Joe Heaney
"Say A Song Joe Heaney In The Pacific Northwest"
Northwest Archives Recordings, NWARCD 001 (54 mins).
Dial-a-track-code 1201
This posthumous album completes the Joe Heaney discography and fills in the last five years of his life. These were spent teaching at the University of Washington's Ethnomusicological department in Seattle from where these recordings emanate. Despite failing health due to emphysema, he continued to sing and teach, literally until his last breath. The sleeve notes and the recordings are the work of former students and are a testimonial to a revered teacher and a powerfully expressive performer.
Not for nothing was he also known as "Ri na Sceal", a singer for whom "abair amhran" was the imperative. Amid the chaos of his personal life he built an artistic edifice of unsurpassed beauty and paid the price. It's all there in the singing, from the pathos of the big songs like Caoineadh na dTri Muire, An Buinnean Bui and Bean Dubh an Ghleanna to the exquisite tenderness of lullabies and ditties like Seoithin Seo/ Oromo Bhaidin/ Coochenanty.
The recordings run from 1979 to 1984, the year of his death, and the heroic effort which he must have been making to breathe, never mind sing, is imperceptible save in the shortened versions of the songs and the slight diminution in bass resonance towards the end. His command of the highly ornamented and complex form of Connemara scan nos never faltered, nor did his belief in himself as a singer.
Skylark
"Raining Bicycles"
Ceirnini Cladaigh, CC62CD DURATION (48 mins).
Dial-a-track-code 1311
The percussive voice dominant for some time now in traditional group playing provides the instrumental underpinning to the curiously titled Raining Bicycles. Yet the rhythmic talents of the two O'Connor's, Mairtin and Gerry, and Garry O Briain, (augmented by Jim Higgins, Dave Primm, Martin Murray, and Donnchadha Gough) are never allowed to prevail at the expense at the melody. Add to this the wand cadences of Len Graham's voice and you don't get a bicycle you get a Rolls Royce.
Here Graham is accompanied on all six songs and partnered on two by Mary Greene on vocals, further enhancing the harmonic colour of a gently rendered Green Grows the Laurel, and the plaintive contemporary song, Echoes on the Wind.
As ever with Len Graham, the totality of the song is encountered and accent, source and locale are tenderly evoked. As for the tunes, they weave their way around from the contrapuntal niceties of the Hiberno baroque Squire Parsons, on strings and box, to the daring modulations of Mairtin O'Connor's two horn pipes, to the final slow air and reels on Micho's Farewell.
Johnny O'Leary of Sliabh Luachra
"Dance Music from the Cork-Kerry Border"
Craft Recordings, CRCD01 (75 mins) Dial-a-track-code 1421
Two years after the monumental collection of Johnny O'Leary's tunes were edited by Terry Maylan and published, here is a recording of some of those tunes, with 28 tracks, close on 50 tunes. It will come as no surprise to those fortunate to know Johnny O'Leary's music that some of the versions included here, notably Murphy's Horn pipe and Dan O'Leary's were not known by producer Terry Maylan to be in O'Leary's repertoire prior to the recording of this album in 1995.
Now 72, Johnny O'Leary has been playing button accordion since the age of five and for the past 32 years has played for the sets every Friday and Saturday night in Dan O'Connell's pub in Knocknagree, accompanied latterly there, and here, by guitarist Tim Kiely, who also carries the Sliabh Luachra gene.
In addition to the jigs, reels and horn pipes of the Pan Irish repertoire, O'Leary has at his command an apparently limitless number of local dance tunes, barn dances, polkas and slides. Aside from this and from his mastery of the art of playing for dancers, (and being a joy to listen to) there is something about his playing that resists either description or analysis. Just buy the record.
