Tim Dennehy: A Thimbleful Of Song Sceilig Records SRCD001 (55 mins)
Dial-a-disc: 1641
A welcome second release from singer Tim Dennehy, A Thimbleful Of Song situates the voice at the centre of the song. The one accompanied track on the album Keep In Touch, a poem by fellow Kerryman Brendan Kennelly, is not sung but spoken . Accent, place, local and national history, love, betrayal and spirituality animate this singing landscape. The songs range in time and space, from the rare and beautiful religious song Amhran Na Paise to Dennehy's own compositions Keep In Touch, Sigerson and Sceilig Mhichll. The land and lore of his native Kerry and adopted county Clare predominate in songs that are powerfully rendered and intensely felt.
There is a stirring version of Donall Binn from the former, while Faha Sports in his hands is a splendid redblooded celebration of the things that matter in Clare, as in life.
Christy O'Leary: The Northern Bridge Old Bridge Music, OBM CD09 (49 mins)
Dial a disc: 1751
Singer and piper Christy O'Leary is much travelled both in musical and purely geographical terms. From the biographical, notes this seems to have set in early in life. It is reflected very thoroughly here, on an album which ranges far and wide over regional song and tune repertoires.
A coherent and organised piece of work, it is unified around particularities of vocal style which derive in accent and tone from his native Kerry, and pipering learned from Micheal O Riabhaigh, the great teacher of the Cork Pipers Club.
An accomplished fiddler, he plays a set of slides with his brother Tim also on fiddle, affirming a Sliabh Luachra birthright. A raucous Peigin Leitir Mor has Kerry manners put on her, while Moorlough Mary learned from Paddy Tunney is sung, unaccompanied, smoothly and fluidly phrased. Pipes he uses to good effect on the three Scandinavian dance tunes, and magisterially on the air Rocking The Cradle which seamlessly flows into The Chestnut Tree, Maire Ni Chathasaigh's slip jig. The Banks of Sullane, dressed out in a fine accompaniment, is a masterpiece of vocal delicacy.
Dan Herlihy & Friends: The Night Of The Fair
Dan Herlihy
Dial-a-disc: Not available
Produced, and recorded in Sliabh Luachra, The Night Of The Fair plays "the man", box player Dan Herlihy, and "the ball", the regional style, in equal measure. This is more surprising than it should be, for the two become less and less synonymous. Now imitated so far and wide that the place has taken on extra dimensional dimensions, this album is a salutary reminder that the "real thing" is alive and well and not in musical heaven with O'Keeffe et al.
Joining Dan O'Herlihy are nine friends whose names - O'Mahony, Brosnan, O'Connor, Cronin etc - are eloquent testimonials to community and kinship. Without exception the dance tunes are sourced locally, the sleeve notes giving provenance, precise to a fine point of exactitude. Those tunes are the polkas, slides, jigs and hornpipes associated with that exuberant dance tradition. Accordion, banjo, fiddle, bodhrans, and a contemporary array of stringed instruments in various combinations settle in beside each other and together add another link to the unbroken chain of cultural continuity that winds itself: around the region.
Volume: Crawford Art Gallery, Cork CD plus book (73 mins)
Dial-a-disc: 1861
Strictly speaking, not a traditional album, Volume is a Cork musical anthology issued as part of the Volume multimedia project mounted by the Crawford Art Gallery recently.
As such, it presents on its 24 tracks an astonishing diversity of music, from "pure traditional to "contemporary traditional" to ... well ... to the likes of Giordai O Laoire and the notorious Nine Wassies from Baine, whose Mothaimse is black comic anarchy of an order not seen on these shores since Flann O Briain's An Beal Bocht.
Less lunatic but rib ticklingly good is Noel O'Callaghan and Douglas Henderson's Johnny Jump Up Seamus Creagh's The Dawn from his eponymous album is an inspired inclusion, and Mel Mercier's Dance displays his mighty command of percussion idioms.
