"SOME GOOD CRAIC " -Gerry Diver Speech Project

Wednesday Night 2/27/13 - 8 pm EST Some Good Craic welcomes Gerry Diver to the show .

WHAT IS SPEECH PROJECT?

Speech Project is an album of new compositions by Gerry Diver featuring exclusive spoken word contributions from Shane MacGowan, Damien Dempsey, Christy Moore, Martin Hayes and Danny Meehan. Archive interviews from Joe Cooley also feature in the compositions.

WHY THE TERM ‘SPEECH PROJECT’?

The music is derived from the melody and rhythm of the spoken words. Naturally, all spoken words has pitch and rhythm inherent within them. Whilst the music borrows from Irish traditional idioms the album is by no means traditional.Using Irish trad ‘snippets,’ Amercian 20th century forms glued together with some of the best known voices in Ireland the music was graciously described by one of the interviewees as ‘a kind of folk minimalism on the cutting edge of folk crossover’

Whilst listening to a recorded interview of the late great accordion player Joe Cooley, Gerry noticed that the voice sounded like it was in the key of B flat minor and there also seemed to be a slip jig rhythm to Joe’s voice. Gerry put the interview into his apple mac and teased out the faint ‘pitch’ tones and rhythms in Joe’s voice …these musical hues formed the basis for two new pieces’ When in New York’ and ‘Old Time Musicians.’

 Christy Moore immediately agreed to collaborate on the project inviting Gerry over to Dublin where Gerry spent some time interviewing Christy at his home, with the agreement that whatever was captured would be turned into a musical composition. Subsequent get togethers and interviews with Shane MacGowan, Damien Dempsey, Martin Hayes and Danny Meehan have given birth to more tracks.