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James Keane, Dubliner. The Castagnari artisans of Recanati, Italy produce a custom-built edition for Irish players, called Keanebox. Keanebox is sold in the United States by Alex Carozza's company in NYC. James sitting on his mother’s knee, with his brother Seán and Patrick, his father. The Piper’s Club was haunt to musical legends when James was a boy. James and Seán as young lads on the window sill of 92 Errigall Road--a famous address indeed. James (left), Mick O’Connor (center) and Seán Keane (next to Mick) would go on to form the legendary Castle. Seán and James during the recording of Roll Away. James joined Ryan’s Fancy and went on to tour and appear in CBC productions. James was asked by the NCTA to form the Ellis Island Céilí Band to celebrate the centenary of Lady Liberty.   McGann    Reynolds   Coen Paul Brady made a surprise appearance at the Dublin Traditional Music Festival to join James and Kevin Conneff in concert. During the show, Paul credited James with introducing him to the rich value of the native music. The show received overwhelming yelps of adulation and rounds and rounds of applause from an audience left screaming. As Brady yelled at James during the night "we'll take no prisoners!" They killed it.

Dublin native James Keane is one of the earliest innovators to create traditional Irish styles of button accordion. His contributions are really to the overall art of European button accordion playing, and this was recognized by the committee to celebrate Dublin's designation as a Cultural Capital of Europe. His hometown flew him back from New York City where he has lived and performed for more than forty years. He appeared as one of the featured artists in Dublin's historic celebration, and demostrated how his musical has been to translate traditional Celtic musical technique onto Europe's great bellow acoustical instrument.       James is also a shanachie and folk-historian known for his extensive memory and the spell-binding preludes he speaks before playing his spiritually possessed music. Keane's artistry is his constant conjuring back to life of those great Irish tradition-bearers. He has lectured and taught many classes on the source music at colleges, retreats and on tours of Ireland.        It is as an instrumentalist, and nuclear-powered performer, that James is best know, however. The heartlands of accordion culture--Italy and Germany--are where the finest accordions have traditionally been crafted according to guild standards as rigorous as any of the great artisan codes. Two companies have approached Keane in the course of his career to fashion instruments that suit his style of playing. Firstly, Weiltmeister, the great Germany company commissioned Keane to help reconfigure their model to create an Irish version that was produced in a limited run with Keane's signature. Another signature instrument, called Keanebox, was produced by the Italian Castagnari company, and is available for purchase in the United States from Alex Musical Instruments, also honoring Keane's accomplishments among the greatest of accordion afficionados. Keanebox. As an instrumentalist, Keane brings the subtlety of fiddle and pipes to the button keys. As a bearer of the Irish tradition, Keane ranks among the masters across instruments. He and other core tradition-bearers are among those great few from the leanest years, who bore the music through its most difficult periods of twentieth century assault in Ireland and America at a standard of musicianship that has made Irish music so enormously rich.        It was from his new home in New York that James flourished as a touring professional musician. On one of the great city stages, or representing Irish passion at a jazz club or simply at a kitchen session in someone's home, the Irish button accordion has had and continues to have one of its most respected ambassadors in James Keane. Bertie Ahern the Irish Taoiseach having attended as he did the sold-out homecoming concert Keane gave at Liberty Hall, took Keane aside after a speech and informally made him an "ambassador."        Keane has had many full-circles. He has lived between Ireland and New York for forty years and has always remained an exile on a mission to represent his native culture well.        Taking up the instrument that he did at the age of six was a rebellious choice from a spirited and hilarious kid. In the house where James grew up in Drimnagh, fiddles were normal. James’ mother, Molly, was from Longford’s deeply musical Hanly family, and like most of her siblings, she was a gifted musician. James Hanly, her brother, was a revered source of knowledge and repertoire, and is cited in Breathnach’s famous collections. Her other brother, firefighter Peter Hanly, was a piper and member of the Leo Rowesome Quartet. James’ father, Patrick Keane from Clare was also a respected fiddle player, coming from a family and region that the young Keane brothers James and Seán--fiddler--would often visit to soak up tunes and nuance during childhood summer trips to the parent counties. 92 Errigall Road in Drimnagh was the family home, but also known across Ireland as the place for musicians visiting Dublin to stay and eat. This heritage and access explains how the Keane brothers became such tradition-bearers in a city that had become when they were growing up, hostile to native culture.        