Zito the Bubbleman is yet another gem from the fingers of the illustrious, though now sadly missed Gordon Duncan. The legends tell us that at a festival in Italy Gordon saw a performer going by the afore mentioned name, who blew a gigantic soap bubble which encompased his person (Zitos not Gordon’s) and in which he proceeded to perambulate about the stage.Opinions 1 crawled out from between the ears of piper/whistler Rory Campbell. Kitty Kelly’s which is also known as Cathrine Kelly’s, Cathryn Kelly’s, Kathrine Kelly’s, Grace Kelly’s, Catriona Kelly’s, Ned Kelly’s, Aoibhneas Eilis Ní Cheallaigh, Eibhlinn Ni Cheaillaigh, Dr David Kelly’s, Eileen Kelly’s, Evelyn Kelly’s, & would, by its polynominal nature and its extreme 9/8ness, seem to fulfill all of the prophecies telling of the coming of a trad tune. However, she’s not the messiah, she’s a very naughty girl. The tune’s real name appears to be Mary Kelly’s and it was in fact brought forth to pass by the mighty Tommy Peoples.
Beg ar Vann is the original and Breton name for the Pointe de Vann which is French for the second westernmost stickie-out bit of Finisterre Sud (south-western Brittany, go look it up on a map). Dan composed the tune in honour of an occasion when he and some friends nearly lost their lives to a large wave whilst acting the goat quite a bit closer to the water line than they really ought to have been, on Beg ar Vann. Moral of the story: Don't follow Dan down a cliff to the Ocean's edge. The following Gavotte, for which we have no official or polite name was learned from Toulouse-based trad rockers Wilfried and Nicolas Besse currently of the group Doolin
Sam Jones, by Richard Thompson, has been described by one writer on the subject as ‘a memorably creepy sea chantey’. This is an odd description as really the song is neither. The character Sam would appear to be an historical amalgamation of several centuries of ‘Rag and Bone’ men who started their illurstrious careers as scavengers on the cooling fields of mediæval battle. Over the years the profession developed a less morbid character. More recent ‘Rag and Bone’ men were more typically of the habit of collecting scrap metal and other odds and ends to sell. The Sam Jones in this song is but a simple worker who likes his work and having a cup of tea after.
Pegasus Rests is a sort of slow air composed by Gavin in commemoration of the laying to rest of another legendary æronautical ferro-equine beast.The following tune, Grey Smoke from the Mountain, is also by Mr. Marwick and was composed after a festival in Poland where he witnessed a performance by a group whose name in Polish translates as Grey Smo...aye, aye, you know the rest. The band consisted of about forty fiddlers, electric guitar, bass a singer and a goat which spent the gig tethered to a mic-stand looking sheepish[1]. Both history and Gav recall that after the concert when he had a chance to speak to a member of said group and mentioned that it would be great if they could come to Scotland his response was ‘...why? Though the last tune here sounds like it might be trad. Breton it was actually composed by Cammy and is called El Greebo. El Greebo was originally the title of a promo photo for an Edinburgh DJ wherein he [the DJ] is wearing a false moustache.
Cam composed this air,Witch, as part of a collaborative project with a writer/poet mate of his. The project was based on an experience of Cam’s of several years ago. He had left the pub after a night on the piss with the afore mentioned mate and several others and was on his way home when he passed by the back wall of a cemetery connected to the old kirk of a village through which he was obliged to pass. There was a hole in the wall and seeing light coming through it he stopped to investigate.There were apparently several young women engaging in some kind of weird new-age ‘ritual’ there in amongst the gravestones. When in his nervousness Cam broke a twig with his foot these lassies were not best pleased, and even a wee bit embarassed, at being discovered and gave chase with much wailing and gnashing of teeth. The full project was never really finished partly because the rhythm of Cam’s tune, a slow reel, never really worked with the metre of the poetry and Cam, in his turn, was rather less than amused about this poet continually spelling his name wrong... even if it was to protect the innocent/guilty.
We crack off this set with a very light-hearted and bouncy jig by Simon Thoumire called Becky Taylor’s Audacity (Simon, we want an explanation!). Becky is succeeded by the cracking though aptly named Harder to Jig which is an Appellation Carina Hewat Contrôlée. We finish this suite with a tune from the legacy of the immensely talented and also sadly missed Martyn Bennett.
The first of these merry melodies is a traditional Norwegian air called Lugumleik about which our Tromsø correspondent had this to say: ‘...hmmm,...Man kan onta at Lugumleik betyr noe sånn som den kule slåtten eller noe i den duren. Faktisk hor jeg ikke peiling og lider her av underliggende musikalske struktureringer så hvem vet hva det blir til slutt! Slåtten er i allefall rå bra og skottene er ikke så borte vekk de heller.’ However, our secret Olso agent was not sure and asked: ‘Om det tek el veke for ein mann ø gøi fjorten dagar, for mange epler gøi det i ei tønne met druer?’ The jury is still out cold on that one. Davie Cattanach composed the second of these tunes which was originally cried Blackwater River, a title as stately and mysterious (and contagious-sounding) as the melody whose existence it proclaims. Soon after we recorded it, however, he phoned us to let us know that he had changed the title to The Hungry Frenchman. When we first heard mention of Vitträd our collective reaction was to check if we could find it in the IKEA catalogue in either soft pine or with the birch-wood veneer. To our great surprise and delight Vitträd turned out to be available only through the Swedish band Garmarna. According to Garmarna, our Tromsø correspondent and our double secret Oslo agent Vitträd means ‘withered’.
