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As a member of Solas for four and a half years, Karan Casey has been critically acclaimed from Japan to America as one of Irelands greatest singers. The Wall Street Journal has described her as one of the true glories of Irish music today.
Karan has learned from a variety of musical sources, starting with church choir and local mentors Lupeta Sheenan and the Foran Family in her own parish Ballyduff Lower. After moving to Dublin for university studies in Italian and Classics, she also trained in piano and voice at the Irish School of Music and The Royal Irish Academy of Music. Meanwhile she sang in the jazz band Bourbon Street, was the resident singer in George's Bistro for two years and performed her own original songs with the group Dorothy.
In 1993 Karan emigrated to New York and began a jazz degree in Brooklyn's Long Island University. Making the rounds of the sessions in New York she was asked to join Atlantic Bridge. Later she joined Seamus Egan, Winifred Horan, John Doyle and John Williams to form the group Solas. The band recorded three albums in just four years, and won NAIRD awards for each. They played with Bela Fleck, Iris De Ment, Jerry Douglas, Stuart Duncan, The Chieftains, Donal Lunny, Sharon Shannon and Paul Winter while touring extensively in America, Europe and Japan.
During this period Karan recorded her first solo album SONGLINES, released in 1997, and also found time to do some solo touring in Ireland. Other recent recordings include the Grammy-winning CELTIC SOLSTICE with Paul Winter and Friends (Best New Age Album 1999), and the PBS documentary (and Rykodisc album) AFRICANS IN AMERICA with Sweet Honey in the Rock's Bernice Johnson Reagon.
In her second solo album, THE WINDS BEGIN TO SING, Karan explores the boundaries of traditional Irish song. Fully versed in the genre's subtleties (and comfortable singing several selections in Gaelic), she is equally at home while transforming Billie Holiday's jazz classic "Strange Fruit" into a chilling Irish ballad from beyond the Pale.
Usually touring with accordion virtuoso Niall Vallely and guitar wizard Robbie Overson, Karan Casey has already performed at many prestigious venues, including the Kennedy Center, WOMAD USA, A Prairie Home Companion, Mountain Stage, Philadelphia Folk Festival, Strawberry Music Festival, Symphony Space, Knitting Factory, Kentucky Center for the Arts, and (participating in Paul Winter's Solstice Celebrations) the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
Washinton Post, Geoffrey Himes
Karan Casey's first three solo albums (1997's "Songlines," the 2000 children's album "Seal Maiden: A Celtic Musical" and 2001's "The Winds Begin to Sing") were dominated by traditional Irish folk songs. As she did in the group Solas, she sang those tunes in a silky soprano that always seemed to be holding back a little of its power for the sake of intimacy. On her new solo effort, Casey shifts her focus to contemporary folk-pop songs and emerges as the Irish equivalent of Emmylou Harris.
The arrangements are still acoustic but with a looser, more impressionistic feel, accenting the lyrics more than the pub rhythms. Casey's singing is, if anything, even more understated, as if she were delivering these monologues close at hand. Like Harris, she proves a terrific judge of songs, and she alerts American audiences to several gifted Irish songwriters. John Spillane and Louis de Paor open "The Song of Lies" with the striking couplet, "And her mouth was as red as the fresh fallen snow," and Ger Wolfe details the pleasures of a romantic walk through the Irish countryside down "The Curra Road."
In recent years, Casey has recorded and toured as part of "The Crossing," Tim O'Brien's exploration of the links between Irish and Appalachian cultures. O'Brien repays the favor not only by co-writing "Another Day," an absorbing, banjo-driven contemplation of mortality, but also by singing and picking on several other songs. Casey's political sympathies are revealed on Ewan MacColl's anti-death penalty narrative "The Ballad of Tim Evans" and on Mary Brookbank's sweatshop lament "The Jute Mill Song." Best of all is Billy Bragg's title tune, an immigration song whose lovely melody finally gets the lustrous vocal it deserves.
Boston Globe, Alan Lewis
Karan Casey is well-known along the folk circuit for her years as lead singer of the great Irish-American band, Solas. She has since gone solo, and her last album, the essential "Winds Begin to Sing," was one of the finest releases of 2001. Casey's voice is among the loveliest in folk music, and she is a wonderful interpreter of both contemporary and traditional material. Her use of grace notes and vibrato has become remarkably subtle. Much of the music here is slow and pretty, though the songs can be bittersweet, as when she takes the part of one "So full of hope but prone to grief." The gentle "Quiet of the Night," with a beautiful chorus, is typical of this disc's sympathetic and uncluttered arrangements. Casey is often at her best on songs with a quick pace. But here, she excels on a midtempo pastoral love tune, "The Curra Road," with the refrain, "We won't worry about the winter ... In the summer we'll go laughing, way down to the river, down the dusty road." "The Curra Road" is a classic of grace and simplicity and should become a folk standard.
