Denise Chaila: An Seo Tour

Following her first solo Irish tour, with autumn shows across Cork, Galway, Kilkenny & Limerick, Choice Music Prize winner Denise Chaila closes the year with a show in Dublin’s Sugar Club on Tuesday December 8th.

The old English word for 'dream' didn't mean 'seeing visions while asleep' until the 13th century. It originally meant "joy" or "music".

As someone who spent over a decade doing everything I could to avoid singing in earnest, learning that to sing means to dream altered something fundamental about the way I understood what I wanted from music. I began my life in Chikankata singing in three-part harmony with my loved ones, and slowly retreated into rhythm and words as I grew into adolescence.

An Seo as a tour, is a small glimpse into the subterranean work I've been doing in my quiet corner of the west coast of our isle. A reintroduction. An invitation to meet me with some of the people I've encountered on my way who have left their fingerprints on me permanently.

These shows, and the music that comprise them both old and new, live somewhere closer to my heart than I've allowed myself to share in my work thus far. Which is interesting.

Everything I've learned sitting at the feet of jazz musicians in restaurants and warm living rooms in Mexico City. Sessions in crowded pubs, fleadhs and smoky studios along the west coast of Ireland. Sharing a home with my Irish-Brazilian family in Dublin with all the samba, fractured Brazilian Portuguese and heritage they have shared with me. Half-remembered notes from the classical singing lessons I took during my adolescence, and all of the eclectic beauty of discovering the richness of the Zambian music I took for granted as a child.

All while still on a road forward. Here I am, in all of the wildness and dreaming. And I hope to meet you in a room of harmonies and space with the stories and songs I'm carrying in my beat up 7-year-old duffel bag.

It's a pleasure to meet you again.
An Seo