Dervish
- Date
- Friday, November 6
- Music
- 7:00 PM
- Where
- De la Luz Soundstage, Holyoke, MA
The evening
In the pubs of Sligo, this music was never kept behind glass.
Thirty-five years on, Cathy Jordan's voice still leads it.
proposed: A ballad first. Then imagine the torrent.
The story
In the pubs of Sligo, on Ireland's rugged northwest coast, traditional music has never been something preserved behind glass. It lives around tables and in crowded rooms, passed between musicians one tune at a time.
It was in those sessions that Dervish first took shape in 1989. More than three decades later, that same deep connection to place remains at the heart of one of the most celebrated traditional Irish bands in the world.
Fronted by the extraordinary voice of Cathy Jordan, Dervish can move effortlessly from the intimacy of an old ballad to a torrent of fiddle, flute, accordion, bouzouki and bodhrán. Their musicianship is formidable, but what has made them endure is harder to measure: they understand where this music comes from.