Interview Excerpt - Sean Kane

These are excerpts of the interview I did with musician/seisiun leader Sean Kane at the Irish Cultural Center in Canton, MA, on March 29th, 2008:

Ben Nicholson: So I guess my first question is a very general question: what is your experience with Irish music, how’d you get into it, why do you still do it?

Sean Kane: Sure… my mother is Irish, she’s from Westmeath. My father was American but he was also Irish, his family came over about 100 years ago, 160 years ago maybe… I grew up in the US in Brockton, spent my time between there and Westmeath most of the Summer every year until I was 18… The funny thing is the Midlands are not rich in Irish culture… The Midlands would have been part of the “pale”… the ring of safety that had been Anglicized around Dublin once the British rule took over… culture had pretty much been squelched out of that area... The Midlands are rich for cows, cattle, farming, but not really rich in culture so when I went over there all the years I spent in the summers it had nothing to do with… music.

I had no background, or so I thought, in Irish music. When I turned 21, there used to be a phenomenal Irish-American bar in Easton… called the Irish Embassy… I used to go in there four nights a week… There was a song they were playing one night, “Seven Drunken Nights”,… I realized I knew all the words and I didn’t know why… It slowly dawned on me that growing up… I used to spend hours and hours listening to my mother’s LPs…

[The Irish Cultural Center] wanted to turn this place from just a function facility into a place that is actually open and people will come to eat dinner and hear music… Last January we started [seisiuns]… It’s not even a restaurant that people are aware of, it’s set back off against the road, there’s no history of it being open, and we just figured we’d just go for it… It’s been pretty good… a little more than a year into it it’s starting to take off.

They’re trying to build it up and make it a well known destination for music and culture.

BN: Having lived in Ireland, even if it wasn’t necessarily the cultural center of music… what would you say are the differences between the music [in Ireland and America]?

SK: As far as the music itself… we’re pretty egalitarian here because a lot of seisiuns…anywhere really can have that almost “jazz-like” mentality, that the musicians are playing for the musicians and aren’t you lucky that you might be sitting there hearing it. There won’t be any singing and they’re going to do whatever they want to do and that’s the way it is. And even singing… in a really traditional setting there’s probably a bias against it… We just don’t do that… because it’s about building up the night and not just about the music… If you play three hours of jig and reels… I don’t find that to be the most attractive thing for a night out… We’re definitely open, some places call themselves a seisiun but aren’t really a seisiun because a seisiun implies that any musician who can play is invited to play, and that’s just clearly not true in a lot of places.

If you sit in on a very traditional Irish seisiun, especially with Irish people, you would sit there keep your mouth shut and not even attempt to play until you get the look from the person saying, “Yeah, it’s okay, why don’t you join in on this one?” We don’t really do that here, but on the other side of the coin, some people come in and have no concept of good manners.

There is always, not just in music, that conflict of identity between that you’re either Irish and born in Ireland or you’re not. And if you’re not, at some level that’s important…

In terms of the music… there would be … [regional] style[s] of music, but all of that is actually going away because in the modern age, you have the Internet and you have CDs, and so now everybody sounds like Altan instead of everybody sounding like the people that they organically learned from in the oral tradition… It’s not the oral tradition any more, it’s the electronic tradition… The modern era is squelching the playing styles… making it all generic.

BN: In terms of playing here specifically… we talk a lot in the class about what is “traditional” and about “authenticity”… about whether or not authenticity is important…

SK: Yeah, authenticity… I think every seisiun might have its own tradition of what tunes in what order it might play… I don’t think we are necessarily that authentic in that there’s so much of our choices that have come in… I kind of think that authenticity has more to do with identity issue than it does with the music ultimately… it’s like another battle line of whose more Irish… as much as it is about whatever the traditional order of a set is.

BN: So do you feel like here that authenticity isn’t necessarily as big of a deal as it might be…?

SK: I don’t think we worry about it… Sean Connor [fiddle player] is Irish, he’s lived a long time in London. There’s some players that aren’t Irish at all… All of that stuff can be interpreted negatively by… certain Irish people. I’m not going to be Irish enough for someone else, I might pass muster with some people but… you’ve got all of that nonsense going on. So I don’t worry about it, I can’t worry about that kind of thing.
You can only be authentic to your own experience.

If we tried to pretend to be Irish, that’s not being very authentic… I think that identity and what it means to be this, that, or the other thing and what badge will prove that is something that I think the Irish have been experiencing for several hundred years, but is also more and more being experienced… people everywhere in the in the world… Travel, displacement, migration, immigration, all of that stuff is becoming more of a norm than the exception and all of that identity politics, first generation and second generation issues, is a very relevant issue in the world. I think the Irish are way out in front with it because they’ve been doing it certainly since the huge emigration in 19th century.

Third culture people have to make choices about who they are and where they come from and you either get empowered by that and you synthesize it… pick and choose what works for you from the places that you’re from, or you become kind of encapsulated, which is you can’t synthesize that stuff and you’re always pining for some other place and you don’t become empowered by it. And I think all of that is incredibly true, historically, about the Irish.

Guitar is not even a traditional instrument in Irish music… The whole notion of a seisiun is a modern creation, that’s what makes me laugh. The bottom line joke is that seisiuns are not traditional at all. The only reason that music existed was that dancers could dance. The idea that musicians would just play the music without anyone dancing didn’t exist… That’s like a 20th century phenomenon. So then when they try to hit you with what you can and can’t do… it’s not like it’s going back 400 years, it’s going back 40 years. We’re not talking about generations of tradition. So we’ve got a stand up bass player tonight. That’s not traditional at all, but it’s pretty cool.