Reviews

Michael Dervan reviews a lunchtime recital lunchtime recital by Abdul Salam Kheir and David Miller as part of the LIkenny arts Festival. Tony Clayton-Lea reviews Jason Ringenberg's gig at Spirit Store in Dundalk

Arabian Delights and Baroque Gems, Kilkenny Arts Festival

It's a good rule of thumb in programme planning to leave an audience longing for more, rather than feeling that the music has gone on too long.

Thursday's lunchtime recital by Lebanese oud player and singer Abdul Salam Kheir and lutenist David Miller was almost twice as long as its slot required. One could only sympathise with those listeners who, whether by necessity or choice, left in the breaks between the pieces during the second half of the programme.

Their plight can't have been made any easier by the fact that the introductions to the middle-Eastern pieces were so mumbled that they were mostly incomprehensible. That was certainly the situation where I was sitting in the gallery of the Parade Tower of Kilkenny Castle.

The playing and singing, however, were musically lucid, the pieces, rich in the tensions of narrower intervals than are common in Western music, and tending to accumulate in energy and drive from calm and melodically straightforward beginnings.

David Miller's contributions on lute, covering works by Weiss, Bach and Kapsberger, served as a timely reminder of how the instrument's extended bass seems to make it at least as useful as a pair of guitars.

The two players joined forces only at the very end of the programme, Abdul Salam Kheir proving very adept as a continuo buttress to Miller, and Miller taking up the Turkish saz for a supporting role in an Egyptian song. I suspect I wasn't alone in wishing the programme had offered a higher proportion of these fascinating cross-fertilisations. - Michael Dervan

Jason Ringenberg, Spirit Store, Dundalk

With one foot on the stained wooden floors of honky tonks and the other in the dusky corners of the White House, Jason Ringenberg - formerly of country punk band Jason and the Scorchers, but now very much a solo entity - sings songs steeped in tradition and politics. His voice is scattershot, but Jason is wearing a silk cowboy shirt and a spangly cowboy hat, and is singing from the heart, so all is right and good with the world.

Ringenberg is a reasonably important figure in the development of modern country music; he and his reprobate band, The Scorchers, were one of several 1980s acts to take it by the neck, wring it, kick it, shake it, and imbue it with a sense of urgency. Ringenberg applies a similar approach to his solo work; it's certainly less furious and nowhere near as loud, but within his material and acoustic guitar playing rests a punk rocker, slightly dormant but nonetheless ready to pay allegiance to a bar band that fuses the Sex Pistols with The Ramones. The truth is, the small stage can barely contain him; he whips around in circles, stomps his feet, croaks his voice, mutters humble thanks to appreciative applause, and carries on with the next song.

It's the songs that matter the most, of course, and Jason has plenty of them - good ones, too. Most are invested with the kind of integrity, humanity and humility that would shame the best of songwriters. The likes of Tuskegee Pride, Erin's Seed, The Price of Progress, and Rebel Flag in Germany highlight Ringenberg's intense levels of passion in history and disgust at what it fails to show us; they are lessons to be learned for anyone with even a passing awareness in human decency.

It wasn't all serious, though. Scattered throughout the sober, sombre material were tunes from Ringenberg's child entertainer alter ego, Farmer Jason: Punk Rock Skunk, Guitar Pickin' Chicken, and The Tractor Goes Chug-Chug-Chug. Silly songs, for sure, but they provided a possible link between Ringenberg's softhearted nature and his need to inform us with ideas about life, the universe and most points in-between. - Tony Clayton-Lea