The Gloaming is an Irish group made up of two fiddles, a piano, a guitar and a singer but it is so much more than that. Martin Hayes is a renowned and extremely talented fiddle player in Ireland and Iarla O'Lionaird is a famous Irish singer who sings in Gaelic. Caoimhin O'Raghallaigh plays the hardanger fiddle which has six strings underneath the main strings that resonate when the main four strings are played making it sounds almost like two instruments. Dennis Cahill is a talented acoustic guitar player from Chicago and Thomas Bartlett is a piano player/composer from New York who has played with bands like The National. So the gloaming is pretty much a super group of musicians adding their own style to traditional Irish music.
They played The Chan Center on campus, which is large and ornate but also strangely intimate. It was a sold out show and more of an older crowd. They started the show with only the hardanger fiddle playing a slow beautiful melody, then the piano joined in and Iarla O'Lionaird stepped up to the mic to sing. He sang a line in Gaelic over the beautiful piano and fiddle and I felt instant shivers through my whole body and my eyes welled up with tears. They were playing a song that I didn't even recognize, or understand a single word to and yet it was so beautiful I felt like my heart was about to burst in my chest. Moments when live music makes you feel like that are what I live for.
Later, O'Lionaird explained that many of their songs are actually Irish poems and he explained what the poems were about before playing each song. The topics were things like dreams, birds, freedom, home, and being in love with a place.
Caoimhin O'Raghallaigh spoke of how beautiful it was flying into Vancouver at sunset and as he was looking at the airplane wing it made him think of an Antoine de Saint-Exupery quote used to describe an airplane wing: "Perfection is not achieved when nothing more can be added, but when nothing more can be taken away". He then used this quote to transition into the next song, "Sailor's Bonnet" which is perfect in it's simplicity as well. Martin Hayes's extraordinary skill with the fiddle was displayed on this song. It started off with choppy short burst of fiddle and piano and gradually gets faster and faster and then the hardanger fiddle joins in and it turns into a boot stomping irish jig that had the entire Chan Center tapping their feet along. It was amazing and I noticed I was grinning ear to ear and felt my heart would burst again, this time from pure joy.
Sailor's Bonnet
( At 9:25 the crowd actually cheered, this was the best moment)
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