MARTIN O Connor's distinctive metallic reediness has been the undertone to many music productions over the years, most recently in Rivet dance, session ing for The Dubliners, The Waterboys, Maire Brennan, and also with The Chieftains in their celebrated Long, Black Veil tangle with Marianne Faithful and Tom Jones. This omnipresent diversity deservedly brought him last Galway based AIB Traditional Music Award.
The abiding pressure on musicians of such explorative talent leads them into yet further dark alleys of their base music deeper, into the other culture potentialities of their instrument and, consequently, into new, sympathetic music forms. Here O'Connor bravely began the night with a display of, new accretions and constructions, dealing particularly delicately with (often abused) asymmetric Eastern European rhythm Romanian musicians are impressed by his compositions.
In 1845 his Famine year contribution, he blends together the slow air, funereal intensity and the emotional potential of the slow reel. Indeed his reel playing the standard meter of ability in Traditional music has evolved to a choppy, syncopation which here was typically expressed in an extremely slipped Kreggs Pipes. Settling into a more familiar repertoire after the interval, brought the band with considerably less effort to a second encore on the well trodden Cooley's set, involving tasty key manipulation info The Wise Maid Garry O Briain expanded to the frontiers' of his versatility's from the Islamic "dunk" of his mandocello, through guitar and piano to the crystal clarity of his Leonard Cohen-ish, emigration introspection No Turning, Back.
