| Recommend |
| Comment |
| Email this article |
| Print this article |
| Get news alerts |
| RSS Feeds |
 Share
|
Digg
Mixx
Linked In
Facebook
Twitter
Delicious
In the beginning, she and her band mates got a chance to perform, and then record, because folklorist and musician Mick Moloney considered the notion of an all-female Irish traditional music group an incredible “phenomenon.”
But today, Cherish the Ladies band leader Joanie Madden says the group’s success is anything but gender dependent.
“These girls can play,” Ms. Madden said in a telephone interview on Saturday. “They’re fantastic musicians.”
For almost 25 years now, through changes in personnel that have left only Ms. Madden and one other original band member still playing with the group, audiences and critics have enthusiastically endorsed the band leader’s assessment.
The reviewer for The Belfast Telegraph in the United Kingdom put it this way: “These ladies dusted the perceived cobwebs off traditional music by presenting it in a new light, with a mixture of first class ‘kick-ass’ playing, sensational singing, dynamic dancing and infectious humour that packaged it and sent it into the modern world—without ever losing respect for the musical roots.”
Next week, the six musicians of Cherish the Ladies, who have raised the
rafters at Bay Street Theatre on a few occasions in the past, will return to Long Wharf in Sag Harbor on Friday, December 18, accompanied by four dancers, for a “Celtic Christmas” show at 8 p.m.
“I got a phone call a few years ago,” Ms. Madden said, explaining the origins of the group’s Christmas set list. “A booking agent asked if we had a Christmas show. I said, ‘Sure we do.’ Then, after I hung up, I told the girls we’d have to learn some songs and put together a Christmas show.”
Ms. Madden and the other musicians were no strangers to the fine art of researching traditional music history, and they applied themselves to the task of decoding the DNA of Christmas music. As a result, the Cherish the Ladies show for the holiday season now features opportunities to sing along with Irish presentations of such traditional carols as “The First Noel” and “Silent Night,” along with a chance to enjoy traditional Irish carols and lesser known songs that might be more than a century old.
Back in the early days of the new millennium, Ms. Madden said the band recorded a Christmas album in her living room, a disc they brought with them and made available for purchase at concerts. A few years later, she got a call from Rounder Records asking where the Christmas album was, because the label wanted to release it. “I told them it had been around for a few years already,” she recalled, “and they said they could get it into stores and much wider distribution.” The album was released by Rounder Records and almost immediately got listed in a New York Times review as one of the top five Christmas albums of 2004.
Ms. Madden conceded that she was excited by the album’s success, because, as she pointed out with a laugh, “everybody and their mother has made one.” “We just Celtic-ized the music everyone knows, if that’s even a word,” she said.
A week before Thanksgiving this year, the band released another Christmas album, “A Star in the East,” which also seems on track to do well, Ms. Madden said. “Irish Music Magazine said that the last one was great,” the band leader said, “but this one is even better.”
The band’s beginnings were about as impromptu as the development of its Christmas show. Ms. Madden, who was at that time playing in a ceili band with nine other Irish-Americans, had just returned to the states after winning individual and group world championship honors at a traditional music competition in Ireland.
She was contacted by Mick Moloney, who found it remarkable that nine of the band’s musicians were women. “He said that he worked with musicians’ societies that had 3,500 members,” Ms. Madden recalled, “and not one of them was a woman.”
Setting out to obtain a grant so the nine women in the band could stage a concert in the United States, Mr. Moloney asked her what the band would call themselves. Off the top of her head she offered, “Cherish the Ladies,” she said, “which was the name of a jig we all learned to play. He said, ‘That’s perfect—that’s what you are.’”
With sponsorship from the Ethnic Folk Arts Center and the National Endowment for the Arts, the band played a few sold-out concerts, then recorded an album, and Cherish the Ladies was on its way. “January 5, 2010, will be the 25th anniversary of our first concert,” Ms. Madden said with understandable pride.
more
Add a comment