Mulligan Records

2009 Year In Music

December 08, 2009

2009 Compass Records Round-Up

Despite the challenges in the industry this year, the Compass Records Group bucked the trend with a robust selection of new releases from across our catalogs. Last week, we got news that 2 of our albums have been nominated for 2009 Grammy Awards: Liz Carroll and John Doyle for Double Play in the Traditional World Music category and Compass co-founder Alison Brown for the track "Under The (Five) Wire" from her release The Company You Keep for Best Country Instrumental Performance. Our congratulations to all! As the year draws to a close, we are grateful for the chance to continue to support outstanding independent artists and are very appreciate of you for your support throughout the year. Here’s a brief synopsis of our year in music.

Celtic: In addition to the Grammy nominated album Double Play from John Doyle and Liz Carroll, we released new albums from several of our favorite Celtic artists including guitar whiz Tony McManus with The Maker’s Mark [winner of the Canadian Folk Music Award for Best Instrumental Album], Northern Ireland’s Beoga (called by The Wall Street Journal the most exiciting new traditional band to emerge from Ireland this century) with The Incident, accordionist extraordinare Sharon Shannon’s latest effort Saints and Scoundrels (featuring the radio favorite "Mama Lou" with guest vocals by Imelda May) and celebrated musician and educator Mick Moloney’s If it Wasn’t for the Irish and the Jews, a tribute to the early Tin Pan alley collaborations between Irish and Jewish composers and lyricists. In August we debuted New York based sensation The Pride of New York, a collaboration between Joanie Madden, Brendan Dolan, Billy McComiskey and Brian Conway, that received a 4 star review from the Irish Times, as well as the String Sisters, a collaboration of the world’s top female Celtic fiddlers including Annbjorg Lien, Catriona MacDonald, Liz Carroll, Liz Knowles, Mairead ni Mhoanaigh and Emma Hardelin. We wrapped up the year with another first class collaboration called The Unwanted featuring music from the Atlantic fringe with Cathy Jordan (of Dervish), Rick Epping and Seamie O’Dowd dubbed by Folkworld “the best of the barley from both the Old World and the New.”

Bluegrass/Americana: It was a big year in bluegrass, with new albums from old favorites as well as new albums from new members of the Compass roster. Banjoist and Compass co-founder Alison Brown delivered the GRAMMY-nominated The Company You Keep with a tip of the hat to her 17-year partnership with her touring band and also produced vocalist Dale Ann Bradley’s album Don’t Turn Your Back; this fall Dale Ann Bradley won the International Bluegrass Music Association’s award for Female Vocalist of the Year for the third straight year. Seven time IBMA Bass Player of the Year Missy Raines and her band The New Hip delivered a grooving set of bluegrass virtuosity flavored by jazz-tinged grooves on their debut album Inside Out and the Matt Flinner Trio offered an amazingly played set of new acoustic instrumentals on Music du Jour. This year also marked Compass debuts from the New England-based brother duo The Gibson Brothers with Ring the Bell, recorded at Compass Sound Studio and which has spent months on the bluegrass chart as of this writing, and Bearfoot, a group which got its start on the bluegrass festival circuit in Alaska, and whose release Doors and Windows debuted at #1 on the Billboard Bluegrass chart.

Folk: We started off 2009 with two albums recorded at Compass Sound Studio and produced by Compass co-founder Garry West: That Kind of Love from storied Southern singer/songwriter Pierce Pettis and a stripped down acoustic recording of fan favorites from Boston icon Catie Curtis entitled Hello Stranger (featuring a duet with Mary Gauthier on the title track). We also released From The Union Of Soul by Australian folk rockers The Waifs, recorded during their 2008 tour of Australia and featuring guest appearances from John Butler and Clare Bowditch. Kieran Kane, one of Nashville’s most revered songwriters, released Somewhere Beyond The Roses, an evocative and relevant set of new compositions, and we ended the year with a remarkable new project from the UK’s legendary Martin Simpson called True Stories which just received a record 6 nominations at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards.

Pop/Rock, Adult Alternative: We were very pleased to make more of Colin Hay’s music available this year. In addition to releasing the former Men at Work front man’s new studio project American Sunshine, marked by Hay’s own sideways glance at the American dream set to some of the purest pop, hardest rock and most emotionally bare acoustic balladry Hay has yet laid down, we also re-released several of Colin’s catalog titles, including Topanga, Transcendental Highway and Peaks and Valleys. (The fourth of his catalog titles, Company of Strangers, will be re-released in January 2010.) We also discovered the wonderful music of French songstress Coralie Clement and released her project Toystore in conjunction with her appearance at Central Stage in Central Park in June.

World: In June we made a foray into the world of salsa with the debut recording A Gozar from Latin SalSoul Queen Cecilia Noel. In late summer, we were very pleased to re-issue Bloodwood, the seminal recording from the late didjeridu master Alan Dargin, as a tribute to the life and music of this very inspirational musician. This instrumental masterpiece was the album with which we launched our company 17 years ago and the re-release contains a rare bonus track and expanded liner notes from his musical collaborator and producer Michael Atherton.

Tayberry Music: This summer we launched the Tayberry Records imprint with the release of two outstanding records. Renowned for his work as the composer of Riverdance, Bill Whelan delivered the gorgeous The Connemara Suite, performed by the Irish Chamber Orchestra, which beautifully accomplishes the composer’s goal of writing for traditional musicians within the framework of a chamber orchestra. Also in the classical vein, The Celtic Tenors album Hard Times offers a collection of harmony rich arrangements of well-known songs that demonstrate why these vocalists have established themselves as the most successful classical crossover artists ever to emerge from Ireland.

