John Carty: "Last Night's Fun"

Shanachie 79098 (62 mins).

Dial-a-track-code: 1201

John Carty's last album, The Cat That Ate The Candle, was a banjo album with some fiddle playing. Last Night's Fun is a fiddle album with, thankfully, some banjo. Born in London in the 1960s, he came of age as a musician in the emigrant Irish community which boasted, many fine players and was linked through his family to traditional musicians in Roscommon and Galway.

He is, as was evident on the last album, a highly accomplished traditional musician in the strictest sense and also a great stylist. His repertoire here is made up largely of standards, with a Sligo/Leitrim/ Roscommon connection, an area to which he is strongly attracted.

For a player of his age, this could be viewed as an unfashionable choice, but this album proves that fashion is a pretty meaningless term in traditional music these days, particularly when a musician of this calibre marks out his territory in its broad church. On Anderson's/Miss Thornton's he accompanies himself on flute, and on a bravura version of The Drunken Landlady/Tom Steele the banjo and fiddle partner each other memorably.

Seamus Walshe: "Clare Accordion" Seamus Walshe SWCD003 (47 mins)

Dial a track code: 1311

The Drunken Landlady pops up again on Seamus Walshe's album Clare Accordion; different instrument and a different player make for a complete change of sonic, landscape. Walshe's identification is with "that county" with the name that, is synonymous with great music. Like John Carty, Walshe's repertoire and style of playing come out of the life tradition of sessions, gatherings and family music making. The end result is a joy to listen to easy and uncontrived with melody and rhythm explicitly prioritised.

Walshe has a lightness of touch, which makes for a fluent right hand and uncluttered tune playing. Hornpipes are declared favourites and he has a decided way with them. Outstanding among the four hornpipe sets are The Stage/The Queen of the West, sparkling against Jim Higgins's delicate piano vamping, and the Whilqueeny's/The Wanderer, where the right hand busies itself in the intricacies of the tunes, to a guitar accompaniment by Mark Kelly.

Elsewhere, Kelly and Higgins assist in the delivery of a bouncing set of jigs, High part of The Roads Connie Connells while Brendan Larrisey, adds the compatible voice of the fiddle to yet another set of hornpipes and the reels The Salamanca/The Rainy Day.

Emer Mayock: "Merry Bits Of Timber"

Key Records KEYCD121 (45 mins).

Dial a track code: 1421

The lightfully titled Merry Bits of Timber is the debut album of Emer Mayock, a young flute player from Mayo. She combines prodigious playing skills with an ear for, composition and this album marks an auspicious start to her recordings career. The inclusion of new compositions other than her own, the accompaniment and her virtuoso playing style, plus a liking for Donegal sourced tunes make for an uncompromisingly contemporary atmosphere.

A conventional first track, The Selma Jigs, features steady, controlled playing and leads into The First Month of Spring/The Flathunters, where the orthodoxies of phrasing and modulation are skillfully undermined.

Of the Donegal material, Gaoth Barra na dTonn is sensitively rendered as a slow air, its simplicity allowed full extension over a fluid melody line, tautly played out. With John Doherty's and The Mad Jigs her skills as a virtuoso player are on display, but not at the expense of the tunes whose integrity is by and large respected, with the possible exception of The Scullion's Wife which dispatches three tunes in little over two minutes of frantic whistle playing.