By Christian Kallen
When Ryan McKasson, Eric McDonald and Jeremiah McLane take the stage at the Raven Theater on Wednesday, Nov. 20, it won’t be just three guys, but a world of music.
Kalos, the trio, play their own version of Celtic music on Wednesday night at the Raven. That includes not only the to-be-expected tunes from Ireland and Scotland, but music from elsewhere in Britain, from the north of Spain and France, from Nova Scotia and Quebec, Acadian music and Appalachian as well.
That’s not all: They are also songwriters; so much of what they do is “in the style of Celtic,” but original.
“We call it Celtic roots music, which basically means that it’s music from all over the world,” said McKasson, the fiddle player in the band—who, as it turns out, got his start playing in the Texas fiddle style. The band members themselves live in disparate parts of the continent: McKasson in Washington state, McDonald in Vermont and McLane in Montreal.
“We all come from a traditional music background,” McKasson said on the phone from Tacoma. “In traditional music, as you know, what you play is a matter of a common repertoire. It’s tunes that everyone knows.”
Another school of Celtic music might be what’s called “old time” music, a sort of northeastern roots repertoire for banjo and guitar pickers as well as fiddlers.
Gnarled Roots and Branches
Speaking with McKasson the topic kept branching off into new but related directions, while remaining almost magnetically oriented around the music: How the three of them intersected in Celtic circles, each bringing his own traditions.
“Jeremiah is a New England player,” McKasson said of his bandmate, accordionist McLane. “He was in a pretty famous New England band called Nightingale. And so he comes from a background of jigs and reels and Quebecois music. Then also he has this really interesting knowledge and expertise in French music, and that’s both the Breton, but also Parisian music.”
In his mid-40s now, McKasson straddles the generations represented by the oldest, McLane, and the youngest, McDonald.
“Eric plays a lot of Scottish music. He’s in another band called Cantre, which is a Scottish band. He also plays quite a lot of old-time music and Irish music,” McKasson said. (I struggled to keep up; my musical geography reference is getting dog-eared.)
“So he’s got kind of the American Celtic thing going on in his background. He’s also our singer,” McKasson added, following with another digression into British ballads and contemporary songs in their style.
If the idea of a traditional band of musicians writing new material is problematic, get over it. “Basically we write tune forms, and they vary a lot,” he said. “We’ve written polkas, we’ve written reels, jigs, bourrées, a lot of different types of tunes from a lot of different types of players. Between the three of us, there’s quite a lot of styles.”
Kalos in Concert
A Kalos concert is not a barn-raising with jigs and reels, however, but a more purely musical experience, following the lines of the melody through its permutations on three instruments, with perhaps a plaintive, heartfelt vocal from McDonald. The trio include originals in their performing repertoire as well as reworked tunes of longer lineage.
Oddly enough, that’s where they got the name, albeit the long way around. McLane called up later to explain the name, Kalos.
“It’s a Greek word that means beauty, and in current usage, good,” he said. “We weren’t wanting to use a name that is Celtic in origin, or specifically relating to a genre so much because we do multiple different genres. Although, as it turns out, we don’t play Greek music.”
They head back into the studio next spring to record a second album in Montreal, for which their performances in community theaters and hip towns serve as an extended rehearsal. Their next stop, appropriately, is Fiddletown, California.
Kalos will be in concert at the Raven Performing Arts Theater, 115 North St., on Nov. 20, starting at 7:30pm. Tickets from $25 general to $60 (first row) available from raventheater.org, or at this Thundertix link.