Sunday Herald, Glasgow, Sue Wilson *****
Formerly a frontline attraction with the Irish/ American band Solas, Karan Casey has long been regarded as one of Ireland's most enchanting singers. Her third solo release is a wonderfully eloquent and moving exercise in bridge-building, as Casey traces old and new connections between musical traditions and eras, spanning both the Irish Sea and the Atlantic.
The opening title track, for instance, is a Billy Bragg cover, putting a contemporary spin on the classic emigration ballad, while the Tim O'Brien/Darrell Scott song, Another Day, sounds like a halfway stage in Celtic music's evolution into traditional country.
There's a delicate Americana gloss, too, on Mary Brooksbank's The Jute Mill Song, conjuring the weariness of production-line workers everywhere, while other Scottish material includes a forlorn version of Matt McGinn's Just A Note, and a silky duet with Capercaillie's Karen Matheson on the Gaelic ballad Lord MacDonald's, set to a subtle dancefloor pulse.
Casey's sole songwriting contribution is the delicate, meditative Quiet Of The Night. A stellar list of guests, including O'Brien and John Spillane and on backing vocals, Dirk Powell on banjo, concertinist Niall Vallely and Mike McGoldrick on whistles, is deployed with consummate taste and restraint. The album's resulting air of understatement further highlights the beauty of Casey's singing and the power of her chosen material.
Hot Press, Sarah Mc Quaid (9.5/10)
Karan Casey is one of those rare singers whose voice is such a beautiful pristine instrument that she could make the direst rubbish sound heartfelt and poignant. Happily, such feats aren't necessary here: for her third solo album, she's once again chosen material worthy of the gift she possess, not least of which is a self-penned number, 'Quiet of the Night' - the first she's recorded. Elsewhere, there are songs by the likes of Tim O'Brien, Billy Bragg and the writing team of Louis de Paor and John Spillane (who joins her for a duet, as does Karen Matheson of the Scottish band Capercaillie). Multi-instrumentalist Donald Shaw, also of Capercaillie, produced this CD, but the overall feel is more Tennessee bluegrass than Highland thistle, thanks to the presence of five-string banjo player Dirk Powell on a number of tracks.
Los Angeles Times, Ute Lemper ***
Casey's soprano is best known from her recordings and performances with the Celtic band Solas. In her third solo effort, she reaches out from the traditional repertoire to include songs by folk-rock's Billy Bragg and bluegrass' Tim O'Brien. But it is Casey's voice, as pure and clear as the crystal from County Waterford, where she was born, that brings an eclectic set of Celtic-related music to life.
Irish Music Magazine, Sean Laffey
Produced by Donald Shaw in Scotland it features a mixture of contemporary and traditional material, (in fact mostly modern) with only two of the tracks cited as traditional. The backing line-up represents the young aristocracy of Celtic music, including vocalists Tim O'Brien, Karen Matheson and John Spillane. Karan's regular band of Robbie Overson and Niall Vallely are augmented by the likes of Dirk Powell, Michael McGoldrick (who plays both flutes and a mean bodhrán), Dezi Donnelly, Paul Meehan, James Grant and Cillian Vallely.
The contemporary songs come from the pens of John Spillane & Louis de Paor, ('Bata is Bóthar' and the 'Song of Lies) Billy Bragg (the opening Solas style 'Distant Shore'), Ger Wolfe, ('The Curra Road') Tim O'Brien & Darrell Scott, ('Another Day'), Ewan McColl ('The Ballad of Tim Evans') and Karan adds one of her own with ('Quiet of the Night'). The Two traditional songs are the English radical ballad 'The Four Loom Weaver' and the Scots 'Lord MacDonalds' which is given a Donald Shaw waulking-rock blás. The overall sound is a mix of Capercaillie meets Solas with enough of the distinctive trio that is the Karan Casey Band shining through to let you know this is serious talent at work. Her vocal abilities have been sung loudly before, here she's joined by a crew of the most empathetic musicians, from the rollicking jaunty band sound with the simple underplaying of Dezi Donnelly's fiddle on 'Lord McDonalds' to the sparse banjo accompaniment of the 'The Jute Mill Song', they know what to do, when to cruise, when to rev it up. This album has variety without crass novelty and consistency without predictability. Full of new songs that refuse to pander to a Mid-Atlantic singer songwriter zeit gheist and old songs that have been kissed back to life. There's nobody else doing this sort of folk thing at the moment, it's where Kate Rusby ought to be, where Niamh Parsons sometimes briefly and loosely went, Karan's out in front and from the looks of this will be for many years to come.
