Somewhere on a Bulgarian road in 1968, a lorry driver gave up trying to talk to Andy Irvine, a young Irish musician who would become one of the central figures in modern Irish folk music. The two had no language in common, and after a few futile attempts at conversation the driver reached for the radio.
The music caught Irvine immediately. More than three decades later he could still recall the moment: “I heard this music, and I thought wow! That’s Bulgarian folk music and it was just great.” The exchange itself was brief, but the sound stayed with him. By 1992, when Irvine and Davy Spillane released EastWind, that morning had been followed by nearly a quarter of a century of listening, collecting, learning and cajoling other Irish musicians into playing the music he had first heard in that lorry.
Andy Irvine had left the traditional and folk music band, Sweeney’s Men, in 1968, with Eastern Europe already in mind, although he never managed to produce a grand explanation for choosing it. Much of the counterculture was heading east towards India, following routes shaped by psychedelia and spirituality, while Bulgaria, Romania and Yugoslavia attracted considerably less attention.
As a boy he collected stamps and remembered being fascinated by the name Bulgaria written in Cyrillic, България, one of several countries that seemed remote without actually being very far away. “Perhaps I was a bit conservative not going to India, where everybody else went,” he told Hot Press in 1980, “but Bulgaria seemed far enough to go without actually leaving the continent.” With his girlfriend Muriel, he spent much of the next 18 months moving through Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, Greece and Turkey, hitching lifts, sleeping rough, and busking when he could. Winter eventually drove them north through Ljubljana to Denmark, and a brief return to Dublin for a wedding ended with the pair getting married themselves before setting off again.
His uncertainty about travelling behind the Iron Curtain began to ease at the Bulgarian border. Irvine arrived unsure whether a long-haired hitchhiker carrying a mandolin would even be admitted, only to find guards curious about the instrument. He played them a couple of Irish jigs while they tried to tune their radio to Bulgarian traditional music, finding only the popular singer Emile Dimitrov. Elsewhere, the authorities were less indulgent. Irvine was arrested for busking in Ljubljana and brought before an official on suspicion of begging, a description he found particularly galling: he was a musician, he insisted, not a beggar.
Sundays outside Bucharest Zoo were more rewarding. He remembered opening his eyes after playing to find an enormous crowd around him and his mandolin case filled with multicoloured notes, though the police would eventually arrive there too. In Bulgaria he heard traditional music at campsites, met local musicians and attempted to learn the kaval from one of them. Unable to coax a sound from the end-blown flute, he decided listening might be the wiser course.
The music itself took longer to understand. Irvine was drawn to Bulgarian and Macedonian tunes but found their rhythms baffling. “I loved the music but I didn’t quite understand it,” he later recalled. “It wasn’t exactly 1,2,3,4.” In an earlier interview he remembered thinking, “Wow! That’s amazing! But when does it begin and end?” The uneven metres of Balkan dance music followed patterns far removed from the reels and jigs he already knew, and that difficulty became part of the attraction.
Whenever he found a record shop, he bought what he could, often with little idea who the musicians were or precisely what he was taking home. Back in Ireland, with records and tapes gathered along the road, he began listening closely enough to work out where the beats fell and why the rhythms moved as they did. What had sounded bewildering abroad slowly acquired shape. “After that I was hooked.”
Andy Irvine’s Enchantment with Musical Bewilderment
He kept at it. During the 1970s, Balkan tunes began appearing in his own playing and, eventually, in Planxty’s repertoire. “Mominsko Horo” was an early attempt; “Smeceno Horo”, recorded by the reunited Planxty in 1979, went considerably further and became a favourite on stage.
Irvine remembered Irish musicians approaching the odd metres with a mixture of enthusiasm and bewilderment. Matt Molloy could play Smeceno Horo superbly yet would ask to be reminded of the tune before performances, while other musicians simply found the rhythms awkward after a lifetime spent largely in 4/4 and 6/8. For Irvine, that awkwardness was precisely what made the exercise worthwhile.
He described the process as learning a new vocabulary and playing it in their own vernacular. His determination to spread the habit became a joke among colleagues; he recalled musicians avoiding him for fear another invitation to play Bulgarian music was coming. By then, however, he was already thinking beyond the occasional tune. He wanted an album.
The idea lingered from the Planxty years through long discussions in Dublin pubs, producing plenty of plans and very little recorded music. At one stage, Irvine imagined a Bulgarian-jazz fusion record, though the concept changed as the project moved closer to reality. The decisive conversation came when he played some Balkan tunes to composer and musician Bill Whelan and mentioned the album he had been threatening to make for years. Whelan rang John Cook at Tara Records, and things suddenly began to move.
“Before I could believe it,” Irvine later wrote in the liner notes, “we were rehearsing with Davy Spillane and others and then recording EastWind.” Whelan’s suggestion of Spillane was particularly shrewd. Irvine had long admired the sound of Moving Hearts, especially the harder edge created when Spillane’s uilleann pipes met saxophone, and he later acknowledged that EastWind owed something to that band. Spillane, for his part, had never played a Bulgarian tune before the project began.
