James McNally interview by Jerry Sullivan

AfroCelts have an impressive resume, having recorded with the likes of Peter Gabriel, Robert Plant, and having opened for U2.  And according to a pogues.com article, Van Morrison describes front man James McNally as “the Master.”

 McNally helped found AfroCelts eight years ago after playing a key role in the success of The Pogues.  At Irish Fest in Milwaukee we had the unique good fortune to see the AfroCelts “hello” to the Irish community.  What we saw was a spectacular blend of a tight knit drumming with a pleasant dose of uilleann pipes, bass and vocals.

 It’s odd an eight year old Irish band would do a “hello” performance now, at the world’s largest Irish festival, but this Irish band is different.  It is rhythm based.  And drums in Irish music are “traditionally” a following, accompanying instrument.  Here they took center stage.

 Following the show, I went to speak with some of the band members.  Instead I found an ambulance backstage as N’Faly (Kouyate), the kora player had strained his back.   Later I spoke with McNally by phone from London…

 WPR: I enjoyed the show in Milwaukee at Irish Fest.  I understand a band member was injured?

 JM: (chuckle) Yeah, N’Faly had jumped so high, in a very energetic show… I think he twisted his back.  He’s okay now.  We were concerned, but it’s rock & roll, isn’t it? (laugh).  With a heavy metal group you wouldn’t be surprised to see an ambulance back stage, but it is a bit unusual for a world music outfit.  I suppose it goes with the amount of energy we try and get out on the show.

 WPR: What are you up to now?

 JM: I’m studio bound.  We’re getting ready for the next album.  We’ve got one big show left in London at the Royal Festival Hall and then it’s back to the drawing board.

 WPR: What was unique about the Irish Fest performance?  What is unique about the band?

 JM: This was the first time the African side has ever ended up at the Irish Fest.  That’s probably what makes us such a special Irish band in the fact that we incorporate these other cultures.  We couldn’t afford to (have everyone) come in on that one show because we had already finished our American tour.  It was a one-off show.

 Normally you would have seen us with a live drummer and bass player.  What you saw in Milwaukee was slightly stripped down, more the Sound System based DJ set.  It gets even more powerful and more energetic.  It would be nice one day for Milwaukee to actually see that.  I’m sure the people loved what they saw, but we were working at about 75%. 

WPR: Will you come back next year?

 JM: I doubt it will be next year because I don’t know if they have the same bands back, but  I’m sure the funds will be there judging by the reaction of the people who run this (festival)…they were over the moon. 

 In the Irish market in America I don’t think people quite understand what we’re about.  (We’re better known) in the world market and even in the rock market.  For example, we supported Dave Matthews in North America.  We’ve been dealing more with big world music festivals and summer stages in New York.

 So this was the first out and out Irish fest and it was a “hello”…I mean, here are people just learning about us on our fourth album.  So it’s strange, we’re eight years old, and some people are seeing us for the first time.  We’re having to tell the story again.  But it doesn’t really matter when people come to it, as long as they come to it.

 There’s an amazing remix due to come out.  Then we have to produce an album by around March, so the album should be coming out next summer.  There will be talk of an American tour, but it’s so very expensive to bring this band.  It costs a fortune just to get us into London, let alone Chicago. 

 It really depends on how the music industry is working.  At the moment, it’s pretty weird.  The music industry is in dire straights at the moment with the piracy and the MP3’s and what’s happening with CD sales on some of the great artists.  And when you get a band like us, we certainly need to be pulling in a huge section of crowd on every show.  There are 14 of us on the road, including crew, with the full band. 

 In Chicago we missed out because of 9/11.  It shut down (our tour).  It changed a lot of lives and in many ways changed our lives as we were about to go on a huge tour which would have been, I think, the door opening for us fully in America.  It’s half open and it’s always been half open.  It’s probably the greatest area for us in terms of enlightenment.

 I think whatever state we find ourselves in, playing to people who have never seen the instruments and (who) may be new to African and indeed to Celtic music, we’ve opened people’s minds up an awful lot.

 WPR: Since African American relatives of Thomas Jefferson have explored their heritage, recently I’m finding more African Americans in Chicago (including an alderman) exploring their Irish heritage.  Have you come across anything along those lines?

