A record company put ideals before profit – and survived.

The Dublin City Ramblers are teaming  up with the Southern rock supergroup The Legends of Southern Rock to present a dual cultural concert …

A new album by some of New York’s finest is attracting high praise

The Young Dubliners is a band playing between borders of both emotion and geography.

With dance classes starting everywhere, the basics are explained … [More]

Renowned sideman Declan Sinnott now has his own band, Small Town Talk

These Spaniards effectively combine Irish music with modern sounds

As the economy worsens, traditional music can help heal and bind us.

Comhaltas is considering holding Fleadh Cheoil na hEireann in the North. The move would be a first in 59-year history of the Fleadh. Comhaltas boss Senator Labhras Ó Murchú said it was incumbent on them to host a fleadh in Northern Ireland as it had contributed greatly to traditional song and dance in Ireland.

Gundagai festival shows how its done

Though now out of favour among musicians and listeners, the melodeon has had a huge influence on the playing of Irish music. The one row melodeon gained popularity in Britain from 1850 onwards and was a cheap and efficient adaptation of earlier French and English designs. By the early 1900s nearly all melodeons played in [...]

THE harmonica, more popularly known as the mouth organ, got left behind in the Irish music revival of the late 1950s. In the session it lacked volume and created something of a rattling effect. However, it gained a new profile in 1994 when the mastery of Brendan Power gave the instrument a new prominence with [...]

THE walls were steaming, a Russian band Slua Si was blazing out The Bucks of Oranmore to a crowd of around 200 doing a massive Walls of Limerick dance. Perhaps it should have been the Walls of the Lubyanka, for I was in a large Moscow pub in the shadows of the old KGB headquarters [...]

An Irish rap duo are to debut their cúpla focal at this year’s Electric Picnic festival.
‘Conas atá tú’, the newest track from Cork rapper GMC, featuring Bubba Shakespeare, will feature in the line-up for this year’s  music festival.
The track, a mixture of up-tempo hip-hop beats and traditional Irish music, is set to be a hit [...]

This year’s King of Puck was given the royal treatment when he arrived all the way from the Antrim on Monday.

By Ronan Nolan
THE bodhran evolved in the mid-20th century from the tambourine, which can be heard on some Irish music recordings dating back to the 1920s and viewed in a pre-Famine painting. However, in remote parts of the south-west, the “poor man’s tambourine” – made from farm implements and minus the cymbols – was in [...]

THE credit of recording the first Irish music on banjo goes to James Wheeler. With Edward Herborn accompanying him on the box, they made their first recordings in 1916 and 1917.
Mike Flanagan of the famous Flanagan Brothers played banjo. Born in Waterford in 1898, he started out playing the mandolin. His lively technique can be [...]

A priceless 200-year-old harp by John Egan of Dublin has ben found in a New York dumpster

Brothers Christy Moore and Luka Bloom have inspired a nd guided each other through lives filled with music

Horslips was made up of a group of like-minded musicians, who happened to work in advertising in Dublin. The success of their single Johnny’s Wedding led to their 1972 album Happy to Meet, Sorry to Part and Celtic rock had found its feet. Along with Planxty and the Bothy Band, they changed how a generation [...]