While one early trip to China saw the Chieftains become the first Western group to perform on the Great Wall, in 1983, the group’s music was heard even further afield more recently thanks to Moloney’s son, Padraig. Residing in Boston, the younger Moloney is a graduate of MIT who worked for NASA and played a role in sending one of his father’s tin whistles and one of Molloy’s flutes into space with astronaut Cady Coleman, who played them on the International Space Station in 2010.
“She actually played and sent down a video on St. Patrick’s Day,” says the Chieftain. “She played a tune I gave her called 'Fanny Power,' and we included it on our 50th anniversary album, 'Voice of Ages.'
“Onstage, we play along with the video of her playing the tune, while she’s floating around inside the space station, going all over the place. It’s pretty funny.”
Thanks to their many collaborations with artists from all genres, and attending events like Celtic Colours in Cape Breton and Glasgow’s Celtic Connections (which the Chieftains helped launch in 1994), Moloney and his bandmates have been able to experience young artists who perform at a level that he couldn’t have imagined when the group was starting out in the 1960s.
And the best part is, eventually, the Chieftains get to perform with them, either onstage or in the studio.
“We kind of fade a little bit into the background when they’re onstage,” he chuckles. “In other words, let them at it.
“The standard is just unbelievable, just take the piping that’s going on here and around the world. And now we go to Japan, and there’s a whole bunch of young people who’ve started a Chieftains fan club, and there’s a group of young women called the Lady Chieftains. They never asked, they just put the band together, and we had them on with us when we played a few concerts around the Tokyo region.
“They were in tears when we came off the stage, because it was all over, but we’d love to bring them on tour with us. It’d be just brilliant.”
With the Chieftains 60th anniversary drawing nearer, in 2022, Moloney says there are a number of irons in the fire that may help mark the event, like a documentary that includes new music by the group combined with spoken word poetry.
The group also has a wealth of unreleased material from numerous projects that has never seen the light of day, including outtakes from "San Patricio," the 2010 collaboration with guitarist Ry Cooder that combined Irish and Mexican melodies and artists.
“I could have had four albums out of that one,” says Moloney, who may get his wish someday.