Irish band Lúnasa tries to achieve ‘a kind of a wildness’ at its concerts

Kevin Crawford, far left, with Lúnasa.

Kevin Crawford was a teenager in love — and it changed his life.

Crawford, a flute and tin whistle player of Irish heritage, grew up in Birmingham, England, and, as a teenager, discovered seisiúns in local pubs — informal sessions were people would gather to play sets of traditional Irish tunes. For Crawford, the attraction wasn’t even the music. It was the spirit: the overflowing good fun called craic in Gaelic.

Now, as part of the band Lúnasa, Crawford has shared that sense of communal exuberance with his bandmates and with audiences around the world for more than 25 years.

“I was just hooked,” Crawford said of the pub sessions. “There was just something that (made him say to himself), ‘I have to be in this. I love this thing that’s going on.’ When I started, there was not even an inkling that you could have a band, or that you could tour the world, or you could make an album. I knew nobody else that played music for a living. It was like, ‘I don’t know what this is, but I’ve just got to keep doing it.’ ”

At 19, he says, “I moved to Ireland. My parents and my brothers and my sister, they were still in England. I just had to go and get closer to the music.”

Shortly after the band formed in 1997, Crawford joined Lúnasa, which was adding the rhythmic drive of rock and the flying virtuosity of jazz to Irish traditional music. Though the lineup has changed a bit over the years, the group’s nimble playing continues to delight audiences: Their connection with audiences taps the spirit of a session in a pub while evoking the orchestral sophistication of the concert hall.

The cover of Lúnasa’s 2004 album, “The Kinnitty Sessions.”

“The session is the lifeblood,” Crawford said. “It is what prepares you for that performative side of playing Irish music. There are great musicians that have (not had the experience of) the session scene, and you can almost hear in their music that there’s a little door that they just can’t access.

“It has very little to do with technique or virtuosity. … It’s a kind of a wildness. At some point, you have to not worry about whether you’re playing the music that well or not. And then, because of that, you will play it even better. It’s like you just stop thinking about it and say, ‘Let’s go. There’s something taking us on a ride here.’ ”

Lúnasa’s sound, he says, “is an arranged sound, but it really only makes sense when you take a few chances. And I think that the audience can hear that: They see you’re not just dialing it in.”

When Lúnasa performs, Crawford usually is the one who talks to the audience, and often jokes around with a standup comedian’s timing. “It’s really important for me to connect early on with the audience,” he says. “Because it’s so big and so massive, their contribution back to us — that allows us to really get to that point where you think, ‘Okay, now we’re cooking’ … You can’t get there on your own. You need the audience.”

Lúnasa’s music typically include interlocking melodies from the flute, uilleann pipes and fiddle over what Crawford calls “the engine room” of rhythm guitar and standup bass. The members are from different parts of the Irish tradition, but share a sensibility about how to weave it all together.

“There is that telepathy where I can tell where somebody is going to go,” says Crawford. “We just know, like the hint of something … even maybe the way that Seán (Smyth) on the fiddle, he might attack a note in a particular way. And you just know that that’s going to mean he’s going to go down this road, which then tells you you can go down that road. There are things that only come through really being in the pocket with your band members.”

The band’s name is derived from the name of an ancient harvest festival, which seemed fitting, Crawford said. “If you go back to those pagan times, people did celebrate, and there was music and there was merriment, and there were people painting themselves and doing all kinds of crazy things. We like that association.”

Lúnasa’s most recent album, “Live in Kyoto.”

Though the band is generally an instrumental one, their current Irish Solstice Celebration tour includes singer Dave Curley. The show will feature a number of songs celebrating the season along with Lúnasa’s regular repertoire, including songs from its latest album, Live In Kyoto.

For the album, which was recorded in Japan in December 2023 and released in April, the band wrote all new songs but recorded them live over three nights, convinced that they played their best when in front of an audience that shares a love of the music.

“That energy from when you’re playing … even if it’s just one person you’re playing in front of, something else comes out in the music, and you give something else to the music,” Crawford says.

Lúnasa will perform at The Outpost in the Burbs at The First Congregational Church in Montclair, Dec. 7 at 8 p.m. Visit outpostintheburbs.org.

For a chance to win two tickets, send an email to njartscontest@gmail.com by 11 a.m. Dec. 3, with the word “Lunasa” in the subject line.