Belfast is set to come to life with the sound of traditional music and the buzz of excited young and not so young musicians learning about the tradition with concerts, sessions and the affordable and accessible summer school that the festival is becoming so revered for.
In its 7th edition, Belfast Tradfest returns with over 500 musicians and 450 events in 30 venues throughout the city.
Since its inception in 2017, Belfast TradFest has established itself as a leading celebration of traditional music, song, and dance — offering world-class concerts, electrifying pub sessions, and Ireland’s fastest-growing summer school of traditional music.
This year the line- up boasts big names such as Dervish, greats such as Matt Molloy and Kevin Burke, global phenomenon Iarla Ó Lionáird and virtuosic instrumentalist Tim Edey, Clare’s NOTIFY, award-winning quintet Goitse, John Doyle and Mick McAuley, the trad ensemble Tempest, Ríoghnach Connolly & The Breath, Julie Fowlis, Zoë Conway, the renowned Louise Mulcahy and even The Ulster Orchestra.
Dónal O’Connor, Artistic Director of Belfast Tradfest, told The Irish World: “It’s going to be the biggest programme yet.
“We have 450 events over eight days in 30 venues.
“One of our aims was to bring traditional music to the biggest stages and the biggest rooms in the city, and we’re getting there.
“This year we’ll open the festival with a concert in the Ulster Hall, the iconic Ulster Hall stage that has been graced by everybody from Van Morrison to The Chieftains to Rory Gallagher and beyond.
“This year we have the great Sligo band Dervish and the great Co. Clare band NOTIFY opening the festival.
“They will be joined by the Irish Concertina Orchestra and Cormac McCarthy and the Music Generation Concert Orchestra so we’ll have over 80 musicians on stage in the Ulster Hall and then we’ve lots of other brilliant gigs through the week.
“We’re very excited that the legendary Matt Molloy is coming to Belfast Tradfest for the first time.
“Matt has been a member of all the major seminal groups in traditional music: The Bothy Band, Planxty and The Chieftains.
“I’m very, very excited, on a personal note, we’re going to screen the TG4 documentary about Matt Malloy that I produced called Sé Mo Laoch and to see him perform on a double bill with John Carty and Brian McGrath and Ríoghnach Connolly’s The Breath Project.
“When you think of Irish traditional sean nós singing, one of the leading exponents is Iarla Ó Lionáird.
“He was a founder member of Afro Celt Sound System and The Gloaming.
“He’s coming to play in the beautiful Empire Music Hall with Tim Edey.
“They’re on a double bill with a great new local band called Tempest who showcase the very best of Ulster music and songs.
“We’re very, very proud to be providing opportunities to emerging artists alongside the legends of traditional music.
“And then on the Saturday 2 August, we have two amazing concerts.
“We have, in the afternoon, newly commissioned pieces of music being performed by Julie Fowlis, the great singer who’s the voice of Disney Pixar’s Brave, and the brilliant Co. Louth fiddle player and singer Zoe Conway and their respective partners with the Ulster Orchestra.
“That’s exciting.
“It’s our first collaboration with the Ulster Orchestra and we’re very keen to see if we can build on that partnership and have them engage more with the world of traditional Irish music.
“And then that night, we have a vibrant, energetic, young lineup with the great Sligo band Moxie who have been on a hiatus for a couple of years.
“They’re rooted in traditional music but they’re fearlessly innovative.
“And also on the bill is the all female Scottish quintet, Kinnaris Quintet, a high energy fiddle led group.
“One of the albums of the last decade was released by a trio called Carlos Sweeney and McCartin.
“That album has really captured the hearts and imagination of traditional musicians and audiences.
“They’re just some of the bigger name highlights but the thing that motivates us most and that gives us our energy and fuels us is the summer school.
“We’re trying to create the musicians, the performers and the audiences of the future.”
The Summer School of Traditional Music offers participants an intensive week of masterclasses, workshops, performances, and sessions, taught by greats such as Kevin Burke, Catriona McKay, Iarla Ó Lionáird, Cathy Jordan, Stephanie Keane, Brìghde Chaimbeul, Chris Stout, Louise Mulcahy, Mary Bergin, John Doyle, Zoë Conway, Caitlín Nic Gabhann and Ronán Eastwood.
“We curate a series of concerts with the tutors at the summer school on themes of Belfast traditional music history.
“We celebrate the Belfast harp festival with a brilliant line up featuring the great Scottish Harper Catriona McKay, Co. Meath harper Ciara Ní Tháth, Co. Mayo harper Gráinne Hambly and a collective of 27 young harpers from all around Ireland, the Music Generation Harp Collective.
“We also then celebrate the legendary Belfast fiddle player Seán Maguire in the Mac Theatre.
“I’m personally really excited to have one of my own fiddle heroes come to Belfast Tradfest for the first time: The great Kevin Burke of the Bothy Band.
