Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Some Tunes

I don't know if this is great reading or not, but here are some tunes I'm learning right now and the recordings I'm using as references:

  • Trip to Athlone (track 4 of Colm O'Donnell's Farewell to Evening Dances). O'Donnell plays it together with The Blackthorn Stick; the two sound great together. This one is hard for me to play on the flute since it goes from first-octave A to low D to second-octave E, necessitating changes in embouchure.
  • I Buried My Wife... (Tara Bingham's recording from An Gaoth Aduaidh) Matt Molloy performs this on Heathery Breeze as Frieze Britches (where it's incorrectly identified as a slip jig in the liner notes, which confused me for some time when I first bought the album!), but his version is too fast/complicated for me to keep up with, though very nice for pure listening! Bingham's recording is slower and less heavily improvised. Liam O'Flynn plays it on Come West Along the Road.
  • Rolling In the Ryegrass (June McCormack's recording from the CDs which accompany her tutor Fliúit). CCÉ's Foinn Seisiún 1 CDs have a recording of this (as Shannon Breeze), which you can download for free from their site, but I find McCormack's tone and performance inspiring.

2 comments:

Linda said...

Nice post. I'll listen to the tunes and then perhaps say something more intelligent. Meanwhile, just wanted to let you know you've just been tagged. It's sort of like getting a chain letter, only slightly less annoying. Hopefully you will have some fun with it.
Visit my blog for details.
http://truffles-turtles-tunes.blogspot.com/

Anonymous said...

i buried my wife and danced on her grave's a great tune. one of my favourite tunes to play these days is drag her around the road.