Liner notes
Live at Mona’s
Every Monday night for the past ten years, one of the very best Irish traditional music sessions in the world has taken place in New York City in a small pub called Mona’s on Avenue B between 13th and 14th Streets on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
You could easily pass Mona’s and not even notice that it is there. Indeed, the only thing that marks it as a pub is a small Guinness sign outside that dates from the 1980’s when there was a cut price Guinness special every Thursday night. It is a most unlikely venue for Irish music.
Up to the late 1980’s, this part of Avenue B was avoided by many New Yorkers because it was associated with a seedy underworld of petty crime and drug dealing. In the 1990’s, the neighborhood improved as the city administration cracked down heavily on crime. Now the area has an offbeat, almost fashionable appeal among clued-in Manhattanites.
The music at Mona’s never begins before 11:00 PM, surely making it the latest starting Irish music session in the world. The session leaders, fiddler Patrick Ourceau and guitar and tenor banjo player Eamon O’Leary, turn up a little beforehand. They try to be well-rested because they never know how long the night is going to be.
Upon entering Mona’s, it takes a few seconds for the visitor’s eyes to adjust to the gloom. On the immediate right is a narrow bar maybe 20 feet long. Dublin barman, Emmet Henry, stands vigilantly behind the plain wooden counter with Chris Gough, his regular Monday night co-worker. The service is always lightening quick. These are barmen who are experts at their job.
Beyond the bar counter, the room widens and becomes more spacious. At the very back near the bathrooms is a pool table with a group of serious pool players involved in a league that takes place here every Monday night. The regulars and the music and pool clienteles co-exist easily, chatting freely as patrons go back and forth between the bathrooms and the bar.
Its is Monday night April 12th 2003.
Eamon and Patrick set up in the space at the end of the bar between the two sections of Mona’s. It’s a comfortable cozy alcove naturally delimited by the architecture of the pub. There is just about room for five chairs around a small table, though later more will be pulled up and squeezed in as the number of musicians increases. But now it is eleven, and Eamon and Patrick are the only musicians present. They are sitting in their usual positions, Patrick with his back to the wall facing towards the open space in front of the bar, and Eamon sitting about three feet away against the wall facing the counter end of the bar. They are perfectly situated for maximum musical communication and will be able to hear one another clearly throughout the night, no matter how loud the customers are in either section of the bar. Just before they begin to play, they are joined by Dana Lyn, a Taiwanese-American fiddler originally from Los Angeles who has fallen in love with Irish music since graduating from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio in 1996. She rarely misses a Monday night at Mona’s.
Scott Spencer, a musician and graduate ethnomusicology student at New York University, is standing with headphones beside a small mixer perched on a table near the musicians. There are cables leading to microphones dangling from makeshift mic stands high over the heads of the musicians. Scott is getting ready to record tonight’s music. This will be the first of several long Monday night visits he will make to Mona’s over the next nine months.
Many people had talked to Eamon and Patrick over the years about how remarkable the Mona’s session is and how nice it would be to have a recording available of the wonderful music played there--the kind of live recording that had been issued over the years of great Irish music sessions in pubs like the Camden Arms in London, The Cobblestone in Dublin, Peppers’ Bar in Feakle, County Clare, and Matt Molloy’s Pub in Westport, County Mayo.
Talk finally became action and the project took shape. Glucksman Ireland House at New York University graciously offered assistance and sponsorship. Scott offered to donate his time and expertise, and the project was under way. We didn’t realize it at the time, but this would turn out to be the very first commercially available recording of a bar session in the history of Irish music in America.
