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Lunasa

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Download MP3Irish band Lunasa have been playing their particular brand of music since 1996. Known for their energetic live shows, they draw on the Irish instrumental tradition for their arrangements and original compositions. They have a new CD just out, and they’re currently touring the United States. The World’s Carol Zall had a chance to chat with a couple of Lunasa’s members.

Kevin Crawford: “Hi, I’m Kevin Crawford and I’m the flute player in the band Lunasa.”

Cillian Vallely: “Hello, I’m Cillian Vallely, I’m the piper.”

Crawford and Vallely are two of Lúnasa’s five man line-up. The band features a combination of fiddle, flute, pipes and whistles, and backs those melodic instruments with the driving rhythms of double bass and guitar.

Kevin Crawford says it’s that double whammy of guitar and double bass, that gives them their edge.

Kevin: “They would possibly be what sets us apart from other bands and gives us our own kind of identity in terms of sound as well. You know to have a double bass and guitar providing the propulsive kind of engine room of the band behind it, is slightly different.”

“Each of us actually play flute like instruments – so Cillian also plays a low whistle which resembles a flute sonically, and Sean Smith our fiddle player plays various whistles, so we use flutes a lot to color, we layer them up a lot, various flutes and whistle and stuff like that.”

While most of Lunasa’s tunes come from Ireland, they dip into other traditions as well. Music from Brittany in France, and Galicia, in Northwest Spain features on their new CD, La Nua, which means “New Day” in Irish.

This set of tunes is called Pontevedra to Carcarosa.

Pontevedra is a city in Galicia and the province next to it is Asturias and both those places have celtic links, and some of the music is very similar to Irish music and it’s quite easy to translate a lot of that stuff.

Lunasa’s members also like performing with musicians from other backgrounds. They’ve played with the likes of Billy Bragg and Ladysmith Black Mambazo, among others, and their most recent collaboration is with American singer-songwriter, Natalie Merchant. It all started a couple of years ago when Merchant came to see them play a show in Hawaii.

She came to the gig and she loved it ad she mentioned that she’d possibly like to work with us in the future, and personally I thought, Oh yeah, we’ve heard this before from lots of people, we’ll never ever get the call. But she did actually get in touch then.

Merchant got in touch about the project that would become her new CD, “Leave Your Sleep,” which is just out this week.

She was working on this mammoth project, you know she was kind of setting various poems and children’s stories to music.

Lunasa’s members worked with Merchant on several of the album’s songs, including the opening track, Nursery Rhyme of Innocence and Experience, based on a poem by Cornish writer Charles Causley.

Lunasa is touring the US, performing songs from their own repertoire, until April 25th.

For the World, I’m Carol Zall.

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Lunasa