“We’re really excited to have him come and play that concert but also to teach for five days at the summer school, to impart some of his wisdom and his knowledge. That’s going to be a real treat for whoever gets into that class and on the bill of that Seán Maguire gig.
“We also have the great Shetland fiddler, Chris Stout, Tom Morrow of Dervish, the current Fiddler of Oriel Maebh McGlinchey, a young fiddler from County Tyrone, from a very musical family and her sister Una will join her.
“And we have, of course, Zoe Conway from Dundalk and a group of young fiddlers from North Belfast, from the Glengormley School of Traditional Music.
“So there’s some of the concert highlights.”
You say you are especially excited to host Kevin Burke who is London- born..
“That’s right.
“And I’m going to be doing a Q and A with Kevin.
“He and I are going to have a discussion about his life and about his growing up in London.
“He joined the Bothy band at a young age and then he emigrated to America but he learned all his music in London from many of the greats: the Michael Gormans and the Bobby Caseys and the Willie Clancys, many of the great Irish musicians who had emigrated to London in the 50s and 60s.
“What a melting pot of music that was.”
Last year’s line-up boasted names such as Moya Brennan of Clannad and Cherish the Ladies.
This year’s programme shows it continues to grow..
“It’s very, very exciting.
“The thing that’s probably most exciting about it is the appetite for it seems to grow.
“The people of Belfast are really embracing Tradfest and all that we stand for in terms of the cross cultural work that we do and the summer school and all of the concerts and sessions and all of that, but also we’re attracting lots of people from outside of Belfast and that audience seems to grow and people are really, really getting very excited about discovering this city and how brilliant a city it is.
“It’s full of energy.
“It’s full of welcome and charm and vibrancy.
“It’s an exciting time to be here in Belfast, an exciting time to live here but it’s also an exciting time to visit.
“Obviously it has a chequered past but a very, very bright future, I think.
“We have a small core team of people who run the festival and then we have a big team of volunteers.
“There’s huge interest this year in volunteering for the festival and we have volunteers who travel from all over the world to come and be part of it and to spend time with their heroes.
“They love how Belfast is more like a town than a big city and you get to know everybody.
“One of the most thrilling visual images of the week is to see hundreds and hundreds of people in Belfast City centre with musical instruments on their back, fiddles and accordions and banjos and concertinas.
“That’s really, really fulfilling for us as a festival.
“When I first came to Belfast, between the two ceasefires in the mid 90s, it wasn’t particularly safe to walk around with a musical instrument.
“It certainly didn’t feel as safe to walk around with a musical instrument because you might have been labelling yourself and now we see young people walking around with pride, with their Belfast Tradfest hoodies and T-shirts and their musical instruments, jumping on and off public transport and in and out of venues and bars and restaurants and the Ulster University.
“That’s something that I’m very, very proud of: That we have witnessed that change, that transformation and that progress. And long may that continue.”
Can you believe the calibre of people you are attracting to the relatively young festival?
“Yeah, I suppose myself and the team have to pinch ourselves every now and again to believe that world leading musicians such as Cathy Jordan of Dervish and Louise Mulcahy, that these people want to come to Belfast, want to spend time passing on the music to the next generation, want to come and share the music on the stages and in the sessions is very rewarding.
“This year our Dunville Irish whiskey session trail has over 100 sessions in 20 bars.
“That’s 300 musicians employed to play sessions in the best traditional bars in the city.
“That programme is peppered with the maestros who are teaching at the summer school and then the emerging and local artists.
“I think one of the things that I hoped for when we set up the summer school and the festival was that people in this city would get the chance not just to learn from the best of the business but to spend time with them in a session environment and to see how a Zoe Conway or Mick McAuley or a Padraig McGovern carry themselves and to see these people are incredible musicians but they’re also incredible people and there’s a lot to be learned from spending time with them.
“That’s one of the things we’d hoped for.
“You’ve got an opportunity to go to 105 different sessions in the city and sit with your heroes and your idols.”
Isn’t that what is special about traditional music, that you never know who could sit beside you in a session?
“I think the session is a real leveller.
“I mean, I can go to a session anywhere in the world and play music with other people that I’ve never met but I can also go to a session and end up sitting with the fiddle on my knee because I don’t know any of the tunes that are unique to that session or that place.
“It doesn’t matter how old, how young, how established, how emerging you are, there’s always something to be gained and learned from sitting in a session with other musicians and there’s a lot of joy and fun to be had too.”
It also seems like there’s very little divide between performers and audience and more of a universal feel about the festival..
“One of the things that people say to us a lot is that they love the fact that they can be walking down the street from one event to another and bump into the legends of the music or bump into their long lost friends or people that they met at the festival last year, it’s such a social occasion.
“Obviously the events are a big part of it but the social interactions on the fringes are equally as important, if not more important.
“And the making of friendships, the reconnecting with old friendships, the creating of new and future friendships with people from all over this city and all over these islands and beyond that.
