Cork's Greatest Records: The Dolphin’s Way by Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin

“To this day I hear traditional and non-traditional piano players refer to this as the album that revealed to them what was possible on the piano,” says Mercier, who with Colm Murphy provided the album’s percussive accompaniment to Ó Súilleabháin’s keyboard wizardry.

Recorded at Dublin’s Windmill Lane Studios during Professor Ó Súilleabháin’s tenure lecturing at University College Cork’s music department where Mercier was a mature student, The Dolphin’s Way was “where he established his ground-breaking and unique traditional piano style”.

“Listening to it today it’s as fresh and innovative as it was back then,” says Mercier. “The articulation, the invention, the sound of it is really extraordinary and it was a very influential recording.” 

With an eclectic multi-instrumental background in classical, jazz, trad, and pop, Ó Súilleabháin, born in Clonmel in 1950, studied at UCC under Seán Ó Riada and Aloys Fleischmann. Ó Riada, who himself crossed many musical boundaries, had a profound influence on the student who was to succeed him as UCC lecturer.

His dynamic spontaneity of style playing no small part in the elevation of the piano’s status from background accompanying role to centre stage as a melody instrument in traditional music, Ó Súilleabháin was a “tunes player” on instruments including whistle and flute and “understood the music and the role of ornamentation and variation”.

“He had that in him – and he was a lovely lilter - and then he had the technique and the dexterity and I think also the boldness to find a way to channel that through into his right hand on the piano,” says Mercier.

“Nobody had found a way before that in the right hand, the melody-playing hand, to convincingly bring the ornamentation and variation and rhythm of the melody which would normally be played on the fiddle or the box, and make sense of them on the piano.

“Then on the left hand he had the facility to colour the tunes, to harmonise them and play counter melodies, to create rhythmic drives, these beautiful expansive palettes of tonality in the airs.

“The combination of the two meant that he was finding a way of realising the potential of the piano to perform these tunes in a way that nobody else had done before.” 

Produced by Declan Colgan, The Dolphin’s Way, on which Ó Súilleabháin’s piano improvisation transformed Irish traditional tunes into virtuoso performances, opens with ‘Oíche Nollag’, a piece emblematic of his synthesis of styles.

With its instantly-recognisable opening, the piece, along with tracks such as The Chase, Merrily Kiss the Quaker, and The Old Grey Goose, stayed in Ó Súilleabháin’s repertoire for three decades prior to his death, aged 67, in 2018, whether accompanied solely by Mercier on bones and bodhrán or by chamber or full symphony orchestra.

The arrangements were honed during what Mercier describes as a period of “fantastic new vitality around traditional music” at UCC, where since his appointment in 1975, Ó Súilleabháin had set about developing the traditional music curriculum.

Mercier, son of Chieftains and Ceoltóirí Chualann bodhrán and bones player Peadar Mercier, had recorded on several previous occasions with Ó Súilleabháin before the man who was to become his friend and mentor inspired him to study for a degree which for the first time welcomed traditional musicians onto a course previously dominated by the classically trained.

The pair began playing regularly as piano and percussion duet and “it was that repertoire that Mícheál decided to record on The Dolphin’s Way,” says Mercier.

“We also did a lot of student ensemble work together. Mícheál would take a group of students out to Sullane Studios in Baile Mhúirne and we’d have weekends of musical experimentation and there’d always be a recording that would come out of that,” recalls Mercier, who in 1994 succeeded Ó Súilleabháin when he departed UCC to establish the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance at the University of Limerick, succeeding him again two decades later on Ó Súilleabháin’s retirement from UL.

Just as his compositions and arrangements formed crossroads between traditions, as an educationalist Ó Súilleabháin pushed for parity of esteem between all musical genres and appointed lecturers with practical as well as academic expertise.

“He had a big argument with the college because they didn’t want unqualified people working there,” says one of Ó Súilleabháin’s first appointees, fiddle player, lecturer, and composer Connie O’Connell.

“They wanted people with degrees – they did not want the ordinary musician from down the country to come in and work at UCC. I laughed at him first when he asked me to see would I do it. I think he was only experimenting at the time, seeing how it worked.

“He went back to them and he said ‘look there’s an Irish class here and you’re employing people that talk Irish from the gaeltachts and that’s their qualification – why not do the same thing with the music?”

 It was, according to fellow UCC music lecturer and former student of Ó Súilleabháin, Mary Mitchell Ingoldsby, “the beginning of a great new time in the music department”.

Ó Súilleabháin was “an inspirational and charismatic teacher and he opened a lot of students’ minds to the music”, she says, citing “his energy, his performances, his academic work, and work outside and within the college, encouraging students to form traditional music societies…the whole traditional music scene in Cork city was greatly enhanced and this was driven by Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin”.

The manager of UCC’s traditional music archive, uilleann piper Mitchell Ingoldsby says while Ó Súilleabháin’s innovation is well known, he was also “very keen to collect and preserve the music at its source” and invited the likes of Micho Russell and Ben Lennon to UCC to interview and record them, also founding an Irish music archive at Boston College as visiting professor.

“As part of the course he encouraged students to collect music as field work,” she says. “He insisted they used really good recording equipment, the same type as was used by RTÉ at the time, and because students came from every corner of the country, music was collected in those areas so we now have a very impressive archive in UCC.” 

The producer of multiple albums for fellow artists, Ó Súilleabháin recorded The Dolphin’s Way as a commission for Virgin Records. “I remember when it came out there was huge excitement about it because there was a completely new sound, especially in some of the pieces Mícheál had composed himself,” says Mitchell Ingoldsby.

“He used original and highly effective ornamentation. There hadn’t been any other piano player to use rolls as effectively as Mícheál did,” she says.

“He was very capable of putting in grace notes and many of the ornaments that pipers or flute or traditional fiddle players would use and they remind me of the rolls that some of the old harpers may have used.”

 “Never sentimental” but demonstrating a “huge sensitivity about his playing”, she says there was “great pathos to the slower pieces, a lament or sadness to them and they achieve great depth of feeling”.

That depth of feeling, for Mel Mercier, resonated up to and indeed beyond Ó Súilleabháin’s passing. “I experienced this album in a couple of ways,” says Mercier. “One, because I went into the studio with Mícheál and Colm and recorded it, but actually my deepest and most rewarding experiences of it were for years and years after that, sitting in the well of the piano with the bodhrán and the bones, playing along to Mícheál in the dance tunes.

“Mícheál’s genius as a musician is captured in this recording and I was in the privileged position of being immersed in his sound as I sat in the well of the piano and of course since Mícheál died, my own loss is the loss of that experience.

“Despite having played Oíche Nollag for 30 years we still went into it every time with the same kind of gusto and pleasure. I cherish the memory of that experience and I can in my mind’s eye still go into that well of the piano and hear and feel and be lifted up by that sound.”