Fitting musical traditions into a new Mozaik

Multi-tasking is a skill usually peculiar to the female of the species, but occasionally its musical incarnation can be seen flourishing in the welcoming gabháil of those in possession of both X and Y chromosomes, writes Siobhán Long

Andy Irvine, variously described as "venerable", "legendary" and "a musical genius" has followed a musical path so circuitous and picaresque that he's as well placed to assume the mantle left vacant by travel writer and cultural connoisseur, Alistair Cooke, as he is to captain the multifarious gatherings which have shared a stage with him over the past five decades.

Fresh from the phenomenal success of the Planxty reunion (proof positive that good music needs no public relations machine to champion its cause), and ever on the road, we intercepted him during a brief sojourn in Dublin following a trip to San Francisco and just before his departure for a tour of Germany.

Irvine's spirits have been newly-charged by the success of his latest conglomerate, Mozaik.

Having played solo and in so many bands, what could possibly have encouraged him to embark on yet another incarnation, this one of his own making?

"I think there's no bigger buzz than being in full flight on your own on stage," he admits.

"That's as big a buzz as I can imagine. The whole thing about being a professional performer is that we want to be loved, so if I can be loved by mother audience all on my own, so much the better. But Mozaik grew out of an epiphany I had while I was in Australia, driving through the wide open spaces of New South Wales. I find I'm very creative in Australia. It's like my dishwater goes round the opposite way and it works for me. Anyway, driving a car is what triggers my creative impulses, and suddenly I had this idea of putting together a band, marrying the three strands of music that I like best: Balkan music, Old Time American music and Irish music. So having thought that, the players suggested themselves."

Mozaik is populated by five musicians from four countries: Irvine and Donal Lunny bring mandolin, harmonica, bouzouki, guitar, bodhrán and vocals; Bronx-born Bruce Molsky contributes fiddle, five-string banjo and vocals, Irvine's long-time Dutch compadre, Rens van der Zalm brings fiddle, mandolin and guitar to the mix; while Nikola Parov offered the troika of Bulgarian traditional instruments to the pot - the gadulka, gaida and kaval, (soul mates to the fiddle, pipes and flute of the Irish tradition), as well as the tin whistle, clarinet and guitar.

"The trick of it is the excitement of playing multi-rhythmic bars, but with everyone knowing exactly where they were, and everyone being totally together," Irvine offers, by way of explaining the sheer delight of the live performance. "It's a big buzz for the listener and for the players."

Bruce Molsky, Mozaik's fiddler, banjo player and vocalist, is equally excited by the breath of fresh air that the band brings to his repertoire and vice versa. Having grown up in the Bronx, and having moved to Virginia for many years just to be near all the great old-time fiddlers of the south, he's no stranger to stretching and bending traditional tunes and making them his own. Mozaik demanded something else though.

"I knew it would be a musical fusion of trad-based styles," he says, recalling his response to Irvine's invitation to join Mozaik, "but I had no way of knowing what it was going to sound like. When it came to learning the tunes, they were a trial, that's for sure. It was like trying to square dance with one foot nailed to the floor. Now though, it makes sense so I understand it a whole lot better."

Mozaik are planning a short tour in Ireland some time between July 18th and August 8th, so we'll get a chance to hear for ourselves the high-spirited jambalaya that the band captured so successfully on their debut live album, recorded in Brisbane's famed Powerhouse.

Listening to the tunes that coalesce so seamlessly on the album, it's a challenge for ears reared on the simpler rhythms of Irish music to tune into the calculus-like time signatures of Balkan music such as Smeseno Horo (a long-time favourite from Planxty's live sets) and Roumen Sirakov's Daichevo.

"You do have to be playing some of those time signatures for a long time before you get the hang of them," Irvine admits, despite his well-known affinity for the music of the Balkans, "and I have to admit that I've extracted what I wanted from Balkan music and left the rest. I never intended to immerse myself in Balkan music. In actual fact, the majority of Bulgarian tunes are in 2/4 or 6/8, and many of the tunes you would pass over. So it was the time signatures that initially excited me. In fact, it became a standing joke that I can only play in 4/4 by playing in 7/8 and adding one beat!"

Having been schooled by Hummingbird Films, the company that brought us Bringing It All Back Home and The River of Sound, most Irish punters are no strangers to the weaving of Appalachian and Irish traditional tunes into one cohesive whole. Melding a third dimension to the mix in the form of Balkan tunes is an entirely different affair, and one that Irvine relishes with his customary appetite for exploring new terrain rather than sticking to well-worn paths.

"Absolutely right," he says. "But we simply played different tunes and waited to see what would work well together. Really, we found that once we started to rehearse, the tunes suggested themselves to us. It happened so naturally."

Molsky agrees wholeheartedly: if the tunes didn't meld naturally, they didn't force them. The band's success was dependent on an organic process, not a manufactured one, he insists.

"If you sit down and play together, you'll find out pretty quickly what you have in common and what you don't," he says.

"Andy has been a huge fan of American traditional music for a long time and I know his music real well, so the challenge for me is the rhythm. A lot of the melodies are the same, but where the accents are, how the phrases work: we're divided by a common language. It's like spoken language, but with different accents, and we had to find a common ground. It really wasn't that hard."

The response to Mozaik in both Australia and the US has been ecstatic, although Molsky is sanguine about the welcome that experimental music such as this is greeted with in his home country.

"Our concerts didn't attract people who were hard-core for one style or another", he says.

"There are very strong pockets of the Irish music community, and Old Time, and to some extent, Eastern European, in the States, and the people who just want to hear the stuff played in its pristine, unchanged way stayed at home, but there's a whole other crowd of people who want to hear something different, and they loved it. I think that in the US people are more reticent about musical experimentation than in Europe. I think we have so many cultures swimming around together in this country [the US\] that people like to have some definition of what is what. But to me, music either has integrity or it doesn't - regardless of style."

Mozaik's début CD, Live From The Powerhouse is available on Hummingbird Records