Jessie Lloyd & Steve Cooney
Thursday 17th November - doors 7.30pm - An Taibhdhearc
Jessie Lloyd, all the way from Australia will collaborate and share her aborigine roots through her Mission Songs Project with another musician who credits the same indigenous culture for his upbringing, the legendary adopted Irish guitarist Steve Cooney in what is sure to be a unique and emotive concert.
Jessie Lloyd
Jessie Lloyd’s profoundly moving Mission Songs Project reveals the daily life of Aboriginal people on the missions, settlements and native reserves during the colonisation of Australia. A musical time travel of original compositions from the residents over the generations.
Starting in 2015, Mission Songs Project explores the human reality of the ‘missions era’ where Aboriginal people were forcibly removed from their homelands and moved onto missions. In a time of great distress, these truthful songs are surprisingly filled with optimism and hope, revealing a forgotten story on an unexplored corner of Australian history.
Mission Songs Project faithfully navigates the musical journey of Aboriginal music and connects the traditional with contemporary, revealing the continuation of cultural practice and song traditions into the 21st Century. This is a musical journey through time and place, this is our songlines.
Jessie Lloyd is an Australian Aboriginal singer, social historian and cultural practitioner of Indigenous song. Jessie takes audiences on a profoundly-moving musical journey into the depth and diversity of Australia’s cultural identity.
www.performinglines.org.au/projects/mission-songs-project/
Steve Cooney
Steve Cooney was born in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, where he learned to play the didgeridoo, and from the age of seventeen he played in a number of rock bands. He is of Irish ancestry. Cooney moved to Ireland in the early 1980s, and since then he played, noticeably the guitar, over 60 albums with Irish artists, such as Altan, The Chieftans, Clannad, Stockton’s Wing, Christy Moore, Iarla O Lionaird, Andy Irvine etc. He also composes his own material and is a producer/arranger of traditional music. Steve is one of the most gifted guitar players in the world.