Singer-songwriter Autumn Grieve volunteered to be the logger for the recording sessions. She describes the scene beautifully:
“The players are crowded around one small table amidst a perplexing mix of textures: one wall of exposed brick and another of faded pink tile reminiscent of a shower stall, the floor below is a worn, grayed linoleum peeling over concrete. Not quite the expected, (romanticized) setting for an Irish session. No golden- hued, glowing hearth ambience here. This is New York - the atmosphere is subterranean. A weak garish-blue light is the only source of illumination... The contrast between the two core players is intriguing. Patrick upon his fiddle nearly dances in his seat, both feet delicately tapping out the rhythm, bright eyes full of humor, smiling, winking, ever ready with a warm gesture for newcomers. And Eamon, the essence of understatement and disheveled reserve, his guitar playing as well as his presence a subtle anchor beneath the higher flights of melody, a ubiquitous toothpick slanting from the corner of his mouth.”
Patrick Ourceau and Eamon O’Leary are both master musicians. Patrick was born in Paris, France in 1967. He first heard Irish music on recordings, liked it instantly and decided it was what he wanted to play. He is now known as a great fiddler, but it was not his first choice. “I started playing at about twelve years of age, I think. I started off on the whistle, and then moved on to the fiddle... actually it was two instruments I really wanted; I also wanted to play the concertina... The concertina was on top of my list, but it was hard to find one, living in France... And so, I decided to go with the fiddle. Maybe one day I’ll still play the concertina.”
He came to the US in 1989. His primary reason was to play Irish music. “I was fully aware of the music here, I knew of (fiddlers) Andy McGann, of Liz Carroll, Paddy Reynolds, and Tony de Marco and Brian Conway, and I thought, it could be really good for me. Why not?” Patrick has had a fine career in his fifteen years in the US playing with the noted Clare concertina player Gearoid O’ hAllmhurain and in groups such as Celtic Thunder and Chulrua.
Eamon O’Leary was born in Dublin in 1972. He started playing the guitar in his teens but had little interest in Irish music at the time. “I didn’t really come to Irish music until, I suppose, my late teens... and then, it was a matter of chance. It was just through friends that I made along the way who happened to play, and I just began to soak it up that way.”
He did not expect to be playing Irish music professionally when he arrived in New York in the late 1980’s. “When I first started hanging around New York, there was a café on St. Mark’s place where we used to play every week. It was an Irish- owned place, and we used to do a weekly night of music there. And the people, the audience, were not an audience that was used to Irish music... the enthusiasm with which they responded to it was sort of inspiring.” So he started playing in sessions around the New York area with various musicians, including Patrick.
Patrick and Eamon are full of stories about a litany of sessions they were involved in during the 1990’s: The Shades of Green on 15th St., Ryan’s on 2nd Avenue, The Irish Rover in Queens, The Bay Breeze in Bay Ridge, The Iona in Williamsburg, The Scratcher on East 5th St. And many more. Some lasted a few months; others, a few years. But eventually, they all ended, almost always for financial reasons. The musicians learned by direct experience that a session can last over the long haul only if it is supported by the owner and at least one bartender.
The session at Mona’s came about in 1994 through Eamon’s friendship with fellow Dubliner Emmet Henry, who arrived in New York in 1993 joining a brother who had come over a few years earlier. Emmet had just graduated from The College of Marketing and Design, but he had no particular career plan. He did not have much interest in traditional Irish music at that time even though he is a distant relative of the famous uilleann piper Leo Rowsome. He worked as an art handler for a while until his brother found him work in a bar on 2nd Street and Ave A. He started working at Mona’s as a barback (bar assistant) in June 1994 and shortly moved up to the position of barman.
Mona’s is over 60 years old. For the past 17 years it has been owned by Richie Curton, an Italian American. Richie has no ancestral connections to Ireland but when Emmet and his brother suggested an Irish music session on Monday nights he was open to the idea. Monday is a notoriously slack night in the New York bar trade and it was a novel idea worth trying out, even though Mona’s had never been known as an Irish pub.
Emmet asked Eamon to organize the music for the session. From the very start it worked out. He played with various musicians, including fiddler Fiona Doherty, for about a year until Patrick Ourceau joined him to stay.
