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CD Reviews: The Digital Folk Life. Org

Sligo Rags,: The Night Before the Morning After
Contact: Michael Kelly, fiddlin4you@aol.com

Some of the finest Irish music is being performed by emigrants and American-born or based Irish-Americans. Apparent case in point: Orange County, California’s Sligo rags, a trio with a repertoire that expertly crosses Irish vocal and instrumental music in twinkling fashion, leads traded off between the leader, Michael Kelly (fiddle and vocals), and multi-instrumentalist David Burns (guitar, banjo, mandolin, vocals), with Gordon Rustvold’s solid bass guitar providing spot-on rhythm throughout..

 I say “apparent,” because the vocals of both Michael Kelly and David Burns sound  like pure Irish, but I’m told that in point of fact none of the band is from Ireland at all, tho there is Mother Ireland in the background of two members (not Gordon Rustvold, whose name does provide a bit of a giveaway – but he doesn’t sing on the CD). However, in song after song, rich regional – if adopted for the occasion - accents ring clear throughout this very appealing CD, from the opening uptempo version of “From Clare to Here – it still manages to retain the wistfulness of this lovely song – to the jaunty closer, “Red is the Rose.” One could have wished for fuller information on composers, perhaps, and similarly, they provide no times for the individual cuts on the CD liner, perhaps of more importance to hard-pressed DJ’s than to a more typical audience drawn from their live performances. But this may be as much a matter of economics as anything else; the CD comes with a single, double-sided cover liner, and no lyric sheet or fuller discussion of the music’s provenance or sources, which may be a pity – again, to DJ’s looking for something to say, rather than real human beings just enjoying the bloody music, if you follow me.

 Favorites here: The “Jackie Tar/Harvest Home/Banish Misfortune” medley (cut 3); the machine-gun delivery of “Little Beggarman,” which opens cut 6; “Arthur McBride,” cut 8 – sounding very close to Paul Brady’s setting of the song; and the near-swaggering “Minstrel Boy,” cut 14, with its emphasis more on the defiance of the bold young harper rather than his untimely death, an interesting re-emphasis. But the music is of high quality throughout, and the CD comes with the fullest recommendation for purchase and repeat listening.

 

(John McLaughlin, April 4, 2005)