Thursday, March 12, 2015

The Week, 3

A little over a year ago, Irish Fest Park Stage manager Kelly Dougherty and myself attended TradFest in Dublin to scout bands to bring back home to you. You saw some fruits of that "labor" last year in the performances of Socks In The Frying Pan, Moxie and FullSet.

There was another band we saw a lot of that week, both on and off the stage, that we just loved. They were unlike anything we'd seen or heard and were taking Irish music and setting it on its head. We wanted to book them. We tried to make it work. But the financial challenges of bringing a 10 piece band over from Ireland proved too difficult to conquer. We were sad. Kansas City would never know the joy we'd known in Temple Bar we'd thought.

Enter Cultural Ireland. This wonderful organization exists to promote Irish arts worldwide and through a very generous grant from them, that band we discovered 13 months ago in a Dublin pub will be taking our stages in Kansas City in just 176 days. Ladies and Gents, meet...

Baile an Salsa.

Ten musicians from eight different countries who found each other in Galway in the beautiful west of Ireland to make musical magic. Vocals in Irish, English and Spanish. Baile means home in Irish and dance in Spanish and they could not have chosen a better name. If this music doesn't get you dancing, you should probably go home. I could try to describe the energy, the fun, the spirit, the boundary-crashing inventiveness of a Baile an Salsa performance, but I'd fail. Maybe some video samples will do the job.

Appearing all three nights of Irish Fest, 2015, We're so excited: Baile an Salsa!


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