The primary measure of success for any bar is of course the regular business it attracts. “It’s not just that people come,” Emmet says “but that you can get them to keep coming back...For some reason (the session) seemed to fit without changing the nature of the bar from any other night. The bar attracts nice easy going people who have been coming there for years. They like the change – for one night a week the juke box is off. The people who come to hear the music are also easy going and friendly.”
Emmet and Eamon between them made a very deliberate decision not to mic the session. From experience Eamon found that “using mics, using a sound system, changes the whole feel and mood altogether. Mona’s, from the time I started playing there, was always a bunch of people just sitting around the table, having a few tunes. There’s also sort of a hierarchical aspect to the use of microphones, ‘cause there will be, obviously, less microphones than there are players. So that’s a bit off-putting, and understandably so.”
They decided to start the session very late in the night. Patrick feels this was an inspired move because it cut down on the numbers of musicians likely to show up and attracted basically only the serious participants; “That’s what’s always been nice about the Mona’s session. Because it was so late, we never got this session with 25 musicians, which would have included 10 bodhran players and 5 whistle players, you know? And I think that that’s definitely been a great help... trying to keep the core of musicians smaller, so you can play theoretically nicer music”
The music at Mona’s is always of the highest caliber. The core repertoire has been established by Patrick’s own preference for the beautifully crafted, sinewy, lyrical music of the East Clare/East Galway tradition. He has become well known in this regional tradition, respected as much in Ireland as he is in the United States. He has a huge repertoire of this music but he is also very eclectic and open -minded in his tastes.
“I try to stick with a lot of the standards. I try to find nice tunes we can play together. Yes, I do like playing tunes in the repertoire of Clare and Galway but there are tunes in that repertoire which are common to other places in Ireland. That’s usually the sort of the tune I like to play. When you play in sessions a lot you pick up so much music... So I would know the tunes...but there are people, it happens, now and again... musicians come down to Mona’s and we cannot really play music together, because we’re so different, musically. But... we’ll try nonetheless to have a good time.”
Eamon is an outstanding guitar accompanist with a great ear for key and chord changes and great rhythm and drive. Everyone likes to play with him. He is also an accomplished tenor banjo player with a rapidly expanding repertoire, having heard so many tunes played by master musicians over the past ten years. It was partly frustration that drew him to the banjo.“I suppose after a number of years doing strictly back-up at the session, I began to weary of it a little ...not that I had exhausted the possibilities on the guitar, but that I wanted to be playing the melodies, because I always, I suppose, envied the others, as they’d sit around and discuss this tune or that tune, and this version or that version. It just seemed like a whole other world, and that’s why I took up the banjo.”
The brilliant musicality of Patrick and Eamon is the key element that attracts so many fine local players to Mona’s along with hundreds of the best Irish musicians in the world -- a veritable ‘who’s who’ list in Irish music. If travelling Irish musicians are in the New York area they will more likely than not end up in Mona’s. New enthusiasts for the music are drawn by the brilliance and beauty of the playing as well as the communality of the place. Emmet himself is one of those, impressed by the fact that in the weekly session “there is no showmanship and all the musicians clearly have a great love for the music.”
The personalities of Eamon and Patrick are also a major attraction. They are both extremely likeable, easy going and personable and always find time to talk with people. A night at Mona’s is always a pleasant social experience, well worth the trouble it takes to get there at such an inconvenient hour. In fact the inconvenience ends up being somewhat of an asset.
“You have to know what you’re looking for,” says Patrick, “know where you’re going, to arrive to it...I’m often surprised that musicians from out of town, who are on tour, and they might have an extra day in New York, if it’s on the night of the Mona’s session, they know about it. So the word is out there amongst musicians.”
“It’s funny all right” says Eamon.”My brother arrived into JFK, my younger brother from Dublin, a couple of days ago? And he was sitting on the subway, on the A train, coming in... there were three people speaking Spanish next to him, one of them carrying a fiddle case, and it wasn’t long into their conversation when he heard the word “Mona’s”..they had a printout from the internet that had...our names, and mentioned Mona’s.”
