For tour dates and a link to a track from the album please go to the Salut! Folk Facebook group
An old joke I heard in Belfast: “What do you call a banjo at the bottom of the sea?”
Answer: “A start.”
The wag who came up with that wasn’t the first or last to mock this instrument. Reddit has a long list of other anti-banjo jokes.
It is just as well that the banjo, a musical tool with roots in slavery, has also been with many fine ambassadors. Earl Scruggs, Bella Fleck, Barney McKenna, Bill Keith, Pete Seeger and many more spring to mind.
And up with all the masters of banjo-playing are Damien O’Kane and Ron Block. Their third album of Irish-American fusion, Banjovial, is a glowing celebration of their instruments, Block’s bluegrass banjo and O’Kane’s Irish tenor.
Photo: Kevin Johnson
With 10 newly composed tunes and two songs, we are treated to a sumptuous feast of sound inspired by Irish music, bluegrass, Americana and more.
At first I was listening track by track, each laboriously chosen from a link. Not everyone approves of Spotify but it became a lot easier to navigate the album once I had added Banjovial to my library.
It was sheer delight to explore the tracks using the shuffle setting.
But I was particularly grateful when certain stand-out pieces popped up. Rusby, O’Kane’s tune in honour of Kate, his wife and mother of their two children, is gorgeous. It could relate to maternal skills or intimate moments but I preferred to think of it as a musical depiction of Kate Rusby’s self-proclaimed “natteriness”, whether in-between songs patter or in everyday settings. That was before I saw the track notes. O’Kane says the tune is meant to represent the “warmth, kindness and the genuine love she radiates every day to everyone around her” and that will do me for me.
Another special track, for me, is the coupling Shabby and Cookie / St. Patrick’s Day, the first recalling two cats important to Block’s children when they were young, the second written by O’Kane one St Patrick’s Day and also featuring the great Irish accordionist Sharon Shannon. Other tracks were inspired by C S Lewis, O’Kane’s driving and the time of Covid.
As the album progresses, we move between music that is rousing, music that is jaunty and music that is contemplative.
As well as playing percussion, Josh Clark shares production credits with the duo. Important session work is provided by Steven Byrnes on guitar, Duncan Lyall on double bass and Moog and – on some tracks – Shannon and the American bluegrass musicians Aubrey Haynie and Tim Crouch.
Bromance has become a dirty word with the odious Farage sucking up to Trump and Elon Musk (unreciprocated by Musk who much prefers the yobbish appeal of Tommy Robinson), Trump sucking up, to no avail, to Putin.
But this wonderful duo’s publicist Jane Brace came up with the phrase Banjo Bromance and it fits them perfectly as well as rehabilitating the term.
Ralph McTell has said he was blown away by the duo’s “exquisite musicianship”.
Banjovial would inflict nightmares on anyone who sniggered approvingly at those banjo jokes. To open-minded music lovers, it will bring enormous pleasure.
Please visit the Salut! Folk Facebook group for details of a 14-date tour by the pair.
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