Intro

The idea behind this series of programmes grew out of many animated conversations that I had with Philip King and Nuala O'Connor. We talked about music and the people who make it. We wondered and argued about what motivates people of all ages all over the world to get immersed in Irish traditional music. We asked questions about the culture and the values that support it. We were also aware that alongside the well established generation of traditional musicians, there are many brilliant younger performers who are about to appear on the scene and we wanted to find out more about them and what ties them to this music.

One of the things we aimed to do with the Raw Bar series was to show the diversity, continuity and quality that is to be found everywhere in Irish traditional music. We also wanted to take a look at the relationships that people form with their instruments, with the music itself, with the memories of dead musicians, with the urge to make new tunes. We also looked at how families have played a vitally important role in keeping traditional music alive and relevant. We met instrumentalists, singers, dancers and composers. We heard tunes and songs that are hundreds of years old alongside newly composed pieces. We saw a young sean nós dancer in Connemara performing steps that he had invented and mixed with steps that he had picked, magpie-like, from older dancers just because he liked them! Above all we encountered wonderfully varied accents both in the artists' speech and in their performances.

The Raw Bar is a phrase that identifies the authentic spirit of Irish traditional music, song and dance. For me the phrase also captures ideas of freshness, purity, nature and energy. These are some of the things you'll experience when you see and hear the performances on The Raw Bar Remix, a selection of the best of many excellent performances we recorded for the first two series of The Raw Bar for RTÉ One television. In the first two series, you heard excerpts - here we give you the full performances.

Our search for The Raw Bar took us all over Ireland, into England and across the Atlantic to some of the great cities of the US including New York, Chicago and Boston. We met and filmed many well known performers who are bringing this music and song to concert halls and stages throughout the world - Matt Molloy, Dónal Lunny, Paddy Keenan, Andy Irvine, Martin Hayes, Mairéad ní Mhaonaigh and Dermot Byrne. We also encountered many more fine performers who are starting to make a wider impact on the traditional music scene here in Ireland and further afield - Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, Harry Bradley, John Carty, Liam O'Connor, and Seán McKeon. In the US we were captivated by the music of the legendary Joe Derrane, Liz Carroll and Seamus Egan and we met many excellent young players on the way up the ladder such as Cleek Shrey and Sean McCumiskey.

It's not easy to single out individual performances over others but one of the really satisfying experiences for me was getting to meet and hear some virtuosi of one of my favourite instruments - the harmonica - and I think you'll be blown away when you hear the quality of the different performances we got from Brendan Power and Mick Kinsella.

One of the questions I was most interested in was what the future might hold for Irish traditional music in these fast moving times. The answer I got was usually very positive and expertly summed up by Donegal's Packie Manus Byrne who described the weather forecast for our music as 'sunny'!

One of the questions we asked the participating artists was to tell us what the phrase The Raw Bar meant to them. The answers ranged from 'a place where you eat oysters and seafood' to 'the real deal' and everything in between! The background to the title itself comes from an account by the late Seán O'Boyle of his meeting with a traditional singer. Sean wanted the man to perform a song and the singer asked if Sean wanted the accompanied version or just 'the raw bar'. We felt that the phrase captured what we were looking for - not just authentic music but the awareness of its authenticity and value. I hope you'll agree with me that we found it in spades. I also hope that you'll join us for The Raw Bar Remix from Friday 27th July at 7.30pm on RTÉ One.