Reissues: We have continued our goal of bringing classic recordings back into print with the reissue of albums from the Green Linnet and Xenophile. Below is a list of the albums reissued in 2009.

Celtophile Collections
The Dance Music of Ireland: Jigs and Reels
The Voice of Celtic Woman: There was a Lady
A Collection of Celtic Moods: Season of Mists
Piping Hot
Traditional Music of Scotland
Traditional Music of Ireland

Xenophile:
Tarika Son Egal
Tarika Bibiango

The ’Cap’ of Kevin Burke’s Solo Canon: Fiddler’s Second Solo Recording Rank

November 10, 2008
The ’Cap’ of Kevin Burke’s Solo Canon: Fiddler’s Second Solo Recording Ranks First

CEOL - By Earle Hitchner

What do the Beatles’s "Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band" in 1967 and Irish traditional fiddler Kevin Burke’s "If the Cap Fits" in 1978 have in common?

The first partially influenced the second.

Before I explain why, I want to expose, once and for all, a dirty little secret about the impact of the Bothy Band, of which Burke was a member, on Irish traditional music from the middle to late 1970s. It was rock-and-roll. A key, usually overlooked ingredient in the enormously influential sound of the Bothy Band was its rhythm, and that came from Donal Lunny on bouzouki and guitar and Micheal O Domhnaill on guitar.

I can hear all the trad-heads and purists out there screaming "sacrilege" and "heresy." But in a recent interview I did with Lunny, now residing in Japan, he admitted that rock-and-roll shaped his attitude and approach to the Irish traditional music performed by the Bothy Band. Besides, how could an Irish acoustic trad band be heard or stand out amid the Stones, the Who, the Kinks, and other rock groups then dominating popular music? And what would be different or distinctive about the Bothy Band in the wake of previous Irish traditional ensembles?

Again the answer is rhythm, affecting choice and order of tunes, attack, energy, embellishment and improvisation, instrumental layering and density, and overall imaginative execution and sonic power. Of course, it didn’t hurt that Burke, Lunny, Micheal and Triona Ni Dhomhnaill, Matt Molloy, Paddy Keenan, and Tommy Peoples (Burke’s predecessor on fiddle) were among the best Irish traditional performers on the planet and, as a sextet, constituted an Irish traditional supergroup at a time when that term was used far more judiciously and begrudgingly than today. And I do mean "begrudgingly": many older, hard-core Irish traditional musicians still scoff at claims for Bothy Band ascendancy and strength within the close-knit trad community back then.

By 1978, the year "If the Cap Fits" was released on Dublin’s Mulligan Records, Kevin Burke had already recorded with the Glenside Ceili Band and Christy Moore, issued his "Sweeney’s Dream" solo debut in America, and made two studio albums with the Bothy Band in Ireland. But Burke’s musical interests weren’t bound by Irish trad alone. In his note on the back cover of the original "If the Cap Fits" LP, he mentions "negro bluesmen," and it was not a facile reference. On BBC radio in London, he listened to the blues of such musicians as Robert Johnson, Son House, and Roosevelt Sykes, and he was also smitten by the slide and bottleneck guitar playing of Ry Cooder, with whom he guested on Arlo Guthrie’s "Last of the Brooklyn Cowboys" album in 1973.

Like Lunny, Burke additionally listened to rock. "When I first listened to ’Sgt. Pepper’s,’ I was impressed by how the Beatles made many of their songs flow into each other without coming to a dead stop," he told me. "I thought I’d try something like that for my solo album. So there’s a glimmer of ’Sgt. Pepper’s’ influence on that long set."

The "long set" is an 11-tune, 16-minute medley concluding "If the Cap Fits," which marks its 30th anniversary with a special new remastered Compass edition CD that features a lengthy new essay by me. (At Burke’s request, I omitted the Beatles’ influence in my CD essay, but I feel no such constriction here in "Ceol.") Throughout the unbroken flow of his fiddling, he gets a little help from his friends, including Gerry O’Beirne on slide guitar, who enter and leave in a manner akin to a real session, which was the point of this long set for Burke. It is a jaw-dropping track combining skill, invention, and stamina in equally potent portions.

I am just as impressed by Burke’s achievement on the other seven, far shorter tracks (none is longer than 4:22). Each of them is an exquisitely conceived and chiseled performance, capturing the fiddler at the apex of his trademark silkiness but also injected with Sligo-style yeastiness.

Produced by Donal Lunny, "If the Cap Fits" has never sounded cleaner, crisper, or more stirring than this new Compass remastering from the original quarter-inch analog tapes in 1978. Thirty years later, it remains a monumental accomplishment and the solo summit of Kevin Burke’s recording career so far. It is a must addition to any reputable home library of Irish traditional music.

[Published on November 5, 2008, in the IRISH ECHO newspaper, New York City. Copyright (c) Earle Hitchner. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of author.]

For more information on Kevin Burke and "If The Cap Fits", please click here.

LATEST NEWS

2009 Year In Music

2009 Poll

Winner announced for Pierce Pettis Songwriting Contest

Congratulations to Amy Stroup, winner of the Pierce Pettis American Songspace Songwriting contest!

Out of the several hundred entries, Amy’s song "I Fell for You" was chosen by Pierce and the staff of American Songwriter and Compass Records.

She will workshop and record at the famous "Hillbilly Central" Compass Sound Studio with Pierce later this fall.

www.piercepettis.com

Liz Carroll & John Doyle to play for President Obama on St. Patrick’s Day 2009

The ’Cap’ of Kevin Burke’s Solo Canon: Fiddler’s Second Solo Recording Rank