Shelta
This year’s Headliners... Shelta!
Featuring Paddy Keenan, Tina Lech, Peter Molloy and Fionn Ó Lochlainn.
Over the course of his long career, Paddy Keenan has been called “the piper’s piper”, “the most exciting traditional musician in the world”, and “the Jimi Hendrix of the pipes”. He began his career in the 1960s with The Pavees, a group that incorporated members of the Keenan family as well as other Dublin musicians. In the 1970s he was a founding member of one of the most seminal bands in the history of Irish traditional music, The Bothy Band. In the years since he has pursued a mostly solo career. What goes around comes around, and Paddy has recently decided to return to the musical possibilities that are available within a band. He has formed an exciting new group, incorporating elements of his past and present in a fresh new way. This band is Shelta.
The members of Shelta represent several generations of Irish traditional music. The legacy of the Keenan family goes back through Paddy’s father and grandfather, like Paddy himself representatives of the Travelling style of open-fingered piping. Peter Molloy continues the legacy of flute playing learned from his father, Matt Molloy of the Chieftains. Tina Lech is a North American Irish fiddle champ and a veteran of Michael Flatley’s Lord of the Dance, thanks to a chance introduction to Irish traditional music as a child which led her to begin learning the fiddle. Fionn Ó Lochlainn, who as a child developed prodigious abilities on as many instruments as he could, finally settled on guitar, bass, piano, mandolin and drums. Since then, he’s performed and recorded with acts as diverse as Seal, Joe Cocker, Billy Bragg, Irish music pioneer Donal Lunny, and now Shelta. “Shelta” means music in the language of the Travellers; music is a language that transcends words. Listening to the tunes and songs produced by this exciting new band provides a perfect fusion of the two.