Birmingham Post, Mike Davies ****
Former lead singer of Irish-American Celtic folk outfit Solas, the County Waterford colleen's already carved out an impressive solo career over the course of the two albums released since she left to start a family. Unlike its predecessors, while there are traditional numbers such a and Lord MacDonald's (sung in Scots Gaelic, a language Casey doesn't speak) the emphasis is more on the contemporary. Here are songs by Billy Bragg (the wearily beautiful title track), American bluegrass star Tim O'Brien (Another Day), Mary Brookbank (The Jude Mill Song the female equivalent of the preceding trad The Four Loom Weaver) and the great Ewan MacColl (The Ballad of Tim Evans) nestling alongside contributions by Irish writers such as Ger Wolfe (The Curra Road) and her self-penned, intimately delivered Quiet Of The Night.
Love ballads, songs of homesickness, immigration, sweat labour, and the miscarriage of justice paint the emotional landscape in both personal and political colours, etched out in simple acoustic arrangements making haunting use of fiddle, low whistle, flute, mandolin and accordion in a manner that evokes Dolly Parton's recent return to her Appalachian roots.
Name guests include O'Brien, Karen Matheson and Donald Shaw from Capercaillie, and Balfa Toujours banjo man Dirk Powell, but its Casey's pure voice that strikes the most resonant notes, forging an album that while unassumingly understated slowly stakes a strong claim as Celtic CD of the year.
www.amazon.com, Christina Roden
The Waterford-born singer Karan Casey has been on a highly personal journey since she left the Irish-American supergroup Solas. Her solo albums, of which this is the third, reveal a questing nature and a deceptively fragile-sounding, vibrato-enhanced soprano. At times, Casey brings the early Dolly Parton to mind, especially when she's essaying modal ballads that recall the Celtic-derived American Appalachian tradition and its tributaries. Her material ranges from Irish and Scottish folkways to modern story songs, many of which deal with immigration and other forms of displacement. The poignant opening tune, composed by British songwriter-activist Billy Bragg, is a meditation about a frightened, uprooted newcomer dealing with homesickness and hostile natives. The sensuous yet coolly ascetic semi-acoustic arrangements feature prominent banjo, fiddle, low whistle, and accordion vamps, plus an atmospheric solo piano. Guest artists Karen Matheson (lead vocals in Capercaillie ), bluegrass singer-mandolinist Tim O'Brien, and American roots player Dirk Powell all make indelible impressions.
www.ink19.com, Dave Aftandilian
When I first heard Karan Casey sing with the Irish traditional group Solas in 1995, not long after they'd gotten together, she took my breath away. It doesn't matter what you're thinking about or where you're hearing her sing, Karan's voice whips your head right around and commands your full attention for as long as she's on the stage. Sometimes sweet and vulnerable, sometimes in your face bold and brassy, Karan's singing is always exquisitely sensitive to the song and achingly lovely to your ear and heart.
Karan left Solas a few years back to concentrate on her solo career. Distant Shore is her third solo album (not counting a lovely children's album she released in 2000 called Seal Maiden), and marks a bit of a departure for her, since all but two of the songs are contemporary rather than traditional (compare that to her last album, The Winds Begin to Sing, on which seven of the eleven songs were traditional). I have to say, I do miss the traditional songs; it's not for nothing that Karan is known as one of the finest Irish traditional singers of her generation. But her voice is in fine form on all the songs here, the accompaniments are tasteful and adventurous, and the album is well worth having.
One of the things that hasn't changed on this album is Karan's strong feeling for the hard-working ordinary folks who far too often get short shrift from the bosses and the governments. Two of the songs on Distant Shore deal with the immigrant's experience of discrimination: the title track by Billy Bragg and "Bara is Bóthar" ("The Stick and the Road") by John Spillane and Louis de Paor. Karan says those songs are on the album to give her a chance to talk about the subject with her audiences, since prejudice against immigrants is a big problem in Ireland today--only this time it's the Irish who are doing the unfair kicking around of the new arrivals.
Another thing that's stayed the same is Karan's love for folk singer and songwriter Ewan MacColl, which I heartily endorse. My favorite song on Distant Shore is her version of his "The Ballad of Tim Evans," about a man who was hung for a crime he didn't commit. Karan's voice burns with righteous rage, and the accompanying concertina and mandolin really tear the roof off the track (delivered by her partner Niall Vallely and American bluegrass musician Tim O'Brien, respectively). There's a simple but very sweet composition from Karan herself, "Quiet of the Night," with her voice just incredibly gentle and gorgeous on the chorus: "I love you in my heart / because you let me be." Niall returns the sentiment with a very sweet and mellow concertina solo later in the track. Elsewhere on the album you'll find some lovely banjo work from Dirk Powell (of the Cajun group Balfa Toujours), fiddle from Dezi Donnelly, and flute, whistle, and bodhran from Michael McGoldrick. |
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