Amid the Mirk Over the Irk
When Irish meets Klezmer
Amid the Mirk Over the Irk: When Irish Meets Klezmer is an imagined musical meeting of two of Manchester’s long-established and prominent immigrant communities: the Irish and the Jewish.
Conceived in 2015 by Richard Fay (for whom Manchester has always been home), it combines traditional folk tunes, new compositions, intriguing fusions, and spoken word to evoke this imagined confluence of cultures across the banks of the river Irk.
It was first performed in March 2016 at the Manchester Jewish Museum in nearby Cheetham Hill, bringing some of the best musicians in Manchester’s thriving Irish traditional scene together with L’chaim Kapelye, a group of klezmer-playing graduates from the Music department at The University of Manchester where Ros Hawley and Richard Fay established the Michael Kahan Kapelye (klezmer ensemble) in 2012.
Those first Mirk shows – also featuring a dozen or more of the next generation of Irish traditional musicians – filled the museum for three consecutive concerts.
And so, the Mirk phenomenon was established, an evocative collective bringing together the creativity of musicians from both traditions.
The shows – co-produced by Richard Fay and Daniel Mawson with the musical and performance ranks swelled – were repeated again in January 2018 at the Museum, and in April that year at the Chorlton Irish Club.
And new Mirk (ad)ventures are on the horizon ...
Amid the Mirk Over the Irk EP
Track List
01 Amid the Mirk Over the Irk
02 Butterfly – Babele
03 An Irish Night in the Garden of Eden
04 From Flatbush to Strangeways
05 Dennis Doody’s Bulgarish
06 Amid the Mirk Over the Irk (Reprise)
Video and Audio by Sam Gee
An Irish Night in the Garden of Eden
An Irish Encounter with Klezmer by Angela Usher
‘Our ancestors rarely met, seldom mingled.
Would the yearnings for one lost world speak to those who’d lost another?’
Amid the Mirk Over the Irk’s first official video of ‘An Irish Night in the Garden of Eden’, where this classic Klezmer tune fuses with Irish musical traditions and instruments into an Irish jig.
Butterfly/Babele
A Klezmer Encounter with Irish by Daniel Mawson
Klezmer has been part of The University of Manchester Music Department's ethnomusicology activities since 2012 when the Michael Kahan Kapelye was founded (by Ros Hawley and Richard Fay). Since then, klezmer students and alumni from the department have made links with the wider community.
In Butterfly/Babele, the compositional hand of Daniel Mawson (Performance Lead for Klezmer at the University of Manchester since 2018 and himself an alumnus of the Music Department) is foregrounded in an exploration of how a traditional Irish tune might be interpreted by klezmer musicians.
Video and Audio by Sam Gee