Girsa
www.GirsaMusic.com
Girsa is an exciting eight member all-female band known for their lively mix of traditional Irish tunes, dance, and inventive vocal harmonies. Raised in the musical enclave of Pearl River, New York, the girls have played together since childhood and all have represented the US at the Fleadh Cheoil na Eireann. Steeped in the rich tradition of Irish music and dance, the ladies combine tight instrumental execution and innovative twists on the time-honored tunes and songs.
The band will be debuting at several Irish festivals this summer, including Milwaukee and Dublin, Ohio. They have earned a loyal, enthusiastic following playing gigs at colleges, festivals, concerts, pubs, and parties. Their debut CD has earned terrific reviews and is a favorite on Irish and folk radio playlists across the US and Ireland. In a Wall Street Journal review titled Whats Irish for Girl Power, the bands precocity and passion are praised by writer Earle Hitchner, who admires their compelling renditions of traditional Irish ballads nestled comfortably with crisply delivered contemporary songs.
Girsa fiddler Maeve Flanagan is the daughter of fiddle teacher Rose Conway Flanagan. Rose also taught Deridre Brennan, Kristen McShane, and Margaret Dudasik. Maeves sister, Bernadette, plays bodhrán, piano, and joins Margaret in lively step dancing. Blaithin Loughran is a button accordion player and the daughter of flute and whistle teacher Margie Mulvihill. Pamela Geraghty is a button accordion and guitar player who joins Deirdre and Margaret on vocals, along with her cousin Emily McShane. Emily is also a piano, guitar, and bodhrán player. Whistles are played by Maeve and Margaret, and Deirdre adds mandolin and auto harp to complete the vibrant Girsa sound.
Tony Demarco
www.TonyDemarcoMusic.net
Tony DeMarco: Irish fiddler. If that sounds slightly off, you have only to listen to the music on this recording to be cured of any preconceptions about the importance of ethnic purity in traditional music. There may have been a time when Irish music in New York City was played exclusively by Irish immigrants and their offspring, while their Italian neighbors strummed mandolins and sang opera. But the Big Apple really is a melting pot, at least for some of its disparate immigrant elements. Before World War II it really wasnt very common for Italian and Irish Americans to marry each other. By the 1950s, however, this kind of ethnic mixing was fairly normal in Tonys native Brooklyn, where the Italians and Irish lived side by side and attended the same parish churches.
Tony was born on May 20, 1955, the second of three children raised in East Flatbush by Paul DeMarco and his wife, the former Patricia Dempsey. Paul, a grandson of Italian immigrants, was a teenage lightweight boxing star who turned down an offer to turn pro and work with lightweight champ Paddy Billygoat DeMarco in order to pursue a more conventional career on Wall Street. Tonys maternal grandfather Jimmy Dempsey was a New York City cop and a son of Irish immigrants who married Philomena Minnie Fenimore, one of several Italian-American siblings who married into Brooklyn Irish families.
Musical ability runs on both sides of Tonys family. During the Prohibition years, Minnie Dempseys Italian immigrant father ran a speakeasy in East New York, where he played the piano and mandolin. Tonys paternal uncle Louie DeMarco was a singer who performed with 1950s doo-wop groups, including Dickie Dell and the Ding Dongs. Tonys cousin John Pattitucci, from the Fenimore side of the family, is a leading professional bass player who has recorded with jazz stars Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, and Wayne Shorter. But Tony definitely found his way to Irish traditional music via a different path than the one trod by musicians raised in Irish immigrant households.
More typical young Irish traditional musicians in New York in the 1970s had at least one parent born in Ireland. They may well have attended step dancing classes with one of the many dance schools in the region, and most likely went to group music classes conducted in the Bronx, Brooklyn, New Jersey, or Long Island by Pete Kelly, Martin Mulvihill, and Maureen Glynn. They would have joined a branch of the international Irish traditional music organization Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann and competed each year at the regional fleadh cheoil at Manhattan College in the Bronx. If they placed high enough, they would go on to the big show, Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireannthe All-Ireland Fleadhfrom which not a few returned home with the coveted title of All-Ireland champion on the fiddle, button accordion, tin whistle, or other instrument.
Tony had a different background altogether. As he puts it: I never grew up with the competitive Comhaltas sceneI came through the hippie scene, the folkie scene. He tells the story of how he took up the fiddle and discovered Irish music in his own contribution to these notes, but it is worth repeating here that his first exposure to Irish traditional music was through a Folkways recording of the County Sligo fiddler Michael Gorman. Tony had many other musical influences before this, and would have many more afterward, but for him the appeal of the Sligo fiddle style would never fade.
![_im77998[1]_girsa](http://static.wix.com/media/ec780d84fcab8db406fc0968f093a892.wix_mp_128)
