Gay McKeown and Nollaig Mac Carthaigh: The Art of Uileann Piping Volume 3 (Na Piobaire Uileann)
Having strapped your children into Volumes I & II, now watch their wrists hopping off the regulators under the guidance of Gay McKeown and Nollaig Mac Carthaigh in this extraordinary CD/video tutor. Before they conduct the autopsy of a tune, both execute lovely chanter work as they go popping, rolling and cranning through 23 mazurkas, polkas, reels, air, slip jigs, set dances, airs. McKeown first maws open the regulators on An Fhaillingin Mhuinneach; then an ancient piper's march, an Ennis-burping Kesh Jig and a momentous Bean Dubh an Ghleanna - before the pair let rip together with the Dublin Reel, and the phewmungous skip of the Old Bush. Whoo, that's education.
- Mic Moroney
Various Artists: Voice of the People (Topic Records)
For those who baulked at purchasing Reg Hall's 20-volume anthology of folk music and song of, em, these islands, here's a fine sampler, from a 1908 recording of a snowy-sideburned Lincolnshire bailiff to our own Paddy Tunney and Sarah Makem, even Seosamh O hEanai and Margaret Barry in London in the 1950s. Here are Norfolk fishermen and bibulous Dorset shepherds; Phoebe Smith the Kent Traveller; Belle Stewart from Blairgowrie and the wonderful Jeannie Robertson; Sussex old-timers Scan Tester (concertina) and Rabbitty Baxter (tambourine) on a jiggery polka; Northumberlandish Will Atkinson's stonking harmonica on The Stool of Repentance - lots of rangy, wild stuff that delivers many's a gulp in the throat.
- Mic Moroney