MOST traditional musicians don’t experience a lot of bother when travelling around Ireland with their instruments. A fiddle, a set of pipes, a concertina can all be carried safely in the boot of the car. (Air travel is a different kettle of fish, but that’s a story for another day)
Caoimhin Vallely has a different problem, however. He is one of the few people who play traditional Irish music on the piano.
Now it’s safe to say that an acoustic piano wouldn’t normally fit into the family hatchback so why did the Armagh man choose his instrument?
“Ach, if I could start all over again…” he muses before adding, “I’d probably still choose the piano.”
“There was a teacher in my primary school called Eugene Donnelly, who was one of those guys would would take extra lessons for half an hour after school and I gatecrashed one of his classes with a friend of mine who was learning the piano.”
Caoimhin says that the thing that struck him was that when you played a note, it sounded like a note, unlike a fiddle where, in the hands of a complete learner, the first notes were more akin to a cat being strangled.
So the instrument was always there in his consciousness but at the Armagh Piper’s Club, Caoimhin also played the whistle and the fiddle. In fact, when he moved to Cork to study music at UCC, he joined the well-known band North Cregg as a fiddler.
“The two instruments have always been very separate to me,” Caoimhin explains. “I studied classical piano but I never played the piano at sessions or in bars; it was just a solo thing I did on my own."
One of the albums that really influenced Caoimhin was Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin’s Dolphin’s Way. Eventually he started playing the piano in bands and he’s been doing it ever since, most notably with brother Niall in the band Buille.
The Vallely DNA contains a fair amount of the adventurous gene and whatever band they perform in, you know that it will take the music down several unapproved roads you won’t find on google maps. No wonder Buille have toured all over Europe and the USA and have performed alongside such luminaries as Béla Fleck, Martin Hayes, Aoife O'Donovan, Máirtín O'Connor and Michael McGoldrick.
This was certainly true of Caoimhin’s 2005 solo debut album, Strayaway, on which he plays a variety of trad tunes on the piano – with added jazziness and glitz. Eleven years later and Caoimhin has another solo(ish) album out -imaginatively entitled Caoimhin Vallely – which he describes as “an exploration of Irish traditional music on piano”.
What were the aspects of the genre that we wanted to explore, I asked him.
“Well to be honest, I’ve been messing around with the arrangements of them.
“A lot of the tunes are written in certain keys to suit the flutes or the pipes, B Major and D major so I’ve changed the key of a lot of them to suit the piano. Another thing is harmony. The tunes were written without harmony in mind so I had a blank canvas. I do think this has been under-explored.
“And again I wanted to experiment with of fluctuating tempo and juxtaposing different tunes beside each other and playing about with colour and with mood.”
While this might sound too technical to enjoy, the 23 tunes (and songs) are an absolute delight from the opening Bard of Armagh to the Independence Hornpipe which finishes the 75-minute set.
On the sleeve notes, Caoimhin amusingly explains his approach.
“I recorded the album at home sporadically over a month or so – a few hours each day while the kids were at school! The album was conceived as continuous. I’ve included a few track divisions to cater for those with shorter attention spans!”
Why did Caoimhin want the album to be a stream of piano consciousness?
“Well it’s composed of tunes I’ve known for a long time. There is nothing new that I had to learn for the album.
“When I started off with something like a musical doodle, that would lead to a tune and that would lead to another and then I’d play around with what I had and then that would lead onto another tune and then I would go back to everything a few days later and so that was how the process went.”
However, Caoimhin also gives a lot of freedom to the tunes, letting them grow organically, allowing them to sway one way or another like flowers in the wind.
Also on the album are two singers, Fiona Kelleher who does an absolutely stunning job on Elizabeth Cronin’s Last Night Being WIndy.
“Fiona sent me about 30 songs to go through to pick one that would suit the piano and suit her voice at the same time and we chose Last Night Being Windy which Alan Lomax collected from Elizabeth Cronin from Baile Bhúirne in Co Cork back in the 1950s.”
Caoimhin’ sister-in-law, Karen Casey also makes a wonderful contribution with her version of James Connolly.
“I had the pleasure of witnessing an awe-inspiring speech by Connolly’s great-grandson, James Connolly Heron. It gave a glimpse into what this ‘country’ might have been and maybe still could be,” says Caoimhin.
Caoimhin, I think, has shown us what someone who knows traditional music inside out can do on an instrument rarely considered as part of the traditional genre.
The bottom line is, it doesn’t matter, there are many moments in his “stream of piano consciousness” which would delight the most nay-saying of purists. Enjoy.
