February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Part of the reason is his own lack of interest in cultivating fame or in packaging his music to achieve it.
“If I were waiting in Miami Springs for the phone to ring every day, I’d be waiting for a long time,” Kelly said recently from his home. “I don’t give much thought to the idea of being overlooked or forgotten. I just do the things I need to do.”
Since immigrating to the U.S. in 1978, Kelly has raised a son, Timothy, who’s 23, and a fiddle-playing daughter, Sarah, 25; worked in a gift shop that he and his American-born wife, Eve, owned until 1991; privately studied and composed music (more than 600 tunes); taught fiddling; toured with such bands as Bowhand, Planxty, Kinvara, and Patrick Street, and recorded with those groups as well as on his own.
Still, the benign neglect of this exceptional fiddler persists. Now 47, Kelly plays with a deceptively relaxed virtuosity, a beautiful tone, clear phrasing, an unerring, unrushed tempo, a profound respect for past masters, and a deep-dwelling emotion that unfolds gracefully rather than gushes out. His style is finesse, not flash, and it can get lost in a culture where glitz and gratification are just a remote-control click away.
“People sometimes don’t realize that a fast or flashy approach to Irish traditional music is very, very easy to do,” Kelly said. “Playing at breakneck speed has become formulaic. The assumption is that in order to make music exciting, it must be performed at 100 miles an hour, and the audience needs to be hit over the head by technique all the time.”
Kelly’s music takes a different tack. “The tunes themselves let you know how they want to be treated,” he explained. “All you have to do is open your mind to a particular piece of music. Maybe you have to seduce a tune a little more to get to that deeper emotion, that inner core within it. Maybe you even hold back on your technique to play certain tunes. If you’re a chef in a kitchen with a rack of 200 spices, you don’t reach for every single spice for your dish. The same is true for music: it becomes inedible.”
Nowhere are Kelly’s convictions about playing Irish traditional music more evident than in his new solo CD, “Melodic Journeys.” Entirely without accompaniment, it is full of superb fiddling that pulses with unshowy emotion.
“I started off by recording tracks with Donna Long on piano and D