 JM: That’s fascinating.  We’ve been waiting for that to happen.  In Europe, the U.K., Ireland, the African element of us is still quite strange to everyone.  We haven’t connected with our fellow Africans, but that’s very interesting to find in America, we …aw…the band will be very pleased at that.

 The immediacy of the Irish connection is almost there within the language, within the melodies.  The African rhythms and the Irish rhythms with the bodhrán  (connect).  The rhythmic stuff is a big language for us that we need to tap into the African American.

 WPR: Music is so powerful to bridge people and I could see how music could play a part in that whole process.

 JM: Yeah, absolutely.  On our first album is a track called “Sure-As-Not” which very much reminds me (beyond the rhythm, which is quite an obvious connection) of an Irish tune when, in fact, it’s an African village tune in the top line melody.  So, for an African American to be connecting with his Celtic brothers, it’s like a return journey and the connection has gone full circle.  It’s heartening to hear that, really.

 WPR: Are you an Irish band?  Do you think of yourselves first as an Irish band, per se?

 JM: It’s a planetary band, really. Wherever we go there’s an element of us that feel at home.  Our African guys feel very at home when they go to Ireland.  The people that come to see us make us feel as if we’ve come home at every place.  We go to Australia, we’re at home.  In South America or Japan…  There’s this element that makes you feel you’ve come to connect.  We all belong to this and include everybody.  You need everywhere to be home.  Of course, some individual members feel a lot stronger about certain parts of the world.

 I write a majority of the top line tunes and it’s based on my traditional (Irish) background. But they (the tunes) come from me, my side of it.  When I hear the top line tunes, I feel it’s an Irish band.  Then again, when I hear N’Faly singing in African I feel I’m connected to something a lot greater than the word Irish. It’s more about planetary and the world in general and breaking down the stereotypes that everyone seems to feel comfortable putting us in.

 WPR: I just made it to Ireland for the first time a couple of months ago and I was struck in Dublin by so many people from other cultures.

 On our next album we’ve done a piece called “Mohave” which is very Native American.  It’s making people from ancient cultures feel connected with people in the culture which hasn’t even arrived yet.  And that’s where we want to bridge the gap.  We don’t want people to be afraid of losing things.  If we make the bridge, we’ll make everybody feel they can come over it and head into the future.   It’s about connecting the past with the future.  We’ve been very lucky to be at the forefront of that because of the members in the band.  They take a seat in history.   Iarla (Ó Lionáird), our Gaelic singer, and N’Faly are singing very old languages.  But they’re singing on very modern music with very modern instruments as well as old instruments.  It’s good to be a part of.

 WPR: Recently, I found myself in Ireland seeking the essence of Ireland and there finding the influence of the Normans and Vikings and other groups from around the world.  It changed my orientation.  Along with that I’ve been studying the origin of instruments like frame drums and bagpipes.  I thought of the bodhrán as being a traditional Irish music instrument and then I come to find out its really kind of new to Irish music (in the last 40-50 years).

 JM: I’m playing it very modernly.  Where do you draw the line about where anything started, really.  Man has been hitting something ever since he was created.  I don’t really associate with the instrument as much as with the “how” and how you actually do it and the rhythm of the language…what you do with the drum. 

 You can just hit it and it won’t mean anything, unless the “words” (sounds) are put in a line.  It’s not so much the actual sound of the drum, it’s what people do with it and how they form this language.  Its okay knowing what words mean, but you have to put them together to make a sentence.

 We’ve had to do this carefully amongst the drummers of the band.  That’s what’s fairly new, the way the drum is incorporated to play.  The music hasn’t been around for hundreds of years, but the drum has been.  The idea of man hitting the skin of an animal with a stick, that form of language has been around. 

 The bodhrán  is normally accepted to back Irish music, so it’s played in a certain way.  If I played the same way with the AfroCelts, combined with the talking drum and the djembe and the dhol drum and the Asian tablas, I would never be able to talk to them.

