Voices: Boston Celtic Music Festival

The Boston Celtic Music Festival is coming up on the 11th and 12th of January, with day and evening music at Club Passim and First Church around Harvard Square and a Friday night ceilidh at SpringStep in Medford. Performers this year include Matt and Shannon Heaton, Kieran Jordan, Emerald Rae, Laura Cortese, and Flynn Cohen. It's a gathering which showcases, celebrates, and shares Irish, Scots, and Cape Breton traditions through the work of musicians based in the Boston area.

The festival, brain child of musicians Cortese and Heaton, heads into its fifth year with, as ever, a diverse line up and some new twists, including an open stage concert, a reprise of a classic album, and the always popular Boston Urban Ceilidh combination of dance and music

Matt Heaton and Flynn Cohen will do the classic album reprise, working up their version of the collaboration between Andy Irvine and Paul Brady, which has been a benchmark for song writing and guitar styles in the decades since it was released in the late 1970s. Heaton recalls listening to the album's adventurous opening track, The Plains of Kildare ? with shifting time signatures, including a Balkanesque 7/8 romp in the middle ? while driving, which nearly proved to be a dangerous combination. "At the point when the last verse starts and they bring in the backing vocal, I almost got into an accident because I was so blown away," he recalled.

The collaboration is a natural fit. Cohen, who has worked with John Whelan, Aoife Clancy, The Sevens, Cathie Ryan, and Halali, as well as the alt-trad band Annalivia, is a scholar of Paul Brady's guitar style and has transcribed many of Brady's arrangements for songs and tunes. Heaton, known for his musical partnership with his wife Shannon (the two recently released an album of Celtic-influenced Christmas music), is in demand as an accompanist and has played with Robbie O'Connell, the Boys of the Lough and Lissa Schneckenburger. In recent years, Heaton has expanded his talents to bouzouki.

"I was trying to learn some of Andy's material as a way of working on my bouzouki playing, and I knew Flynn was rather obsessed with Paul Brady's approach to traditional music," Heaton said. "I got the idea for the collaboration on the last day before performer applications were due for BCMFest; Flynn and I had one e-mail exchange and decided to do it. Why BCMFest? Where else could we get away with it?" Heaton said.

Cohen and Heaton say they're working at figuring out how best to do this music live, while paying tribute to the music as recorded in the 1970s. There are likely to be special guests on hand to add to the fun, but the duo is keeping quiet about whether they will recreate the 70s era Brady-Irvine hairstyles and clothing fashions.

Heaton notes that their idea has apparently been swiped, too: The Celtic Connections Festival taking place in Glasgow later in January also will feature a Brady-Irvine tribute, "performed by a couple of guys named Brady and Irvine."

Others appearing at this year's festival include innovative Irish dancer Kieran Jordan, whose work you may have seen on The Christmas Celtic Sojourn video, fiddler Eric Merrill, duos The New Tyme Sisters (Emerald Rae and Eden Forman), and Janine Sirignano and Sean Smith, as well as singing from Kyte MacKillop and Friends and Donald Gillies. Hanneke Cassel, pictured at left, will be calling the dances at Boston Urban Ceilidh, where Laura Cortese and her band have high energy tunes in store for those who are ready to dance.

"BCMFest has come a long way, and there's a long way yet to go. But we can definitely see the interest and enthusiasm building out there, and we hope people will continue to lend their support to BCMFest, whether as performers, volunteers or members of the audience," festival co -founder Shannon Heaton says.

There's more about all of this at the festival's website, where you may find ticket information (hint: it's a real bargain), a schedule of performers, and directions to the places the concerts will be held. If you're within striking distance of Boston and enjoy great acoustic music, it's well worth the trip.

Here's a taste of what things are like at BCM fest, through a look back at the events of 2005

Celtic not your thing? Check out the Savannah Music Festival, which spans three weeks in March and April and musical genres from classical to Cajun to bluegrass to swing.

A handy listing of many folk, roots, world and sometimes other genres of music festivals is here.

You'll find music content from many genres and plenty of other music fans at Gather Essentials: Music. For more of Kerry Dexter's Voices columns, look here. It's published on Thursdays.

Kerry Dexter, Music Correspondent Kerry's credits include VH1, CMT, the folk music magazine Dirty Linen, Strings, The Encyclopedia of Ireland and the Americas, and The MusicHound Guides. She also writes about the arts and creative practice at Music Road and contributes to Fred Bals' Series of Tubes.