Lúnasa bring Irish tunes to the Tower Theatre the week before St. Patrick's

The Irish instrumental band plays Fresno's 1939 landmark on Thursday, March 11 — an early 6 p.m. show.

The week before St. Patrick's Day, the best Irish music in Fresno won't be in a pub. Lúnasa play the Tower Theatre on Thursday, March 11, 2027, with the show starting at 6 p.m. Tickets are on sale through the theater's Ticketsauce page, and the date was announced Oct. 26.

Lúnasa are an Irish instrumental band, and their reputation travels ahead of them: the Irish Voice once called them "the hottest Irish acoustic band on the planet," and their agency still leads with the line. They play tunes — reels, jigs, slow airs — built on the interplay of pipes, flutes, fiddle, guitar and bass, and they have been doing it long enough to have ten albums behind them.

The most recent is *Live in Kyoto*, their 10th, recorded in December 2023, which venue listings for this spring's tour say the band is still celebrating. Their last studio album was *Cas* in 2018, which came seven years after the record before it. Nothing new has been announced for 2027, so expect this to be a show of the band's catalog, played the way the live record suggests: with the room in it.

A band built on pipes and fiddles sounds best in a room built for listening.

The Fresno date is part of a West Coast swing in March; the band is due at the Vashon Center for the Arts in Washington on March 18, the day after St. Patrick's. Fresno gets them the week before, when the holiday is close enough to be in the air but the calendar isn't yet crowded.

The room is a good match. The Tower Theatre opened in December 1939 as a 20th Century Fox movie house — Nelson Eddy in *Balalaika* for the premiere — and it gave the whole Tower District its name. A. Emory Wishon built it and hired S. Charles Lee to design it, and Lee's Streamline Moderne tower is still the neighborhood's landmark. It stayed open as a cinema until 1989, was restored and reopened in 1990, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It holds 761 today, which is about right for acoustic music: big enough for a crowd, small enough that the quiet tunes carry to the back.

Practical notes: 6 p.m. on a Thursday is early, so if you're coming from Clovis or up from the south valley after work, leave yourself time to park on Olive and walk. The good news is it leaves the rest of the evening for dinner in the Tower District afterward.

St. Patrick's week tends to bring out the green beer crowd. This is the other version of the holiday: a band that has spent decades on the tunes, in a theater that has spent eight decades holding the neighborhood together. Get a ticket and bring someone who thinks they don't like Irish music.

Sources: Lúnasa at Tower Theatre – Ticketsauce (towertheatre.ticketsauce.com); Lúnasa – FLi Artists (fliartists.com); Lúnasa – Vashon Center for the Arts (vashoncenterforthearts.org); Lúnasa – official site (lunasamusic.com); Lúnasa's Crawford believes the band's 'marriage of sounds' undergirds its staying power – Boston Irish (bostonirish.com); Tower Theatre (Fresno, California) – Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org); Tower Theatre – Historic Fresno (National Register) (historicfresno.org); Tower Theatre – PCAD (pcad.lib.washington.edu); Tower Theatre for the Performing Arts – Cinema Treasures (cinematreasures.org)