 We had to learn a new language that took some of the principles but changed, developed and collaborated and formed a new language.  I didn’t just say “I’m Ireland, this is what I do and you’re talking drum, that’s what you do.” 
We’ve had to adapt and communicate with each other beyond our own traditions.

 WPR: I come from a background of community drum circles and teaching.  There we can mix music from different cultures by starting with a 4/4 timing and then grab a Haitian sound or Liberian sound and mix them.  But when you start bringing (so many culture’s rhythms and instruments), it seems to get tricky fast.  Did the sampling and electronic work help you to figure that out?  How did you come to be able to mix those different kinds of timings?

 JM: The process we found best was actual performance with each other.  Several drummers from around the world such as Hossam Ramzy playing Egyptian tabla and brush darboukas and Pete Lockett playing a ghatam, maybe even taiko drums and timbales, the bodhrán (as usual), the tablas, talking drum, djembe, and the dhol, which can only be used sparingly because it takes over.  We look for performances and playing off each other, almost like some of them becoming top lines.  

 We start the drumming before the melodies and top line harmonies are even dealt with.  We’re looking for amazing passages of magic between us.  It’s only then we hope to incorporate the modern techno drum, which is the computer.

 Then, not overbalancing the organic sounds versus the electronic sounds, we also use patches of our own passages that we’ve recorded.  We take the bits of magic from the sessions that we’ve had together playing off each other. 

 We can play various different rhythms for a couple of hours and within that there might be ten or 15 minutes of pure magic.  We’re like brothers.  We know each other inside out.  We know where we’re going.  We know we’re creating something that’s very unique. 

 Then we get the masters of the technology to incorporate it and balance it up.  There are many wizards of technology out there and they are the modern drummers, not playing with their hands, but playing with their minds. 

 The secret of our success is finding the right balance, having the luxury of live playing in conjunction with strong “groove-plating” (templating) from the electronic guys and the programmers.  It’s a luxury that we’ve really enjoyed.

 Both help bring each other to life.  We’re all interested in programming.  You’ll see that our music is like a theater play.  In an eight minute piece of music you’ll see tablas and bodhráns kick it off.  Half way down the line we’re already raging with djembes or brush darbouka or congas.  Suddenly the dhol drum comes and the talking drum is blazing away. 

 We go from passages.  We don’t play the bodhrán for eight minutes straight.  The stick I use could change three or four times in any one track.  It could start with a 10 inch bodhrán with a half stick and go into a massive 30 inch bodhrán with a rubber stick and finish off with a brush stick on a normal 18” bodhrán.   

The bodhrán is the key instrument in ALL of the AfroCelts tracks followed by the talking drum.  The dhol drum and the djembe have been additives from the last two albums onwards.  Everything is based around the bodhrán as far as how a track begins.  Sometimes you’ll hear eight or nine tracked bodhráns played various ways.   Sometimes it’s very close miked so what you perceive to be “what the hell is that kit,” or a huge taiko drum is actually the bodhrán.  It’s used in many different ways.

 The bodhrán is an amazing percussive instrument, probably one of the most amazing I’ve ever come across.  Whereas with a talking drum, it can be a talking drum.  A djembe can be a djembe.  A dhol drum can only be a dhol drum.  But with the bodhrán you can outwit many people on thinking that it’s another drum completely.

 WPR: That’s interesting, now that I have a few more bodhráns. The last few I bought were made in the middle east.  I was so excited about the sounds to come out of these drums.

 JM: To look at, people don’t get very excited, but when you see the amazing players around the world and what they can do with this one round drum.  Of course the hand in the back becomes very important and the stick and indeed how you mike it.  It’s such a busy drum because you have the hand spinning around.  If you use the normal stick, you eat the space.  I use the brush stick very much. 

 We work very hard to take things out as opposed to putting them in.  We have an abundance of weapons.  When you have too many weapons, problems arise.  Our problem is what to dissolve and release rather than “what do we need here”

 AfroCelts consists of a core group including James McNally (bodhrán , keyboards), N’Faly Kouyate (kora, balafon, vocals), Iarla Ó Lionáird (vocals), Simon Emmerson (guitar, programming) and Johnny Kalsi (dhol, tabla).  In addition, they will perform and record with as many as 20 other musicians.