Ceili Band Brings a Bit of Clare to Philly

Location(s)

Fiddling with a fury.
By Jeff Meade

The Turloughmore Ceili Band from County Clare might be the musical equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. OK, they must have taken a break at some time during their appearance at the Philadelphia Irish Center on Sunday. But mostly they just played on and on and on, and the 120-plus dancers who wore out shoe leather all afternoon and well into the night managed to keep up with them.

For one of the organizers, Marianne MacDonald, Kevin McGillian and his fellow local ceili band musicians will always be the favorite. Still, she says, it’s interesting to hear another group. “Just to hear a big ceili band is very exciting,” she says. “Their timing is just extraordinary."

And it was nice to finally hear them.

The first time Turloughmore’s passed through town, it was last February. As luck—bad luck—would have it, the date of the ceili mor coincided with a massive snowstorm. “They had done a workshop for us at the Mermaid,” Marianne recalls. “And then we got 18 inches of snow.”

Not long afterward, the band was scheduling gigs in the U.S. and realized they would be able to play in Philadelphia in August. They contacted the Marianne and arranged for a return visit—sans snow. (Only the tail end of a major heat wave.)

In the air-conditioned ballroom, a sizzling, humid city in the Mid-Atlantic states seemed far away. And cool County Clare, that much closer.

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