Seamus Ennis: Forty Years of Irish Piping (Green Linnet)
In years past, friends howled me down for bending their ears with this uileann-piping Ur-classic. Sure, it's an atavistic assault on the senses, but this is the crown jewels of Irish music: the pure, hard-core, demented genius of a rangy man. Ennis had the piping discipline through family, never mind the doothin-ditherin "Truckley How" that came with the targeted, didled, nonsense literature of those censored times. Musically, he's wilful: speeding way up; the traffic-jam regulators; the insane onomatopoeic delicacy of the oneman-orchestral Fox Chase; the hysteric alarum trills and high squawking register-breaks; going mad and tearing paper altogether on Paddy Killoran's. Will the modern ear ever be ready for this?
- Mic Moroney
Marcus Hernon: An Chearc Fhraoigh/The Grouse in the Heather (Clo Iar Chonnachta)
These warm nights, Carna must be enlivened by the horse-power and fast, ceiliheaded frogmarching of these original tunes. Laoise Kelly and Steve Cooney are less audible here than Charlie Lennon's piano, Paddy Higgins's martial percussion skeetering around on blocks or snare rolls, or P.J. Hernon's very fine, washy Connemara box. The tunes, all by fluter-brother Marcus, all named after local birds, have a major, lively, head-on feel, except when stormclouds part for a sugarylipped slow air. Hark the hectic tick-tock of The Peeping Plover, or the Warbling Robin, two tunes which earn Seosamh O Cuaig's toast of "beacons of hope in a world of chancers and exhibitionists".
- Mic Moroney