This album from flautist and one time Grada frontman Alan Doherty may be titled ‘From Tallaght To Halle’ but the musical influences explored on this album very much suggest that the man’s latest musical project ALDOC took the scenic route on its journey.
Recruiting musicians from across Europe and Oceania the album uses its globe-spanning lineup as the starting point from which it begins exploring sounds as far afield as New York, the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa, with Doherty’s Irish flute dropping in time and again to remind us of home.
In many ways ‘From Tallaght To Halle’ is an inevitable album. Using hip-hop vinyl scratching and ‘My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts’-style voice sampling on Feeling Much Better to almost ‘Graceland’-like backbeats on Soona Lucky Da Doherty has assembled a summary of the past thirty-five years of World music. But this isn’t a mere rearrangement of all we’ve heard before. While Doherty places himself in certain locations around the world with each song, his own presence and those of his bandmates are always there to add their own individual flavour to the tracks.
A prime example is the above-mentioned Soona Lucky Da which features a shimmering African rhythm but over this Doherty plays his traditional Irish flute, and it’s surprising how well these sounds meld together. The hip-hop influence on Feeling Much Better alters Doherty’s sound so that he ends up playing jazz flute, while soul-funk trumpets hum and echo until you can almost see the high-rises they’re bouncing off. Whereas on the reggaeton Feed Me Seymour he jams with slow pulsing guitar beat in the only way he can, on the melodies rising from somewhere between Istanbul and Calcutta on Elephant Movement he simply fights to keep up.
But these few breaks from the trad flute work simply to show that Doherty isn’t afraid to give himself over to the music, no matter how exotic it may be. For the most part his Irish identity dominates the flute playing. The sense of a journey on the album dominates its progression, and once these disparate influences start to fade into one another the real fun starts. If You Never Knew My Name feels like the closing leg of the journey, while In Halle marks the exhausted celebration of arrival. From this point the album continues into the beautifully energetic Takaka Rain, as if the arrival marks the beginning of a great reunion of old friends finally getting to play together, trying their best to impress one another.
If ‘From Tallaght To Halle’ has any negatives it’s that the songs generally tend to be quite sprawling and repetitive, and as a largely instrumental album it can seem a bit directionless at times. You could argue that any great macro-journey will inevitably be directionless in the micro, but then there’s a point at which music must stop being concept and become music again, with all the surprises and thematic changes music needs to remain interesting. Nonetheless ALDOC’s coming has been long prophesied, and this successful mixing of cultures makes the world look like a small and cosy community indeed.