Shaz Has What It Takes

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Irish Voice Entertainment

Shaz Has What It Takes

April 2, 2008

By Mike Farragher

A BLACK lesbian Irish activist who shaves her head. Uh-huh. Yeah, right. I thought the same thing as you while I prepared to meet Shaz Oye before her gig at Asbury Park’s the Saint.

Would she challenge me to an arm wrestle, or brand me a clueless Yank cracker for still hoping that Michael Bloomberg enters the race and saves us from our lame presidential alternatives?

Nothing could be further from the truth. In person, this delightful folk sensation has a warm flannel personality and a smile that lights up the room.

“I played B.B. King’s in Times Square on St. Patrick’s Day,” she exclaims, her brown eyes spitting sparks as she talks animatedly. “Life doesn’t get any better than that!”

Shaz played as Larry Kirwan’s guest at the annual Black 47 hooley during the Big Green Holiday, and this gig is indicative of the great vibes coming her way as more folks get their minds blown out by her debut CD, The Truth According to Shaz Oye.

“I have felt so very welcome here,” she gushes. “I have complete strangers passing my album around, trying to help me out. I don’t think that the Irish are as welcoming to an American coming over as the Americans have been to me.

“I am over here at the request of Larry Kirwan, who was probably the first one to play my music on his radio show (Sirius Satellite Radio’s Celtic Crush on Sirius Disorder). The club owner here at the Saint played the show in his bar and took a liking to me, and that is how I got booked here. So, that’s the kind of warm reception I’ve gotten.”

Shaz has been anointed “The Next Big Thing” in media outlets all over Ireland. With her deep voice and cool jazzy arrangements, The Truth sets her apart from the earnest acoustic pop scene blanketing the Emerald Isle and churning out the likes of the Frames and Paddy Casey at the moment.

She laughs when she tells me that she’s been described as “Sade with balls,” and discusses how hard it is for even a woman of her unique genetic makeup to get noticed in Ireland.

“I think there is a clogged pipeline of music all over the world, especially in Ireland,” she says as she describes the scene. “There are tons of people employing cheap technology to make music, which makes getting your music hard to hear on the few professional stations in Ireland.
“Thankfully, I have friends like (Hot Press editor) Jackie Hayden, who really believe in me. Jackie is a lot like Larry Kirwan, who has opened many doors for me over here.”

In this small acoustic showcase, Shaz’s songs are stripped of their cool vibes. KISS’s Paul Stanley once said that if you can’t play a song on an acoustic guitar it probably sucks, and this performance shows that Shaz’s songs are top shelf.

“Sylvia Falling” is a poignant tune about the heroin addictions gripping Ireland, while “The River Wild” is a song about a woman named Molly who crosses paths with one of the roving gangs of rakes that roamed Dublin in the 1700s. “Barefoot on the stony road they led me to this place, beyond the pale,” she laments. The rich imagery of downtrodden characters that have fallen in and out of love within her powerful lyrics is one of the many things that make this artist so compelling.

“Ireland is rich in storytelling,” she reasons when complemented on her prose. “It’s the way we communicated things like the pain of the Famine from generation to generation. I’d be a pretty pathetic Irish person if I couldn’t tell a story, wouldn’t I?”

That disarming laugh fills the room again. For someone who grew up poor and without running water in the drug infested docklands of Dublin, there is not a trace of bitterness when she discusses her life or childhood.

“Police wouldn’t come into my neighborhood,” she explains. “Heroin was all around us, but I had an excellent childhood because of my mother, grandmother and Aunt Mabel.

“They were much older and seemed to live in their own time which had very little to do with the times we were in. I would be running after the trucks with the other kids at the Point Depot, completely unaware that I was different from anyone else.”

Those differences soon became more apparent when Shaz went to the equivalent of high school.

“All of my other girlfriends were into makeup and dresses, which I had no use for,” she says with a laugh. “It wasn’t until I ran into an AIDS awareness group did I finally get in tune with the gay community in Ireland and found people I could truly relate to.”

Little is known or written about the gay scene in Dublin, and Shaz believes that it is because there is an enormous pressure in that society to fit in.

“You always feel like you’re coming out,” she says. “I think that fuels my drive to be an artist and an activist.”

What sweet art it is. This is one of the most exciting artists to come out of Ireland in many moons.

The Truth According to Shaz Oye is available at places like iTunes and CD Baby. For more information, log onto shazoye.com.

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