There’s something special about the annual summer gathering that is Earagail Arts Festival. It is now in its 37th year, and its deliciously eclectic programme is spread across the county, and features everything from Catalan circus performers to Brazilian capoeira and Piedmont-style blues from Ballybofey.
Earagail’s welcoming reach is also luring two distinctly different musicians to the party this year. Bassekou Kouyate has revolutionised the ngoni, a traditional lute found throughout west Africa, introducing it to new audiences the world over and collaborating with everyone from Damon Albarn to Béla Fleck and the Kronos Quartet, not to mention his fellow Malians Toumane Diabaté and Ali Farka Touré. Úna Monaghan is a harpist, composer, sound engineer, academic and insatiable collaborator who has invigorated her instrument with a whole new identity thanks to her interest in electronica.
The Irish Times reaches Kouyate during a busy afternoon outside his native village of Garana, where he has been harvesting millet. In a way that’s reminiscent of interviewing the late Séamus Begley while he worked the land in west Co Kerry, Kouyate pauses several times to tell his colleagues what they need to do next.
Koutaye comes from a long line of Malian griots, west African storytellers, singers and musicians. His status as a bearer of the ngoni tradition is unparalleled, and he’s equally at home in a traditional African blues groove as he is in the high-octane, electronica-fuelled funk of some of his previous albums, where ancient tradition meets syncopated modernism, with both thriving in the heady mix.
“Music is its own universal language,” says Kouyate. “I love collaboration because I am on a mission, which is to promote my instrument, the ngoni. It’s the oldest instrument in west Africa, and it predates Jesus Christ.”
Kouyate’s band, Ngoni Ba, features a quartet of ngonis in different registers, as well as his wife, Amy Sacko, on lead vocals. His recent album Djudjon, L’Oiseau de Garaná sees him paring down his sound.
“I went back to my roots with this latest album to show the foundations of this music that has been so modernised in recent times,” says Kouyate.
“I was the one who took the ngoni to an international level, using all this distortion, delay and wah-wah pedal sound effects, to make it modern and international, so that it would reach a younger generation. But later, I thought about how these younger listeners didn’t know where the ngoni came from, where its roots were, and how the ngoni used to be played by my father, grandfather and all the generations who came before me. It’s fascinating how an emotion can be expressed through simply one sound which can be repeated. And that’s what I have done: gone back and shone a traditional light on the ngoni again.”
Kouyate has visited Ireland before; he sees this visit as a chance to revive old friendships while forging some new ones too. “I’ve never collaborated with Irish musicians, but I’d love to if anyone is ready for it,” he says. “My head is full of ideas of what we could do together.”
Úna Monaghan is a kindred spirit, as her most recent album, Aonaracht, attests: she collaborated on it with Saileog Ní Cheannabháin, Paddy Glackin, Pauline Scanlan and many others. She has been busy this year, too, touring with Stone Drawn Circles, the contemporary classical ensemble. She is enjoying the ripples created by tossing pebbles into the waters of traditional, classical and contemporary music, but Earagail Arts Festival offers a welcome return to her roots.
“It’s a beautiful opportunity to change back from the things I’ve been doing for the last few years,” she says, “because I began a lot of my experimental traditional compositional work with harp and electronics, and I performed solo almost exclusively up to 2019. It was while I was working on the Liam O’Flynn award” – a bursary in memoriam of the late piper, sponsored by the Arts Council and National Concert Hall – “that I embarked on Aonaracht, and I began to write for other ensembles and other people.
“I haven’t been focusing on my solo work for a quite a while, so it’s a lovely opportunity to go back to that. It’s going to be a mix of acoustic traditional harp music: some of the ancient harp music and also some electronics, so it will cover music from the 1700s right up to 2023. And it’ll be a great opportunity for me to explore the breadth of my solo performance.”
There has been a quiet revolution in harp music in recent years, with musicians bringing all manner of influences, celebrating the instrument’s breadth and depth.
“I think the harp community in Ireland is quite unique in the way that it talks about its music,” says Monaghan. “You rarely get a harp concert where you just play. There’s always a discussion about what’s going on, and certainly with this Earagail concert I will be engaging with the audience about what I’m doing. I won’t be playing a Carolan piece and then one of my own compositions. I’ll be drawing the parallels and the journey I’ve been on in moving from this type of music to another.
“I think that Harp Ireland have been amazing in the last few years with what they’ve done. Because the harp is not just ours. It’s got a global history. So I think it is changing, and I think partly that’s because of the activism and engagement of Harp Ireland, and with things like the Unesco recognition. It’s not just one narrative any more.”
Úna Monaghan is at Earagail Arts Festival on Thursday, July 25th. Bassekou Kouyate performs on Saturday, July 27th; he is also at Kilkenny Arts Festival on Saturday, August 10th
