Review: Solas, and Matt and Shannon Heaton at Music Haven, Sunday, July 27, 2025

“It’s the melodies,” said Paddy Maloney of the Chieftains when I asked him once why Irish music is so compelling. 

He’d know, right?

Solas surely does. The polished Irish- and American-born quintet made melodies at Music Haven Sunday – at jazz-band speed or in mournful melancholy, emotionally charging songs of longing and belonging, of battered underdog spirit and hard-won triumph. In other words, you know, virtuoso-class Irish music.

Solas, from left: John Williams, accordion; Winifred Horan, fiddle; Seamus Egan and Nuala Kennedy, both playing flute here; and Alan Murray, guitar

They celebrated their 30-year history, which includes a decades-ago show in Music Haven impresario Mona Golub’s former Washington Park series. She was as delighted to bring them back in their second prime after a nearly decade-long hiatus as at the weather improving to allow the show to happen outdoors in the park under a cloudless sky.

Solas’s look-back shaped the elegiac mood of some slower vintage tunes but didn’t bog down the lively ones. And they built up to a moral crescendo of working-folk anthemic calls to arms; also without going over-preachy. They launched this message-powered late run by recalling when “No Irish Need Apply” barriers blocked Irish immigrant ambitions, mostly. Except, as a linked song cycle noted, in Butte, Montana where Irish miners invited kin out west by advising, “Don’t even bother stopping in America!”

Powered by angry-sympathetic tunes of Peggy Seeger and Woody Guthrie – “Songs of Choice” and “Pastures of Plenty,” respectively (and respectfully) – this advocacy section sounded more American then the rest of the show. Egan reminded us we’re all immigrants, an essential national truth nativists now deny and fight in a losing battle. He also made with the blarney to charming effect, noting the lucky salt-and-pepper shaker bandmate Nuala Kennedy brought from home in County Clare just last Thursday to set comfortingly at her feet.

Seamus Egan

Nuala Kennedy

Before this, airs, reels and jigs – some decades or centuries old – revved dance-tune energy or sank elegantly into despond. After the instrumentals “Wiggly” (it’s so marked on the set list, see below, but is likely “Nil ‘Na La”) from their first (1997) album, a zippy set that launched from “The Newly Highwayman,” then “Yellow Tinker,” clear-voiced alto Nuala Kennedy sang the poignant “Aliliu” in Gaelic, proving again that slow Irish songs mourn loss as sweetly/sadly as the blues.  

Center stage was leader Seamus Egan, playing guitar, banjo, flute or whistles, flanked by fiddler Winifred Horan and accordionist John Williams to his right and singer, flute and whistle player Nuala Kennedy and guitarist Alan Murray to his left. Apart from the propulsive melodic energy of the tunes and songs themselves, Egan and Kennedy kept things fresh by changing instruments, sometimes within a song, and by pairing into duos whose chemistry pumped the energy.

John Williams

Winifred Horan

The instrumentals wielded thrilling musical power, mostly melodic; though “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” accelerated from an energetic beat to an exciting stop-and-go cadence. 

Lyrics in later songs took on persuasive moral power Kennedy wielded effortlessly. “Barley” (also title of a film of insurrection) commemorated the 1798 Wexford rebellion and a string of songs on Irish miners in Montana including “Tell God and the Devil” and “Am I Born to Die?” linked to the labor movement.

If “Sunday’s Waltz” offered respite from message music, the late pairing of Peggy Seeger’s “Song of Choice” and Woody Guthrie’s “Pastures of Plenty” returned to it with a vengeance. Strong, spunky instrumentals brought back the antique dance-party mood of the earlier reels, jigs and airs.

Egan was the musical and creative center, though Horan’s fiddle or Williams’s accordion sparked many instrumental breaks. Kennedy’s voice delivered the lyrics with plainspoken authority and her flute and whistles linked tight with Egan’s. Guitarist Alan Murray strummed in stalwart support, never soloing but singing in the same background mode as his playing. He maybe worked hardest of all: When he took off his guitar at the end, a guitar-shaped sweat shadow marked his chest.

Alan Murray

A bit of translation here: “solas” means “light” in Gaelic, and they shone a very bright one Sunday.

Matt (right) and Shannon Heaton

Bostonian life-and-music partners Matt and Shannon Heaton enjoyed what Shannon called their appetizer role as openers, so the audience did, too. Matt played guitar and bouzouki and sang while Shannon sang and played flute and whistles in both traditional and original songs rich in Irish melodies and folkie charm. Shannon said music without words are tunes and music with words are songs. Impressive in both, they, too, played with skill and fire. “Golden Castle Hornpipe” built to a happy whirl, for example; and they sang message material lamenting colonization and tyranny, looking back at events and feelings of timeless power, as in “The Gallant Hussar.” 

The only dancers Sunday were four wonderfully wild children who ran, skipped and grinned around the seats and a young Black man in a Weezy T-shirt who step-danced his way into the audience’s affections. Charmed by his high-gusto moves and high-altitude feet, they applauded when he finished, so he danced an encore to hearty claps – an only-at-Music-Haven moment. That older guy who wears a kilt to any even remotely Celtic music was there; as was WAMC’s Peter Hughes, recording the show for a future On the Road broadcast.

Solas Set List