Matt Molloy – Back To The Island
Self Released – 25 October 2018
The world may be going to hell in a handcart but when Matt Molloy, the paragon of Irish traditional flute playing, makes his first solo album in 22 years, some kind of life-affirming equilibrium is restored. Back To The Island is everything lovers of Molloy’s playing could wish for and more.
Matt Molloy’s flute playing arrived for me, and doubtless for many others, in tandem with Paddy Keenan’s uilleann pipes playing, on The Kesh Jig at the start of The Bothy Band’s 1975 debut record. That was a defining moment for both listeners and players in hearing what was possible on the wooden flute and falling for the exceptional combination of drive and beauty that is no less evident over 40 years later. Only Matt Molloy has been a member of The Bothy Band, Planxty and, since 1979, The Chieftains. His influence is inestimable; without him, we may not have enjoyed the very considerable talents of Kevin Crawford (Lúnasa), Brian Finnegan (Flook) and Michael McGoldrick.
The tunes on Back To The Island (only his fourth solo album) are firmly in the traditional idiom – Molloy describes them as being ‘as old as the ditch’. One thing that has always characterised Molloy’s playing is his playing of tunes more associated with fiddle players and uilleann pipers, in particular, fiddle players, more than those he has picked up from flute players. A prime example on new album is the Monaghan Jig, first recorded, by piper Patsy Touhey in 1904 and popularised in the 1930’s by fiddle player Michael Coleman (both living in the U.S.). Coleman’s version is fast and punchy, whereas Molloy slows it down, lending it his trademark relaxed, breathy, rolling style and imbuing it with bags of irresistible swing.
The fiddle player tune origins are many and varied: Sean Maguire, Sean Keane, Johnny Doherty, Néillidh O’Boyle, Bobby Casey and Scottish fiddler James Scott Skinner all get a look in. Willie’s Fling is a lovely strathspey that Molloy tells us fiddle player Sean Keane ‘threw into the mix at a Chieftains rehearsal many years ago’. Keane recorded it, with Paul Brady on guitar, on his essential 1990 Jig It In Style solo album and named it for Willie Clancy, one of the great pipers. Molloy’s version at one and the same time closely follows Keane’s phrasing – some achievement – but wholly claims the tune for the flute. Lúnasa included the tune on their very fine, recent album CAS (reviewed here).
Molly describes Colonel Frazier, a popular reel, as ‘initially a Piper’s test piece but now championed by all instruments’. It has been widely recorded, by pipers including Patsy Touhey and the fabled Johnny Doran, by flute player John McKenna in the 1930s and by Sean Keane. You can hear distinct echoes of the uilleann pipes in Molloy’s playing but it becomes again unmistakably his own flute version.
Back to the Island says plenty about the personal side of Matt Molloy. The album’s title tune “was composed off the Moroccan Coast after an interesting sojourn in Essaouira”, a city renowned for being extremely windy. A bright reel, which, like all the best compositions, sounds both fresh and yet also somehow instantly familiar. It reflects Molloy’s love of the sea – a theme of many of the album’s tunes – and was composed on his boat Eccentric Lady, where he spends much of his time travelling right across the world, when not playing with The Chieftains or running his famed, self-named, pub, in Westport, Co. Mayo. He says the vastness of the ocean has taught him that ‘you’re alive… yet what an insignificant thing you are…. In case you’re in danger of getting above yourself’. Molloy remains as humble as they come.
There are a number of reels including ‘some of the earliest’ tunes he first learned from his father – his father, uncle and grandfather were all flute players. Another reel, The Girl I’ll Ne’er Forget, is dedicated to his first wife Geraldine and his daughter Claire, both of whom died of cancer. There is an intensity, almost a sense of urgency, about the way Molloy plays the tune compared with other versions and indeed how he usually plays. In the outstanding recent documentary about Molloy shown on TG4 – one in a not to missed series called Sé Mo Laoch (watch it here) profiling some of Ireland’s top traditional musicians and singers – it is obvious that playing music helped him to get through those immense losses.
In the same programme, Molloy talked about the 22-year gap since his last album: ‘The tunes are bubbling away in the back of your head for years and every now and then you think, I need to go down and get it out of the way… I thought it was about time’. Back to the Island was recorded in just two days, in single takes, live in the studio, because Molloy says ‘it’s fresh and it retains that presence’. The accompanying musicians, all do a superb job but leave the limelight entirely to the main man, include Arty McGlynn and, for one track, Steve Cooney, on guitars, both of whom played on Shadows of Stone, the preceding 1996 solo album, and Brian McGrath on keyboard and Joe McNulty on bodhran, both of whom joined Molloy, McGlynn and John Carty on fiddle on 2016’s excellent Out of the Ashes.
Matt Molloy arrived, in his own right, fully formed on his first solo album, just a year after The Bothy Band’s debut, with, brilliant, accompaniment from just Donal Lunny on bouzouki. He didn’t need to get any better but, for me, Back to the Island, half a lifetime later, shows an even greater fluidity in his playing and sounds like a distillation of all his experience of being that good for that long. Molloy has said: ‘I’m first and last a traditional flute player, it’s what I started with, that’s what I do…I’ll play it as long as I can breathe’. That makes us the lucky ones as we delight in the masterful playing on Back to the Island which provides an unfaltering sense that at least some things are just as they should be.
Order Direct from Matt Molloy’s website here: http://www.mattmolloy.com/new-products/matt-molloy-back-to-the-island