BACKSTAGE with DAVY JONES
A Conversation with Uilleann Piper
JARlAth HENdERsON A Special Richmond Folk Festival Backstage Story
F
by Davy Jones
or the world’s most exciting practitioners of traditional music, playing means looking backward and forward at the same time…diligently embracing and re-exposing
musical roots while following artistic instincts that break new sonic ground. Jarlath Henderson knows a thing or two about inhabiting that sacred space. Hailing from Northern Ireland, he’s as celebrated a uilleann piper as you’ll find, having won the 2003 BBC Young Folk Award at the record-setting early age of 17. And while he’s recorded with some of Celtic music’s biggest names, he’s also charged forward to explore how traditional Irish music can be voiced, releasing a daring and moving debut album in 2016, called Hearts Broken, Heads Turned, in which he incorporates electronic elements and varied instrumentation to give old songs new life and depth. He’s truly one of the must-see artists at this year’s Richmond Folk Festival, which is set to bring three thrilling (and free, with a donation) days of music, arts and culture from near and far, starting on Friday, Oct. 12. Henderson and I spoke over the phone recently about his upcoming performance, his journey with his instrument, and what it means to honor the past while forging ahead into the future.
What will the arrangement be for your performance at the Richmond Folk Festival?
We’ll be touring this time as a three-piece, trying for a very dynamic sound with three people, so it’s going to be fun. I’m going to have a guy, Hamish Napier who plays keys, and he’s also a vocalist, a singer I respect and sing with a lot. He also plays flute, as do I. Hamish is great. And then I’ve also got a guy called Pablo Lafuente, a guitarist and violinist. Myself, I’ll be playing some guitar, some pipes and whistles and singing.
Do you enjoy the folk festival format — where you have an opportunity to connect educationally with an audience?
I do. It’s a really interesting one. I haven’t been to the festival before, so I’m really intrigued. I’m looking forward to seeing exactly how it all plays out. But I have gigged in North America, and it’s been really cool just how perceptive and interested the audiences are, and really keen to get some sort of an education as well as a musical performance.
Can you talk a little about the journey the uilleann pipes have been on since their invention?
The journey goes back to probably about 600 BC, [which] is one of the first documented forms of bagpipes. But the uilleann pipes themselves began to come to be as an instrument in the mid- to late-1700s. And since the 1960s, there’s been such a great rise. There are now pipers in Japan, pipe-makers in Japan and everywhere else around the world you can think of. And actually, this year it’s quite cool to
10 RiverCity September / October 2018