Reviews

Gerry Colgan went along to An Evening with the Great Writers at Buswell's Hotel, Dublin, while Siobhan Long reviews Breda Smyth at Whelan's and Kevin Courtney is wowed with DJ Shadow at the Ambassador

An Evening with the Great Writers, Buswells Hotel, Dublin 

Full frontal assaults of the traditional musical variety might be expected to translate more successfully in Caesar's Palace than in Wexford Street, but watching and listening to US-based Mayo fiddler Breda Smyth in Whelan's, it was as if she'd honed her skills on the back of a butterfly, so subtle were her readings of local tunes.

O'Shea's new solo show might be described as a superior salon piece, made so by the selection of excerpts from a wide variety - not all Irish - of authors, and by the actor's easy ability to animate them. His is a relaxed illustration of the art that disguises itself, drawing the audience into his intimate atmosphere of bonhomie and gentle humour.

The art is, of course, that of the actor, and Neil O'Shea is equipped with an elegant appearance and a malleable baritone voice capable of segueing into a controlled falsetto to include his women characters. He begins with Goldsmith and that poem of which everyone knows the punch line - "the dog it was that died". Jonathan Swift has an innings, and Oscar Wilde is revived, as hilarious as always.

Some of the contributors are chosen for entertainment rather the literary value, such as Percy French and Noel Coward, but these earn their keep.

Others seem intended to allow the actor to show his other paces; even Mick Jagger gets an outing, as does a colloquial sketch about Northern Ireland by John McDonnell. I should have preferred it had these yielded to superior material, but they clearly tickled the fancies of a packed audience, comprised mainly of visitors.

Poetry readings are generally excellent, bringing clarity and interpretation to the chosen works. W.B. Yeats, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Seamus Heaney are included, and are among the evening's most worthwhile offerings. Stir in Shaw, Dickens, Synge, O'Casey and Christy Browne, and the scope of the evening becomes manifest, a testing mix of which the actor-host is in complete control.

He is, incidentally, also appearing with a shorter but similar show on Mondays and Tuesdays at lunchtime - 1.10pm - at the Writers Museum, Parnell Square.

An Evening with the Great Writers runs throughout August, Fri-Sat 8 p.m., 01 6764013

Gerry Colgan

Breda Smyth, Whelans

Scaffolded by an enviable quartet of musicians: her sister and soul-fiddler Cora, guitarist, Gavin Ralston, professorial percussionist Tommy Hayes and lithe accordion player Johnny Óg Connolly, Smyth could do little wrong. Doffing their sibling caps to the Mayo cradle that fuelled their early repertoire, Breda and Cora launched headlong into the Maurice Lennon jigs, guitar and bodhrán barely tiptoeing in behind them at the final bend. From there, the cross-fertilisation was inevitable: barndances and hornpipes, The Lads Of Laois, The Humours of Ballyconnell and Johnny Cusker's skyrocketed on the back of a band so drum-tight you'd have been hard pressed to draw breath between them.

Ironically, it was when she took to the whistle that Smyth shed her inhibitions and revealed a dexterity and impishness that had been somehow less evident in her fiddle playing.

Carl Hession's and Paddy Fahy's pair of jigs shimmied in the white heat of the whistle, while she waited for The Dangerous Bends Ahead to finally break the sound barrier, Gavin Whelan's guitar sidling up alongside her, ushering her perilously towards the next hairpin.

It was most definitely a game of two halves, however.

With Johnny Connolly's balletic finesse finally finding an open space at the start of The Rockaway Jigs set, we relished the prospect of hearing more of him, only to find his pleated instrument buried beneath a complex weave of bass, sax and drums, courtesy of the extended line-up of Joe Wall, Hugh O'Byrne and Kenneth Edge.

Electrifying the set of reels, Finbarr Dwyer's/Man Of Aran resulted not so much in upping the ante, as in sullying the landscape and muzzying what had been a pristine coagulation of sound.

Still, Smyth isn't afraid to stretch trad's boundaries, and boldness in an often staid genre shouldn't be prematurely suppressed. Mixed fortunes often make for better inheritances than stuffy safe bets.

Siobhan Long

DJ Shadow, Ambassador

We're reviewing DJ sets now, eh? I mean, they just play records, don't they, so what's to review? Californian DJ Josh Davis plays records, but they just happen to be his own, which makes his gig at the Ambassador just a tad more interesting than the usual bit of cod mixology. That and the fact that Davis is behind such cred musical projects as UNKLE and Quannum, and that his debut album, Endtroducing is probably the finest feast of breaks ever to be gathered on one plate of vinyl.

Onstage, DJ Shadow is talking to the crowd, thanking them for coming out tonight, and praising God for letting him do this DJ lark for 18 years.

Before him are the standard two decks and a mixer, plus two sophisticated-looking CD decks, another mixer, and a few other unidentified pieces of sound technology. This American guy sure needs a big DJ booth.

Behind Shadow are three screens, whose images synchronise nicely with the music. Every now and then, a "deck cam" shows a close-up of Shadow's scratching, just so the other DJs in the house can study his technique.

Hip-hop, funk and breakbeats are Shadow's raw materials, and he uses them like a master at work.

Shadow's new album, The Private Press, gets the most circulation here: Mashin' On The Motorway is a driving concrete jungle tune, while Six Days is a soulful trawl through the weekly wars.

Davis, like most other DJs, builds his records out of other people's records, sampling obscure 45s, composing additional sounds, and fusing different genres to create something he can proudly call his own. You Can't Go Home Again, however, is all his own work, although I'm sure I can detect that ghostly spanish guitar refrain from El Condor Pasa in there somewhere.

Live, it's hard to tell if Davis is putting together the tunes from their separate components, or if he's simply playing his album tracks and doing a few tricks and embellishments over them. The sound coming out of the speakers, however, is sublime, soulful and, though sometimes a little too downbeat, never less than superb.

Kevin Courtney