The Center for the Arts

Genre: Celtic, Folk The Boston Globe called Solas "the finest Celtic ensemble this country has ever produced." The Wall Street Journal called them "an Irish traditional band bearing all the marks of greatness." Thirty years on, the two musicians who earned those words are still the ones leading the band. Séamus Egan founded Solas and remains its architect. Playing flute, tenor banjo, nylon guitar, whistles, and mandolin, he was winning All-Ireland titles as a teenager, and he later wrote the melody that became Sarah McLachlan's "I Will Remember You." Fiddler Winifred Horan has been beside him from the first note: New England Conservatory trained, an All-Ireland champion, and a champion Irish step dancer, she brought a conservatory precision to the band's arrangements that made their sound impossible to mistake for anyone else's. Across twelve albums and thirty years of touring, Solas drew as freely from bluegrass, folk, and Americana as from the tradition itself, and set the standard for what Irish music in America could be. This 30th anniversary tour brings Egan and Horan together with original accordionist John Williams and guitarist Alan Murray, and adds a genuine crossover voice in Moira Smiley on vocals, banjo, keyboard, and body percussion, known from Tune-Yards and her own group VOCO.