Lauren drawing on sean-nós tradition for new jazz work

A new work, Saoirse, (Freedom) created by Irish vocalist Lauren Kinsella will premiere at this year’s Galway Jazz Festival In it, she explores the sean-nós song tradition of Connemara and uses that as a point of departure for an entirely new suite of music.

Saoirse is one of three new works commissioned by Galway Jazz Festival after it received a commissioning fund from the Galway City Arts Office for this year’s festival

The other pieces are a jazz/theatre work by Irish playwright and activist Donal O’Kelly where the world is viewed through the eyes of Greta Thunberg’s dog, Roxy, and a musical immersion in the Connemara landscape via Sean Carpio’s Bog Bodies.

Lauren Kinsella has garnered huge critical acclaim and airplay in Europe and the US over the last few years and her 2018 album, Thought You Knew was rated by National Public Radio (NPR) in America as one of the year’s top albums.

Her current project, Saoirse. might be the first attempt by an Irish jazz/improvising musician to couscously draw on Irish traditional music, but this approach is not unusual in other countries, according to Ciaran Ryan of Galway Jazz Festival.

“It’s a trend that has been growing across Scandinavia for a number of years and is also seen in an increasing element of jazz from the Iberian Peninsula,giving an added ‘earthy’ dimension to a music that is very slow to allow itself be pinned down. Hence Saoirse or freedom. Freedom from genre, from form and structure, from time and place.”

The project has been nearly three years in the making and has involved Dubliner Lauren studying Irish, as her Leaving Cert didn’t offer any preparation for the linguistic challenges of sean-nós singing. She has also explored the cultural and historical context of the material, and the songs themselves.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.

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