Everyone involved in Irish music today will know that the group session is now the engine room for Irish traditional music all over the world, a kind of home base for everyone with a passion for the music. It’s a thoroughly modern context, fashionable with old and young. Sometimes a session will happen suddenly on an impulse when musicians meet one another and decide to “have a tune.” Other sessions are organized affairs that happen regularly at the same place and at the same time. Typically the session will be held in an open space, often in a major population center, with open access to potential participants and the general public. The atmosphere is generally informal with lines between the players, enthusiasts and casual visitors often almost indistinguishable.
The very name ‘session’ (or ‘seisiun’ as it has been fancifully dubbed in the Gaelic translation) is borrowed from Jazz, though indeed jazz and Irish traditional music sessions share little in common apart from the notion of musicians making music together. In the Irish session the music making is communal, participants playing the same tunes together without excessive solo taking and displays of virtuosity or technical skills. There are other places appropriate for this kind of personal expression but not the session.
Traditional Irish music sessions are theoretically open to everyone but there are appropriate norms of behavior and good manners. Bad or beginner musicians should not ruin the event for the more experienced musicians present. Good musicians will avoid a session where novices take over the show. Yet beginners are welcomed as long as they behave appropriately. In fact, many accomplished musicians have learnt their trade sitting respectfully on the outskirts of sessions. Violations of manners are generally dealt with diplomatically and gently without direct confrontation; in many ways the norms of the session are governed by the pastoral conventions of neighborliness and good manners associated with Irish rural life in times long past.
Given its present day international ubiquity, many people are surprised to learn that the pub session is a relatively recent development in traditional Irish music. By all accounts, the idea of regular Irish music sessions in bars started just over 50 years ago and its beginnings were in the Irish diaspora rather than in the homeland. Doubtless music had been played in pubs before then but the idea of a regularly scheduled music session seems to have only emerged at that time. Some Irish music scholars maintain that the pub session began in London in the early 1950s as a regular meeting place for expatriate Irish musicians. In New York it seems to have begun a little earlier than that. The mighty flute player Jack Coen, who arrived in New York from East Galway in 1949, tells me that he would get together with musicians such as Sligo flute player Mike Flynn on Friday nights in the early 1950’s in The New Manhattan Pub which was owned by a Connemara man.
“Every instrument you could think of was hanging right behind the bar,” says Jack. “If you were a musician you were just handed one and then you were ready to play”. That session according to Jack dated back into the late 1940’s. There was also a Sunday session in the early 1950’s at Healy’s Pub in the Bronx, where Jack would play with fiddlers Paddy Reynolds and Andy McGann.. The musicians were not paid, they just turned up and played whenever they felt like it. Many of the Irish pubs in New York at that time had a small back room with a piano and musicians were always welcome to come and play if they felt like it. But more often than not, the really good players like Andy McGann, Paddy Reynolds, Vincent Harrison and Larry Redican would prefer to play in homes such as Martin Wynne’s house in the Bronx where there would be no interference in the music making. In fact the only time one would be likely to hear these great fiddlers and others such as Paddy Killoran and Paddy Sweeney in public would be once a year at the United Counties Feis in Corless Hall on Willis Avenue in the Bronx. In short, quite unlike today, Irish traditional music was then very much a sub cultural activity, practically unknown and invisible to the vast majority of Irish Americans.
The first New York bar which paid traditional Irish musicians to perform in public on a regular basis was The Bunratty Pub on Jerome Avenue in the Bronx in the mid 1970’s. The music took place on a small stage at the back of the bar and the evening’s entertainment would include a combination of songs and music usually performed through a sub standard sound system against a loud and sometimes deafening cacophony of animated chat from the bar customers. Fiddlers Andy McGann, Paddy Reynolds and the late Johnny Cronin were among the regularly featured performers. I visited it myself around that time on a few occasions and played briefly there on weekends with Paddy Reynolds. It was a rough gig but there were always high moments, especially when all the musicians in the pub gathered together late into the night for a few tunes.
