Charlie Piggott & Gerry Harrington: The New Road (Clo Iar-Chonnachta)
This duo's terminally laid-back tempo could topple you backwards off your stool, but cotton on to the decisive slam-jolt of the internal rhythms which Piggott so infectiously asserts on the button accordion. Stepping out from the unison, Harrington's fiddle is a tad less drowsy, with a spiky, impeccable old-timer's style. There's a whole church of unhurried simplification here, even in Eugene Kelly's polite piano gallop and Ringo McDonagh's beautiful, understated bodhran. Oddly, I get lots of Kerry flavours apart from the slides, and there'd nearly be a Begley feel to Piggott's exquisite air, Caoineadh Lugh Darcy. Moments like that, you just have to take your hat off and stare at the floor.
- Mic Moroney
Various Artists: Klezmer: Jewish Music from Old World to Our World (Shanachie)
Tune into this extraordinary 22-track archive of traditional East European Jewish music going back to 1912, and the heart-scalding Cantorial hymn from Yoselle Rosenblatt, or rumbustious folk orchestras such as Abe Elenkrig's, ass-kicked along by barping tubas, and topped by hysteric pippeting clarinets - the wellspring of the Nino Rota music of early Fellini movies. These orchestras could engulf styles from German cabaret to Dixieland or, fleeing the cataclysm of Europe, swing and ragtime in the US. To that asylum we owe the current revival: the Klezmatics' skip-tempo madness, or Boiled in Lead's metal-funk electric guitar replacing clarinet. Punk sacrilege, to be sure, but always with that wild, melancholy Yiddish accent.
- Mic Moroney