Released by Tara Records in 1992, EastWind carried Irvine and Spillane’s names jointly, with Whelan producing and arranging. Bulgarian multi-instrumentalist Nikola Parov brought first-hand knowledge of the musical traditions Irvine had spent years studying, while Máirtín O’Connor, John Sheahan, Rita Connolly and Hungarian singer Márta Sebestyén were among the musicians drawn into the sessions.
Finishing the record proved easier than getting it released. It sat completed for roughly 18 months while Tara tried to place it with a larger company capable of giving it wide distribution. Several labels showed interest, then backed away when the question of how to market it arose. Irvine remembered one particularly absurd response: “This is one of the best records I have ever heard in my life, it’s really fantastic music … unfortunately we’re going to have to pass on it.” The album eventually came out on Tara, still stubbornly resistant to the pigeonhole the larger labels had been looking for.
Its opening track explains some of their difficulty. “Chetvorno Horo”, named after a traditional dance from Bulgaria’s Šop region west of Sofia, throws an Irish ensemble directly into Bulgarian dance structures. Irvine’s bouzouki and Máirtín O’Connor’s accordion move through the tune with the rest of the band gathered around them, and from the first notes Balkan rhythm sets the terms for what follows.
The record is not wholly given over to instrumental dexterity, either. Sebestyén’s singing on “The Bear’s Rock”, drawn from a Macedonian song associated with Kruševo, and on “Kadana”, from the Rhodope tradition of Bulgaria, gives the album another register altogether. Her voice carries the music away from the problem of unusual metres and back towards the songs, stories and social customs from which many of these traditions came.
“Dance of Suleiman” and “Pride of Macedonia” form one of the record’s finest stretches and bring Irvine’s attachment to Macedonian music to the fore. Both lean on the uneven dance rhythms that perplexed him in the late 1960s, including the driving 11-beat patterns he spent years learning to feel without counting. By 1992 these rhythms no longer sound like exercises imported from elsewhere. The musicians inhabit them with enough ease for the oddness of the metre to recede behind the tune itself, which was always Irvine’s priority. He told fRoots that he chose the pieces for EastWind largely for their melodies, a useful reminder that his fascination with the music from the Balkans was never merely mathematical.
The album’s emotional centre remains “Illyrian Dawn”. A reworking of a Bulgarian slow air, it begins with Spillane’s low whistle and later passes to the uilleann pipes over Whelan’s spacious keyboard accompaniment. The title summons ancient Illyria and, with it, the western Balkans stretching along the Adriatic from present-day Albania northwards through much of the former Yugoslavia. The “dawn” suggests a musical sunrise over a landscape marked by Greek colonies and Illyrian kingdoms, Roman roads and Byzantine churches, Venetian ports and Ottoman caravan routes, and by musical traditions that outlasted the empires which governed them.
There is no need for “Illyrian Dawn” to carry a precise historical programme. Its power comes from suggestion, from the sense of a region accumulated across centuries and heard through instruments that belong to another shore of Europe. Few moments on EastWind communicate Irvine’s affection for the Balkans with such restraint.
The record closes by returning to an old obsession. “Hard on the Heels” reworks “Smeceno Horo”, the tune Irvine had already taken into Planxty more than a decade earlier, and sends it through changing metres and instrumental combinations before the full ensemble gathers for the finish. The circle back to Planxty matters. EastWind did not suddenly invent Irvine’s Balkan connection in the studio; it gathered strands he had been carrying through his work since his return from Eastern Europe. By the finale, the kinship he had long sensed between Irish and Balkan folk traditions can be heard in the playing itself, without much need for explanation.
Nikola Parov gave the clearest verdict. After hearing the finished record, the Bulgarian musician told Andy Irvine: “Well, it is not Bulgarian music, but it’s very good.” Irvine was delighted. The comment confirmed the method he followed from the beginning: let the tunes and rhythms pass through the instincts, instruments and habits of the musicians in the room, and allow the encounter to produce its own language.
EastWind rests on an insight often absent from discussions of folk music; traditions remain most vibrant through exchange, through encounters in which they recognise themselves in unfamiliar places. The distance between Dublin and Sofia was never as great as it seemed.
Sources
Irvine, Andy. Interview by Dermot Stokes. “The Importance of Being Irvine.” Hot Press, 26 June 1980. Archived transcription at Andy Irvine News.
Irvine, Andy. Interview by Colin Irwin. “Blood for Bouzouki.” Folk Roots, August 1992. Archived transcription at Andy Irvine News.
Irvine, Andy. RTÉ Radio interview, 30 July 2004. Archived transcription at Andy Irvine News.
Irvine, Andy, and Davy Spillane. EastWind. Dublin: Tara Records, 1992. CD liner notes.