SullivanBurton

Many bands have neatly defined roles. The bassist, the guitarist and so on.

But it's hard to pin down the members of the central Illinois Irish/Celtic band SullivanBurton. On the trio's latest CD, "Monkey Bars", Bruce Burton plays three types of guitars, mandolin, banjo and bodhran. Robert Moore mans the bass, guitar and djembe. And Shannan Sullivan plays keyboards, mandolin, violin and fiddle.

Oh, and they all sing, too.

"We even had Shannan on a Hammond organ, " said Burton, 50. "This little red-headed lady weaving back and forth on the thing like Ray Charles."

So let's just call them "instrumentalists." And they'll be showing off their many skills during a performance from 6 to 9 p.m. Friday at the 401 Water Street building as part of Downtown Peoria's Yule Like Peoria holiday walk.

Yule like reading Burton play his way through this week's Q&A. --Brad Burke

Bruce Burton. Shannan Sullivan. Robert Moore. Um, was ol' Bob on your bad side the week you named the band?

(Laughs) Well, Shannan and I started this thing in '03...as a duo, and actually as an experiment, really. This is actually Bob's anniversary of his first year playing with the band. ...So we said, do we want to change the name of this thing or do we want to leave it alone? So we changed the name from a descriptor to a title. And that works for us. And Bob's cool, he's fine with it. (Laughs.) He's having a blast playing this kind of music because anything goes.

The album is filled with traditional numbers, but it's anything but strictly traditional. Am I right?

If you've ever heard any other Irish music and stuff, you can tell we broke a few of the rules (with) the production of it. But we're from America, you know. We grew up listening to pop and such. That's what we included in it.

Was that a conscious decision to fuse elements of various musical styles into Irish/Celtic standards? Or did it just turn out that way?

Definitely conscious. Especially in "Nil Se Na La, " we wanted to do a really old, traditional Gaelic piece but with just bodhran and funk bass. We love that cut, that's just a lot of fun. Kids love that cut, for some reason. Little kids just think that's the bomb.

Aren't you a bit old to describe something as "the bomb"?

I know, I shouldn't have said that. (Laughs.) Oh well, I'm a little out of touch, I guess. (Laughs.)

What's the deal with the name "Monkey Bars"? You guys hang out at the jungle gym a lot?

We get that a lot. It's something else Shannan and I came up with years ago: Drop the drama, have some fun. ...Things are serious as all get-out right now, and people are losing their sense of humor. The thing, I guess, that we were getting at is, almost as important as not losing your sense of humor; don't lose your sense of enjoyment. So (the title) is not some big, serious manifesto. It's just a way of saying, "Enjoy yourself".

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SullivanBurton will perform from 6 to 9 p.m. on Friday in the lobby of the 401 Water Street building in Downtown Peoria, and from 8:30 to 11 p.m. Saturday at Leonardo's Pizza near the Shoppes at Grand Prairie.
- Peoria Journal Star-Thursday, November 24, 2005

So, does anyone else watch American Idol? I do sometimes, but of course I don't admit it to anybody. Rather than pondering the social implications of a wildly popular singing contest epitomizing Darwinism run amok in the pop music business, or wondering when one of the AI contestants will sing a song I actually recognize, I sometimes wonder what would happen if Randy, Paula, and the dreaded Simon switched their attention to the steadily growing crowd of new acts in the Celtic genres. On one hand, some promising young musicians who missed a note or two would probably go home shattered by the acerbic critiques and take up a career in telemarketing or meet some other fate worse than death. On the other hand, we might be spared from some of the green-beer-soaked Clancy Brothers/Dubliners/Pogues clones who play the notes and sing the words but don't have the feeling of the bands whose arrangements they're mimicking. Send your program suggestions to the Fox Network now!

Anyway, everyone here made my cut, if perhaps not that of any network television shows....

...Another entry in the suddenly popular "running your names together to name the act" category is SullivanBurton, the Illinois trio of fiddler/keyboardist Shannan Sullivan and multi-instrumentalists Bruce Burton and Robert Moore, who apparently joined the band too late to be included. Monkey Bars [self-released 2005] is an energetic acoustic/electric mix of largely Irish material that goes well beyond the usual pub standards, with crisp playing and strong singing and a good mix of the sensitive and the silly. "Winnie's Morning Tune Set" begins as a quiet acoustic guitar piece that morphs into a hot fiddle reel with resonating bass lines as Winnie presumably wakes up. Among the songs, there are fun versions of the Oysterband's cheerfully cynical "Blood Wedding" and Tommy Makem's bawdy "Town of Ballybay".
- Dirty Linen June/July 2006- Tom Nelligan