But James was a rebel as much as a traditionalist. He deviated from the fiddle path, and took up the button box, when only Sonny Brogan, Joe Cooley, Paddy O'Brien and a few others could be looked to for inspiration on rendering the nuance of traditional music on this peculiar and relatively new instrument. On Keane's seminal solo album, That's The Spirit, he performs the Last Bus to Drimnagh, a jig taught to him in the dash at the end of a late session at the Piper's Club, with one last tune taught by Bill Hart for James to lilt on his way home to bed for school the next morning. It was James who would bring together the community to donate a building, carpentry, painting and promotion, to open a branch of Comhaltas in Dublin named for Sonny Brogan, whom the boy James regarded as a hero, and friend. Keane has made it his life's mission to ensure the esteem held for these great keepers of the flame be as essential to the tradition as the tunes themselves.        By the age of ten, James and Seán--two years older--had become fixtures on the late 1950's Dublin traditional scene where Séamus Ennis, Leo Rowsome, Sonny Brogan and Tommy Reck would create a now legendary cultural movement that would go on to save the Irish musical tradition and propel it alive, authentic and in continuum into the future through a sensitive younger generation's interpretation. The Keane brothers were a Dublin phenomenon, like the Rowsomes or the Potts or the Kellys, that manifest the tradition in the capital city from the deepest and most Irish parts of Ireland. They did so to taunts of scorn from classmates at the very tough Christian Brothers all-boys school where fights took place by the old Castle walls, and heads were often knocked against the sword handles sticking out from the stone. Fiddle and accordion were neon targets for culchie slurs, and the slagging would have stopped anyone from pursuing the music, but not the Keanes. And it was this reputation that they held in the clubs populated by the legends of Irish music in that early Dublin music scene.        While still in his early teens, James co-founded what would become, in a few short years, one of Ireland's most heralded music ensembles--The Castle. The legendary Céilí Band was formed in 1960 with Seán and their school mate Mick O'Connor--the great flute player who would go on to found the O'Connor musical dynasty, including his son, Liam, Ireland's finest fiddler of the next generation. The Dublin creation would tour Ireland in the early 1960s with an ensemble that included the Dublin teens and old masters like Joe Ryan and John Kelly, father of James Kelly. The Band was a phenomenon that gave the cream of the tradition the céilí band format to fill dance halls with ancient melodies, reels and jigs, instead of the imitation pop pumped out by the show bands. The Castle would go on as Fintan Vallely has written to become "the melting pot from which the Chieftains would emerge."        The Folk Revival was just coming to Ireland at the time, and the Dublin teens were asked to open the concert series at the Grafton Cinema featuring the McPeake Family, Pete Seeger and Ewan MacColl. Keane made his first recording around that time, on Live at the Embankment--an anthology--with a track featuring an as yet unknown Donal Lunny. He continued recording in New York, where he made some of Irish traditional music's time-honored records in the course of his long career. The Irish Accordion of James Keane (Rex Records) was one of the earliest experiments to marry very traditional music to new forms of accompaniment. Sweet and Traditional Music Of Ireland was released as a compilation by Rego Records, featuring tracks by Longford fiddle player Paddy Reynolds and Charlie Mulvihill, it ranks among the classic New York recordings of Irish music.        The movement James Keane had helped propel in Dublin, was a root of the Folk Revival that he would join up to later in New York as a professional musician from the late Sixties to the present, and through many changing moods in the mainstream to his kind of music. Keane has had to navigate Irish stereotypes in New York with a determined stance to represent the culture standing tall. Jack Coen a man of similar mission called the music the gospel in a documentary Keane made about the New York Irish music scene called "Guardians of the Spirit." And for James the music is his alternative to the brutal style of Catholicism he was taught by the Christian Brothers. Keane released his seminal solo album with John Doyle on guitar, called That's the Spirit to capture his sense of transcendent melodic spirituality. Keane landed in New York in 1967 on a three week tour with accordionist Joe Burke, flute player Paddy Carty and the Loughrea Céilí band, and emigrated permanently a year later, meeting and marrying his wife Theresa O'Shea from Kerry shortly afterwards. They have lived in New York for forty years, and raised two sons. In the 1970s James played across Manhattan clubs with a regular gig at the now legendary John Barleycorn, often with balladeer Jesse Owens. Within a few years he was appearing on the big stages at Madison Square Garden (in the Felt Forum) and Carnegie Hall for example. One such appearance prompted New York Times critic John S Wilson to write "best of all was James Keane, the accordionist, who swung through reels with such exciting drive that he virtually lifted the audience out of their seats."        