Ireland's traditional music is community music: its home and its final destination is not the stage or the “music market” (two recent creatures) but people's houses and the bars in town. It is cultivated collectively, in 'sessions', as we do in our sessions in and around Barcelona.

But the stages are out there, and so is the music market, whatever we may think about them; and since, through all those long hours playing together in sessions, special affinities inevitably form among some participants, it is not surprising that groups emerge out of the sessions, to seek their fortune on stages near and far, following a pattern that has been emerging over the last thirty years or so everywhere this music is played.

Drónán is a band that came into being that way: four session musicians whose affinities brought them together in a band that sets out to plumb the depths of the music, without mistreating it. Irish pipes, a flute, a tenor banjo and a piano are the mainstays of the band's musical explorations through the rich territories of Irish traditional music – one of the few local musical traditions that still thrives in Europe despite the media's long insistence on ignoring it and a thousand other musical traditions around the world. All the members have a long track record in musical ventures, and in this one they set out to see just how far the tradition will take them and their audiences.