Irish Dervish whirls In

Jack Bernhardt, Correspondent

Since forming in 1989, the acclaimed Irish band, Dervish, has shared its sprightly songs and tunes with audiences as far from the Emerald Isle as Rio de Janeiro and China's Great Wall.

On Thursday, the award-winning sextet will bring its songs and tunes to Carrboro's ArtsCenter, the latest stop on its seventh annual March tour of the United States.

The lads and lass of Dervish hail from County Sligo, south of Donegal Bay on Ireland's west coast. Renowned for its traditional music, Sligo is home to many legendary musicians. Most famous and influential was Michael Coleman, a brilliant fiddler who emigrated from south Sligo to New York in 1914, and made about 80 recordings for American record labels. Those records, and Coleman's emotionally expressive style, continue to influence Irish musicians today, including the members of Dervish.

"For as long as we've been together we've had a desire to bring Sligo music to the world," says singer and bodhran player Cathy Jordan, who speaks softly with a lilting, warm Irish brogue. "Sligo music is wild and vibrant and highly ornamented and energetic, and Coleman was an exponent of that. A lot of the tunes are from that south Sligo region; that would have been Coleman's area, as well. So in a lot of ways, we play from the same source, all right."

Since the Irish music revival of the 1970s, several bands have emerged combining traditional elements with modern rhythms and perspectives. The Bothy Band (which featured former Chapel Hill resident Triona Ni Dhomhnaill), Planxty and Altan were among those who put Irish music on the global map and paved the way for Dervish. By blending a variety of traditional instruments, including fiddle, flute, accordion and whistles, with more contemporary instruments and musical conventions, Dervish follows the lead of those earlier bands while fashioning its own distinctive style.

"Every band has its sound," Jordan says. "For each of [those bands], if you stripped away the backing -- the guitars, bouzoukis and mandolas -- you would have the fiddle, flute, accordion. And that sound would be the same as it would have been a hundred years ago. Generally speaking, it's the rhythms and chord structures and sequences that give it a uniqueness.

"The lads in Dervish ... are a fantastic unit together; they're like one instrument playing. They're very together in their intricacies and their melodies intertwine with lots of interplay between them, and powerful rhythms, as well. That's what makes Dervish sound apart from everyone else."

The band's sound can be heard on "Spirit," a wonderfully diverse album released on Nashville-based Compass Records. "Spirit" showcases the band's instrumental brilliance with jigs, reels and airs, along with traditional and contemporary songs. On dance tunes, such as the opening medley of reels, "John Blessings" ("Tinker Hill/Patsy Touheys/MaryBergins/Johnny 'Watt' Henrys"), the instruments weave in and out with the delicacy of fine Irish linen.

By contrast, the combined jigs "Whelans" ("Trounsdells Cross/Whelans") begin with a traditional grounding before morphing into a wild and frenzied rock opus. Jordan closes the album with a soft a cappella hidden track that she sings in her native Gaelic. Jordan also sings contemporary songs in English from Bob Dylan ("Boots of Spanish Leather") and Brendan Graham, ("The Fair Haired Boy"), an Irish friend of the band's who composed pop singer Josh Groban's hit single, "You Raise Me Up." The arrangements, Jordan says, are often worked out spontaneously as the band searches for the sound and feel that works for each selection.

Together for 17 years, Dervish shows no signs of slowing down. The band owns its own record label, and that allows the musicians to work at a comfortable pace rather than having to release an album every year. Still, they'll be working on two albums this year. One will be in conjunction with the Eurovision Song Contest, featuring a song from one band from each European country and broadcast to a television audience of about 750 million fans.

For the second project, Dervish will travel in August to Hiltons, Va., home of Maybelle, Sara and A.P. Carter, the famous Carter Family, whose recorded songs were some of the most influential in country music's early commercial era in the 1920s and '30s.

Dervish has been asked to participate in a documentary film about the Carter Family, and to record an album of Carter Family songs. It's an exciting "hands across the water" project for Jordan, who came of age listening to Carter Family songs.

"It's very fitting because when I was young, we had some old 78 rpm records of the Carters," she says. "It will be a journey, as well, tracing the women of the Carter Family and to see what their life was like through the eyes of an Irish woman."