Collaborations

Melanie's collaborations with various musicians and poets have brought an exciting and exhilarating dimension to her creative output and she is pleased to acknowledge them.

For seven years she worked with guitarist and composer Francis Cowan while she lived in Scotland and this combination became one of the most popular duos in the country, performing extensively in Arts Centres, Concert Halls, Jazz and Arts Festivals, including a regular slot in the internationally acclaimed Edinburgh International Fringe Festival.

In 1992, she won an award from the Scottish Arts Council to work on a project with top American arranger Richard Niles who has worked with Pavarotti and Petshop Boys, and co-formed the O'Reilly-Niles Detect which toured around Britain for a period of 18 months.  Together they created an exciting sound of combining classic jazz songs with contemporary arrangements and thrilled many an audience with a powerful dynamism, including the support slot with the "Jools Holland Band".  The musicians in this band included some of the finest in Britain, including Guy Barker, Alec Dankworth, Nigel Hitchcock and Gerard Presencer.

In 1993,  Melanie was still living in Scotland, but on one of her visits to her native city of Dublin, she went to see one of Brian Friel's plays and while reading the programme during the interval, came upon a poem called "Oilean Draiochta" (originally called "Hy-Breasil"), by the great Irish poet Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill. She was immediately moved and inspired by it. Thus began one of the most exciting and unique collaborations at the present time - Melanie finally met up with Nuala and together they have composed songs which have been recorded on her album "Tir na Mara" and performed live.   She and Nuala continue to collaborate on new works which will be performed and recorded.

In addition to performing with her band, Melanie has created a unique duo act, with guitar player Sean O Nuallain, specialising in Bossa Nova, Swing and songs which bring together Irish traditional and jazz influences. Sean studied jazz & bossa nova guitar with acclaimed Canadian guitarist Gary Elliot and has gigged extensively in North America. He is originally from West Clare and his traditional music arrangements have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3, inter alia. This aspect of Melanie's work is called Mistletoe msuic (hence the company name). Sean got the name from Robert Graves' introduction to Idries Shah's "The Sufis"; MISTLETOE

"Now, all other sacred trees, plants and herbs have peculiar properties. The alder's timber is waterproof and its leaves yield a royal red dye; birch is the host of the hallucigenetic fly-cap mushroom; oak and ash attract lightening for a holy fire; the mandrake root is anti-spasmodic. The foxglove yields digitalis which accelerates the beat of the heart; poppies are opiates; ivy has toxic leaves and its flowers provide bees with the last honey of the year. But the berries of the mistletoe; widely known in folklore as an "allheal", heve no medicinal properties, though greedily eaten by wood pigeons and other non-migratory birds in winter. The leave are equally valueless; and the timber can be put to few uses. Why then was the mistletoe singled out as the most sacred and curative of plants. The only answer can be that the Druids used it as an emblem of their own peculiar way of thought. Here is a tree that is no tree, but fastens itself alike on oak, apple , poplar, beech, thorn, even pine, grows green, nourishing itself on the topmost branches when the rest of the forest seems asleep, and the fruit of which is credited with curing all spiritual disorders. Lopped sprigs of it are tied to the lintel of a door and can invite sudden and surprising kisses. The symbolism is exact, if we can equate Druidic with Sufic thought, which is not planted like a tree, as religions are planted, but self-engrafted on a tree already in existence, it keeps green though the tree itself is asleep, in the sense that religions go dead by formalism; and the main motive power of its growth is love, not ordinary animal passion or domestic affection but a sudden surprising recognition of love so rare and high that the heart seems to sprout wings. Strangely enough, the Burning Bush from which God appeared to Moses in the desert is now thought by Biblical scholars to have been an acacia glorified by the red leaves of a locanthus, the Eastern equivalent of mistletoe."