By Brian Byrne
A SHORT tour of free concert events over these two weeks is Newbridge-based musician Martin Murphy’s manner of launching a new double CD of his personal distinctive guitar sounds … and getting his musical identify on the market after 15 years residing and dealing in Berlin.
Martin, who returned to Ireland in 2020 partly to ‘keep an eye’ on his dad and mom when Covid hit, has been giving the concert events in bookshops and cafes in Kildare, Dublin, Waterford and Kilkenny and will likely be ending up the tour this week in Limerick and Cork.
His work is all instrumental, largely enjoying a selection of guitars from classical Spanish by means of steel-string acoustics and infrequently electrical. Currently, he’s significantly within the guitar music of Brazil. While residing in Berlin, Martin performed with a quantity of acoustic teams, making his residing by means of music. “It was all sorts — folk, bossa nova, Jewish music and Irish. Now I’m trying to make a solo career.”
Back in Ireland, for him and everybody else in his enterprise, the pandemic introduced the shutters down with a bang. And although issues are opening up once more now, music as a enterprise is not at all again on full music. “A lot of people think it all started to happen again when the country opened up, but it’s not that simple. I’m spending a lot of time sending emails to people who say they only respond to email communications, and then conveniently don’t answer.”
Martin composes his personal music, and his new double album — Comet Nights’ and ‘Raduga — partly displays his present South American curiosity. “I’ve kind of fallen in love with the Brazilian music, and it fits in well with my classical guitar, which I hadn’t been doing as much of until recently.” One of the issues that makes music from Brazil fascinating, he says, is that ‘there is no real hard-line between popular and serious’. “Ask anyone on the street and they’ll tell you they love the classical composers from their country, and people in the concert halls will equally tell you they also love the music of some pop artist. They’re very much mixed, and they have genres that are in-between, which you need some training to do, but they are also very popular as parlour music and also dance-hall stuff. We have a touch of that as well in Ireland.”
Martin’s Summer Cafe Music Tour options his personal work in addition to that of Brazilian composer Villa-Lobos. He is grateful to the local companies which have given him platforms to showcase it. “There’s really nowhere to perform original music in Kildare, so it’s always a victory when we can bring new music into the heart of our community,” he wrote in a latest Facebook publish. Often actually into that ‘heart’, as many of his concert events have been held within the open air. He hopes to construct up from these to extra severe gigs over the approaching months.
This is Martin’s second summer time tour, and he’s observed that the vacationers who pay attention and sometimes then purchase his CDs are already totally different. “This time last year, especially in the west, it was all Irish people, but this year the overseas tourists are back.”
Martin’s newest and former works may be heard and acquired on mmurphy.bandcamp.com.