Mona’s regular John Casey traces his own experience in attending Irish music sessions in New York back to The Bunratty. A native of Millstreet in County Cork he arrived in the United States in 1973 and sought out Irish music immediately. In the 1970s there were only 2 bars where one could hear traditional music regularly: Monks Park on Monday night and The Bunratty on weekends where he was a regular until it closed in the early 1980s. He followed the New York sessions everywhere for the next 20 years and got to know the scene well. He went to Kearney’s and O’Neill’s, to Paddy Reilly’s, Swift’s and the Scratcher and regularly attended the series of Irish concerts at the Eagle Tavern and later at the Blarney Star Pub. [For Mick's 2003 interview with John Casey, click here]
His favorite was The Glocca Morra owed by the Keanes, a Galway Family. Musicians such as Tom Bermingham, Joe Burke, Joanie Madden, Bernie Morris and Dermot Henry played there on Friday and Saturdays nights. “The crowd was mad for the dancing,” according to John. “But the family left and the new staff didn’t like the music. There have been hundreds of sessions that have lasted a couple of months. Most sessions are started when a musician walks in to a bar and sees that business is not good on that night. He suggests a session and that’s how it will start. But without interest and backing from the staff or the owner (it) won’t last.”
By contrast the immediate future for the Mona’s session seems secure. It continues to create money for the bar despite the expense of hiring the musicians. The crowd flags seasonally (particularly during the hot, steamy New York summers) but it always come back. The bottom line of course is that Mona’s is a business, but as Emmet says “you don’t abandon something just because there is a slack period.” And the crowds are growing rather than falling off. It also attracts scores of young enthusiasts and musicians who enjoy the calibre of playing and have the opportunity to pick up new repertoire as well.
The session at Mona’s is an anchor artistically and socially for Dana Lyn. “Monday, because of the Mona's session, is my most enjoyable night of the week-- for music and for the company of the other musicians, the locals, and the staff. There is no pretension about the music, and no pretension about the setting either...The session has a life of its own, and there's never a feeling of pressure to please the staff or to please the on-lookers; we are there for ourselves, playing for ourselves, and the beauty of the relationship between the musicians and the bar staff and clientele is that they like us, musically and otherwise, just the way we are.
I feel very relaxed and at home in this bar, possibly because I've spent so much time in it, both playing music and socializing. I miss it when I'm away. It is also musically a good fit for me, and I have yet to find a fit so comfortable, in Ireland or elsewhere. Many visitors (trad musicians from Ireland and the US) to the session have also remarked on the standard of the music, and the apparent feeling behind it. I remember a visitor once saying, with some surprise, that it seems like we play music for the same reasons and with the same amount of intent that he does, at home in Galway.
It's all about the music at this session, and people's enjoyment of it. There's very little showboating or soloistic playing that goes on, and it's about playing music together, and talking with each other about it. Because of the day of the week and the late hours, it seems to be relatively free of possible hijackers. The lateness, the relaxed pace at which the session is run, the hospitality of the barmen, the fact that we are free to stop as late as we want adds a timeless quality to the evening. I feel like the session is a genuine celebration of the music that we love.”
Indeed the hours of the Mona’s sessions have become legendary in the Irish music scene. If, at the official closing time of 4:00 AM the session is still going strong, Emmet simply closes the door and with seemingly infinite patience lets the musicians keep playing until they run out of energy. Sometimes this doesn’t happen until 7 or even 8 AM. The musicians thoroughly approve of this arrangement!
So ten years on, and by all accounts with no end in sight, Live at Mona’s represents a kind of sonic snapshot of a famous institution in the rich and varied world of traditional Irish music, the product of an extraordinary synchronicity which brought together an offbeat and thoroughly unpretentious physical environment, a sympathetic owner, a supportive barman, two individuals blessed with thoroughly engaging personalities and outstanding musicianship, and an appreciative eclectic clientele willing to accompany them on the joyful journey.
- Mick Moloney
April 4, 2004
Glucksman Ireland House, New York University