As Keane's success in New York grew, his reputation led him on tours across the United States and Canada, where he would meet the members of Ryan's Fancy, a renowned ballad group. By 1980, Keane joined Ryan's Fancy, emigrated to Nova Scotia, and was soon appearing on CBC television as a melodic instrumentalist, actor and performer with the group. Keane would go on to release three albums with Ryan's Fancy, television shows and movies, and he joined them on long tours for many years, before returning to New York and taking up his solo career again. Mick Moloney then produced Keane's second solo album, Roll Away The Reel World, which reunited James with his brother Seán--chief fiddle player with the Chieftains, since 1969. This album, named for a line from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, is itself counted among the masterpieces of the Irish tradition.        Keane worked in the 1980s as a soloist and also toured with artists like Mick Moloney, the Green Fields of America and Séamus Connolly. In 1981, he was chosen by the National Council for the Traditional Arts to found a musical group to perform at the spectacular centenary celebration of the Statue of Liberty. Keane is known for his reverence for the old masters that make the tradition a living and ancient one, and so he gathered the great old musicians that were scattered about New York to form the Ellis Island Céilí Band. The group included Jack Cohen, Paddy Reynolds, Andy McGann, Mike Preston and Mattie Connolly to name a few, and they appeared to- gether on NBC's Today Show.        It was the recognition in 1991 by his native city's cultural committee that began the reawakening in Ireland of appreciation for one of the great artists that had to leave Ireland to make a living. It was at the Dublin Traditional Music Festival that he was joined by Kevin Conneff of the Chieftains and Paul Brady for what is remembered as an historic public performance after a twenty plus year hiatus from the Dublin music scene. Keane recorded an album with Paul Brady while there, and it remains to be released. It was then that the largest circulating Irish American newspaper in New York named Keane Traditionalist of the Year. Not long after his return to New York, he began a series of appearances on New York Public Television as weekly host and performed on Irish Eyes and Erin Focus respectively.        Then, in late 1993 and through 1994, Keane returned to the studio (with producer Gabriel Donohue) to begin work on his third solo album--That's The Spirit. That album was met with overwhelming critical success and led to many projects afterwards, including a second album with John Doyle called Toss the Feathers & a unique collaboration with author Sharon O'Connor on a project entitled The Irish Isle, a book of "New Irish CuisineSéamus Egan (on flute) Winifred Horan (on fiddle) and Sue Richards (on harp).        Keane is a highly regarded recording artist, and would follow these projects with more, including contributions to albums for the Kells Music Label, and a tour de force eight-minute-long track for the album Séamus Connolly produced from "The Boston College Gaelic Roots Festival." He was asked then to participate on Atlantic Wave, a remastered CD-release of the 1971 anthology Sweet and Traditional Music of Ireland. Another highlight from that period was at Virginia's Wolftrap Performing Arts Center with an old friend from Dublin, and piping legend Paddy Keenan.        With the flurry of professional activity that followed Keane's rediscovery in Ireland in the 90s, he has been able to expand his touring schedule to include more trips across North America and Europe. Aonach Paddy O'Brien, an annual music festival, has honored Keane as keynote speaker. The experience opened a floodgate of memories, and Keane has repeated his storytelling on many stages since, but in classrooms more recently. Keane has lectured or told stories in university settings about the early Dublin music scene, and about his experiences with so many of the tradition's masters in Ireland and abroad. On a return trip to Ireland in the late 90s, Keane found himself again in a recording studio, this time in County Meath, surrounded by some of these great masters--and friends--again. Bothy Band fiddlers Paddy Glackin and Tommy Peoples joined him. Planxty founding member, Liam O'Flynn, recorded with him. Chieftains vocalist Kevin Conneff was there, as was Ireland's finest flute player--Matt Molloy. Keane's superb album, produced by Skylark's Garry Ó Briain on the Shanachie label, is called "With Friends Like These." It is a testimony to the esteem and kinship the greatest players of the Irish tradition hold for one of their own: James Keane. In recent years, Keane has been touring regularly. A memorable trip home to Dublin led to a massive concert to be organized and staged at the Liberty Hall Concert, which was sold out and attended by a veritable who's-who in Irish music and society, including the Irish head of state. The concert was organized by Des Geraghty, a friend from the earliest days, and a great supporter of the music, and of those who deserve to be held in esteem as its masters. Since then, Keane has been a founding-member of Fingal, the wonderful group founded by Randall Bays and Dáithí Sproule.