Newport update: The Swell Season

“I’ve been wanting to play here forever,” said Glen Hansard of The Swell Season,the Irish/Czech, male/female duo,  in regards to the Newport Folk Festival. Fifty one years running, the festival and Hansard finally met this afternoon.

Dedicating their first song to Richie Havens, the man who’d graced the stage before them, The Swell Season made their set one of the most enjoyable hours of performance with visits from friends (members of The Levon Helm Band, The Low Anthem and Tao Rodriguez-Seeger), duets with Marketa Irglova (the other half of Hansard) and a solo Willie Nelson cover (“Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain”) that was the result of minor temporary issues with the volume mix.

The duo ran quickly into 2009′s “Low Rising,” and inspired a perpetual, scattered sing along if only to mirror themselves. One highlight  was the Irglova-written “If You Want Me,” which showed the quiet-in-appearance songstress to possess a  ghostly, widowed tone similar to Portishead’s Beth Gibbons.

The Swell Season’s dynamic is heavy on the soft-loud. Like watching video of Dylan in ’64, Hansard makes use of his confidence to appear a bit shaky, creating a vocal combination that is both melodic, airy and loose. He slapped guitar chords like a lover with a short fuse and created a wandering marriage of the calm and the burst.

Joined by members of the Levon Helm Band, The Swell Season performed an excellent cover of Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic.” In the end, the duo added on the friends with members of The Low Anthem and Tao Rodriguez-Seeger (yep, Pete’s grandson), for the Dominic Behan-penned “The Auld Triangle.”

-David Padula