Solas return to the Birchmere on Feb. 28

The reunited Irish-American band keeps its 30th-anniversary run going with a Sunday night in Alexandria's longtime home for acoustic music.

There are rooms where Irish traditional music feels like a visit, and rooms where it feels like it belongs. The Birchmere has spent decades being the second kind. On Sunday, Feb. 28, 2027, Solas play the Alexandria music hall at 7:30 p.m., a date announced Oct. 27 with tickets on sale through Ticketmaster.

Solas are an Irish-American band whose sound blends traditional Irish music with folk, bluegrass, Americana and contemporary songwriting, as the ScotRail events listing for their January Glasgow date puts it. They had been away for a while. After an eight-year hiatus, the band announced a 30th-anniversary reunion tour beginning in 2025, according to WYDaily, and the anniversary run has kept going, with stops listed from Bozeman to Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

The early 2027 calendar shows a band in no hurry to stop. Solas play Glasgow's Pavilion Theatre on Jan. 22 with Isla Callister, then come back to the States for February dates including Durango, Colorado, on Feb. 10 and Silver City, New Mexico, on Feb. 12. The night before Alexandria, they play the Community Church of Chapel Hill in North Carolina, a listing that notes it's the band's first visit there since 2012. Alexandria gets them on the very next night.

The Birchmere is the right place for it. The venue opened in 1966 as a restaurant and added music in 1975, when owner Gary Oelze began turning it into a bluegrass-centered concert hall, as its Wikipedia entry and Connection Newspapers recount. It moved to Alexandria in 1981 and, in 1997, to its current 500-seat home on Mount Vernon Avenue in a former Kodak film-processing plant. Over the decades, an estimated 13,000 performances have taken place there; Ray Charles played one of his last concerts in the room. Oelze died in 2023 at 80, as WTOP and The Zebra reported, but the hall he built still runs on the same idea: put good players in front of people who came to listen. More on its history is at birchmere.com.

That idea fits a band like Solas, whose music depends on fiddle, flute, guitar and voice being heard clearly, and on a crowd that will go quiet for a slow air and loud for a reel.

Put good players in front of people who came to listen. That's the Birchmere, and that's what a Solas show needs.

A Sunday at 7:30 is a civilized hour, early enough to get home for Monday. It's a 500-seat room, and with the band only recently back on the road after years away, it's worth getting tickets well before February.

Then settle in at a table and let the tunes do the rest.

Sources: Solas and Isla Callister – ScotRail (scotrail.co.uk); Irish band Solas celebrates 30-year anniversary with tour stop in Williamsburg – WYDaily (wydaily.com); Solas 30th Anniversary Tour – Downtown Bozeman (downtownbozeman.org); Solas 30th Anniversary Tour – Go Portsmouth NH (calendar.goportsmouthnh.com); Solas – WNMU Cultural Affairs (culture.wnmu.edu); Solas – Community Church of Chapel Hill Concerts (tickettailor.com); Solas Tour Dates – Durango (eventticketscenter.com); The Birchmere – Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org); Over 50 Years of Iconic Music Venue in Alexandria – Connection Newspapers (connectionnewspapers.com); Owner of Alexandria’s Birchmere Gary Oelze dies at 80 – WTOP (wtop.com); Obituary: Gary Oelze, 80 – The Zebra (thezebra.org); About – The Birchmere (birchmere.com); Solas at Birchmere – JamBase (jambase.com)