“We have people coming from 33 different countries this year to the festival so it really is becoming an international event at this stage with a very national and local heartbeat.
“We invite people from England and London and further afield to come witness it for themselves, see how welcoming this place is, see how many amazing bars and restaurants and venues we have here in the city, that it’s easy to get around but it’s a fun place.
“One of the things that a lot of people say to us too is the craic they have with the taxi drivers is like nowhere else.
“Belfast people are very, very straight, very honest and very open.
“I think visitors really appreciate that.”
You have said it a few times but what the programme comprises is renowned names and those that are more emerging, that’s a very important blend, isn’t it?
“Very, very important.
“Our festival club is an opportunity for some of the emerging artists to really put themselves out there.
“We’ve got a relatively new band NxNW which features Ryan Molloy and David Doocey and Stephen Doherty.
“And we also have Joe Jack Attack and Becky Ní Éallaithe.
“On the main stages of the summer school gigs, we provide opportunities for young local artists to perform alongside some of the greats.
“I can remember as a young musician being able to say that I shared the stage with one of my idols.
“It’s a memory you’ll cherish forever.
“An abiding memory is the Return to Camden Town Festival.
“We played in the Irish Centre in Camden before the great Armagh fiddler Brendan McGlinchey and that’s something I’ll never forget.
“Festivals provide those opportunities.
“We exist to support musicians, to give them an opportunity to showcase their music, to give them a sense of feeling valued in the community of traditional music particularly if they’re doing something novel, interesting, innovative, of high quality.
“We, as musicians, understand how challenging it is to be a musician, how difficult it is to sustain a career as a musician because of all the obstacles that are in the way in terms of financial challenges, in terms of unsociable hours of work, in terms of all the travel and all the logistical challenges that it poses.
“We really want to support that.
“We really want to recognise that and we’re a part of the ecosystem, as much a part of it as the musicians are themselves and we all need each other.
“We all rely on each other.
“We want to support each other and a rising tide lifts all boats.”
What’s been the highlight of the whole journey for you so far?
“My particular favourite moment each year is the end of the week at the summer school when the young musicians from the whistle and sing programme perform.
“The whistle and sing programme is for kids aged five plus and they learn some basic tunes on the tin whistle and they learn some of the Belfast street songs.
“They perform the songs with the actions, with the dances and the movements.
“They perform them in the Ulster University for all their mammies and daddies and grannies and that is my favourite bit of the whole week.
“I can stand watching the legends and the heroes and the maestros all day long but to see these young musicians who are five, six and seven, stepping into the world of traditional music for the first time, and many of them not from backgrounds of traditional music, is special.
“And then we’re seeing them going on and signing up to the local music schools for their weekly classes and then coming back to attend the individual instrument workshop the next year with the really great musicians.
“That’s the most rewarding aspect of the work that we do.
“In the years ahead what we want to do is to continue to grow the summer school.
“We’re on target to have over 800 students at the summer school this year.
“When we started, we had just under 100 so I think we’re on course to continue to grow that.
“We have a great partnership with Ulster University that affords us the ability to continue to grow that number and to be a beacon and a light for Belfast and to be a reason for people to come to visit Belfast and to see all the other amazing things that this city has to offer.
“I suppose most of all is to create a better opportunity and a better society for our own people in this city, for our own families and friends and our own community.
“And if that is something that other people find appealing and they want to be part of, well then that’s just brilliant.
“Since day one, we have brought together people from the world of piping and drumming from the marching band world of highland pipes and fruits and drums together with people from the world of fiddles and accordions and concertinas.
“This year we’re very excited that our ‘With Pipe and Drum’ concert, which takes place in East Belfast every year, this year will take place in the Great Hall at Stormont.
“Those that are lucky enough to get a ticket for that concert, which features Louise Mulcahy, Julie Fowlis, Mark Wilson, Alan Glenholmes and Andy McGregor, will also get an opportunity to go and visit the chamber where the politics takes place and get a look around what is a remarkable building which has been a place of divisive politics for many years.
“We’re really thrilled to be bringing people together through the medium of traditional music in that historical setting.
“That will be one for the books.
“We’ll have Pipers of the Highland and the uillean varieties, and we’ll have bodhran players and snare drummers, and we’ll have sean nos dancers so it’s going to be quite the spectacle.
“(And) the whole festival opens up with our Titanic Ceili which is a free family fun day on the Titanic slipways where the big ship set sail for the new world.
“Last year we had almost 10,000 people dancing and enjoying the Titanic ceili and this year we’ve got the Great West Kerry band Pólca 4 coming to perform.
“We have a great singer from Cork who’s making a big name for herself, Meadhbh Walsh.
“We have Róise McHugh who is based in England.
“And we have pipe bands and ukulele orchestras and the Belfast Wren Boys and the Glengormley School of Traditional Music.
“It really is a brilliant, fun open air day.
“We invite everybody to come along to that.”
Belfast Tradfest runs 27 July- 3 August.
For more information, click here.
