National world music act

The Chieftains

World beaters

The Best Music Poll may be just 11 years old, but this seems like at least the 30th time that the Chieftains have won the World category (okay, four years out of 11, including the last three). The wonder boys of Irish music have been around for some 37 years and 30 CDs; they started out on a traditional path, taking the high road (fiddles, flutes and whistles, uilleann pipes, harp, bodhrán, tiompáin -- no guitar, accordion, or piano), but over the years they've played with everyone from Mick Jagger and Sting to Chet Atkins and Emmylou Harris to Chinese orchestras, collecting multiple Grammys along the way.

This past year's CD, Tears of Stone (RCA Victor), is the all-male sextet's overdue toast to the ladies, as they back up vocalists Bonnie Raitt, Natalie Merchant, Joni Mitchell, the Rankin Family, the Corrs, Sinéad O'Connor, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Loreena McKennitt, and Joan Osborne and jam with fiddle players Eileen Ivers, Natalie MacMaster, and Máire Breatnach. The idea was, Paddy Moloney explains in his liner note, "to marry the many-faceted voices of contemporary women artists from around the world to the simple beauty of traditional Irish music." Certainly there are few artists around today who can make simple beauty look as easy as the Chieftains do.

-- Jeffrey Gantz

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The BMG/RCA Victor Tears of Stone page

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