Music » Celtic Music

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It took Paddy Maloney 15 years and eight LPs to assemble the incarnation of the Chieftains that plays on Boil the Breakfast Early, the band's ninth release. When former Planxty and Bothy Band flautist Matt Malloy joined up, the Chieftains were finally able to perform with a stable roster. Ironically, this would be one of their last recordings of purely traditional material before they set off on the series of collaborations that was the hallmark of the band's recorded output in the 1980s and 1990s. But the collection of tunes here crackles with the sort of excitement that only the finest musicians can generate. The dance tunes are played with such verve and vivacity that even the most slothful listeners will start tapping their toes, while the slow airs fairly ache with a majestic melancholy. Boil the Breakfast Early shows the Chieftains at their unadulterated, traditional best. --Michael Simmons

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The Chieftains' fourth album, one of their all-time best, marked a turning point in the band's career. The addition of harper Derek Bell, who appears here as a guest artist but later joined the band as a full-time member, fulfilled Paddy Moloney's original notion of what the Chieftains should sound like. Bell's harp moved the band away from folk to an almost classical sound on occasion, but it also linked them to an instrumental tradition that stretched back more than a thousand years. The Chieftains still play the dance tunes with verve, but on tracks such as "Morgan Magan," "Carrickfergus," which the band later recorded with Van Morrison on Irish Heartbeat, and "The Tip of the Whistle," the band finds a more lyrical mode than on their previous recordings. This 1973 recording also introduced the band to the movie world when filmmaker Stanley Kubrick became entranced by the haunting air "Mna Na Heireann" and used it on the soundtrack for Barry Lyndon. (The Chieftains 4 is also available as part of the box set From the Beginning: The Chieftains 1 to 4.) --Michael Simmons

On the Chieftains' third record, originally released in 1971, the group's founder Paddy Moloney was still experimenting with various ways of arranging Irish music for a band. Traditionally, a solo musician performed jigs, reels, and airs such as these, so Moloney was exploring unknown territory with his arrangements of ancient tunes. On many of the tracks the melody is still played on a single instrument with minimal or no accompaniment, much as it was performed for centuries. But on tracks such as "Carolan's Concerto" and "The Trip to Sligo" you can hear Maloney and his band mates discover new harmonic and rhythmic possibilities in the old music. They managed to be innovative while still respecting the past. This is the sound of Ireland's finest musicians giving birth to a new tradition. (The Chieftains 3 is also available as part of the box set From the Beginning: The Chieftains 1 to 4.) --Michael Simmons

If there's a single early Chieftains album to get, this is it. It ranks among the best of their recordings from the 1960s when the group formed. Though containing fairly run-of-the-mill Irish material, it's far more spirited and inventive than Chieftains 1, thus illustrating the solid foundation of talent that has supported the Chieftains' music since the ensemble's inception. Like the group's first recording, this one is also available as part of the box set From the Beginning: The Chieftains 1 to 4, but this particular reissue has been remastered, with spectacularly crisp results. --Genevieve Williams

Release Date: 2002-02-19, Audio CD, Sony

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In the world of traditional Irish music, the Chieftains have done more than any other group to widen the genre's popularity. This, their debut, released a mere two years after their 1963 inception, reflects only a taste of what was to come. It's straightahead folk music; the selections consist of stalwartly traditional reels, jigs, and airs, all of which illuminate the debt that American folk traditions owed to old-school Irish and Celtic folk forms. Fairly restrained in its energy, these songs float by without the confidence of the Chieftains' later work, revealing the music's position in the tentative vanguard of the Celtic folk revivals of the later 1960s. Along with the group's three subsequent releases, this debut is also available as part of the slim but stellar From the Beginning box set. --Genevieve Williams