John Doherty: "The Floating Bow"
Ceirnini Cladaigh, CCF31CD (53 mins)
Dial a track code: 1641
Born at the turn of the century into a well known Donegal family of travelling musicians, John Doherty was compared to Fritz Kreisler at the 1946 Oireachtas by the adjucator who awarded him the gold medal. Listening to him on these and other recordings, it's easy to see why. Consummate technique, great powers of improvisation, a musical intelligence very close, to genius, a prodigious memory, immense repertoire, and passion for music only go partway towards describing Doherty's music making.
This collection was recorded between 1968 and 1974 by a young friend of Doherty's, Alun Evans, a medical student when first they met. His notes, which accompany the album, are the best of their kind; he writes well and fluently about Doherty's life of rambling tinsmithing, and playing in west Donegal, gives a very vivid account of the kind of man he was, and illustrates the constituent elements of his unique style.
The "floating bow" of the title refers to a technique employed by Doherty whereby the sequence of bow strokes and stresses are reversed or altered, an effect of quite startling dynamic impact given full expression here on Miss Patterson's Slippers. Other stylistic effects "dragging", "swagging", "feathering" and devices such as "hacking", "snapping" and "berling", doublestopping, playing in difficult keys, chording, and an extensive musical vocabulary of ornaments and decorative embellishments characterise as playing and are helpfully identified by Evans and by Dermot McLaughlin in the track glosses, which deepens appreciation and increases admiration further.
Although much of this is characteristic of the Donegal style, Doherty extended the possibilities, way beyond the dictates of convention - and it goes without saying that only a virtuoso could have brought it off. Most every track bespeaks a truly remarkable level of musical achievement the eerily accurate bagpipe imitation on The Enniskillen Dragoons, the inventive facility of The Mountain Road, the beguiling beauty of An Chuilfhionn rendered in march tempo, and the breathtaking reach of the penultimate track Bonnie Kate, to mention but a few.
"Happy To Meet, Sorry To Part"
Globestyle Irish, CDORBD 092 (68 mins)
Dial-a-track code: 1751
The iconic Doherty visage also graces the cover of this, the seventh release in Ron Kavana's nine album anthology selected from the Topic archive. Like Evans's recordings above, these are superb vintages long in the cask. Each track of the 30 is memorable; each bears the indelible mark of individual style, as unique and particular as a thumbprint. Doherty himself features on two tracks, a jig, The Knights of St Patrick, and an untitled Mazurka, neither of which appears on The Floating Bow - unsurprisingly, given the huge repertoire.
Many, though not all, of the musicians included are dead. Of those who are happily still with us, Seamus Tansey's whistle duet with Eddie Corcoran from 1969 is a brief, electrifying tour de force while Bonny Kate/Jenny's Chickens featuring Tansey on bodhran (old style with tambourine outboard) is of an order of wildness seldom encountered today. The stars in the firmament of the tradition are here in force Willie Clancy with the magisterial Pipe On The Hob a showpiece of chanter playing minimally accompanied, while Felix Doran's reels George White's/The Ivy Leaf are con brio with the liveliest of regulator syncopation.
The eponymous title track comes from Ennis, a double jig dressed out in finely judged cadences and subtleties of ornamentation. At the other end of the spectrum are the lesser known players whose inclusion throws a light on a world of music making seldom winkled out by pervasive media; box player Rose Murphy from Bell mount, Co Galway, Ellen O'Dwyer, the late John Rea, the Co Antrim dulcimer player, the racy combination of Noel Pepper and Paddy Moran, (flute and harmonica) on St Anne's Reel and finally the splendid Wright brothers, three jew's harp players with Paddy Neylon on coppers percussion closing too soon with The Foxhunters Jig.