The first strathspey in this set, Wendy’s Lament, is a composition of the Nova Scotian fiddler/baroque violinist David Greenberg. Jon composed the second of these strathspeys in a paroxysm of displeasure over transgressions and injustices committed by a musical colleague. In keeping with the grand tradition of stepdancing strathspey titles such as ‘Stepping on the Bridge’, ‘In Step with Harvey’, ‘Steppin’ Out’ &c. he called it Steppin’ on Your Face. The Mystery of the Mud Angel was a bit of a cop out title given to tune composed by Dan after an incident which he and Jon witnessed in a pub in Paisley where Jon was performing. A young and rather inebriated female of the species, whilst gaily frolicking about in front of the stage area, knocked over an entire table of empty glasses. Following a beautiful pirouette with body held magically at 45° to vertical (for which the judges awarded her a combined score of 9.7) she fell hands down into the pile of the afore mentioned and now broken glasses. Blood gushing from her forearm, she disappeared for an all too brief few minutes and then, in stark contrast to the expectations and desires of the assembled company to see her conveyed away by practitioners of the medical (or legal) arts she reappeared, her hand mummified in bog-roll and another pint held securely therein to continue her bacchanalia minuet. The tune, composed in commemoration of this event, was originally to be called ‘The Red Hand of Paisley’ but it seemed to us, upon deeper meditation that the political connotations thereof might lead us to places where we did not necessarily want to go. Peter on the Logging Road was composed for Dan’s mate Peter the vicious, virile, victorious vespa violator of ol’ Piermont towne[2]. Over the years of their friendship they were often wont to set about cutting and splitting firewood at hours of the evening which, with the aid of particular libations and assorted machinery, frequently resulted in the local police being asked to join in the fun and games. On ya go Pete the boy ya!
The 37 Bus was composed by Michael Toner (Michael, our humblest apologies for the slanderous falsehoods formerly published here). It is, at least on the surface, an hilarious song about a Glasgow jakey beating nine colours of snot out of a large number of the Glasgow polis. Besides being a cabaret style comic song it seems a rather tongue-in-cheek though affectionate commentary on Glasgow life. It is also rather refreshing in that it is not tartan short-bread tin kind of song with a little bow tied ‘round it.
It might, at first glance, seem rather narcissistic that a tune by James Gray should be called the Evæl Dr. Gray, but as the layers of mystery are peeled away and the mist rises from the hills we find that although the now Dr. Gray, Dan’s former flatmate, may have written the tune it was in fact Dan who named it. The tune was composed in honour of Dan discovering that if the bass drone of a set of border-pipes is tied into a sliding half-hitch knot it will sound in D rather than A thereby allowing for a more realistic approximation of the D-æolian mode. The tune was named in honour if its composer winning a PhD competition or something like that. Mrs. Dundas of Arniston provides us with a lighter, more delicate intermezzo in C-major before we unleash the hounds. The first of the hounds to be unleashed is the mighty melody, Marianne’s Reel by Fr. Angus Morris of Cape Breton[3]. Coming in behind Marianne is MacDonald’s Reel which is another transatlantic Frankenstein construction of tune. It was not, however, assembled using the pieces of dead tunes... though a bit of digging was necessary to find all its bits. It exists (and has done so for some time) as MacDonald’s March or Quickstep in the Donald MacDonald Collection (1831), J&R Glen’s Collection and Ross’s Collection (1885). In all three of t hese collections, however, only parts one and two of our version are given. Barry Shears of Glace Bay, Cape Breton, gives a version with parts one, two and three of our version and in Quebec they play a tune called the Reel de Jos Cromier which consists of parts one, three and four of our version. Thanks really must be given to the Vermont/Newfoundland band Nightingale by whom we were inspired to take up the habit.
Slow airs being the fiercely territorial creatures that they are we do not normally put two of them together in a single set. We make an exception here owing to the strong mutual attraction between these two. The first, Far Away, was composed by Pete Jung, whom we suspect of being a Vermonter. Be his nationality what it may, he composed the aforementioned after a contradance[4] in Bratleboro, VT, whereat he beheld a ‘ creature of character and feature’ with whom, but sadly not by whom, he seems to have been quite taken. Although the title, Far Away, refers to where she seems to have remained, relative to him, it turns out that she was not all that distant after all she was just very small. We finish with a semantically and musically fitting successor, The Tail End of the Tour, which Jon composed. Contrary to what some of you filthy-minded, juvenile sickos might be thinking, the tail end of the tour is not a reference to what musicians are often alleged to get up to when on tour. The tune was composed during the final days of an intense and exhausting (though ultimately very fulfilling) musical experience. At such times the impending joy of seeing loved ones and home again is starkly juxtaposed to the dread of returning to the world mundane.
We kick off with three original tunes from the band. The first strathspey and reel, Moladh an Ruis air a’ Phraidheagh le Cneamh ‘s Uisge Beatha, which translates as ‘In Praise of the Whisky Garlic Fried Rice’, was composed by Mr. Houghton in celebration of a most wholesome repast which was concocted at the end of a week of recording, in Drumelzier in the Scottish Borders. It was discovered upon a morning that the edible contents of the kitchen consisted of a bulb of garlic, half a bottle of whisky, leftover rice an egg and possibly even some cheese found behind the fridge. The rendering of the above ingredients in a wok rather unexpectedly yielded a delicious breakfast (Keep your een peeled for the up coming Cantrip Cookbook!). Jon wrote Tom’s Incredible Table to commemorate the interior decoration misfortunes of a friend (who shall remain nameless). Once upon a time this friend spent many hours at the selecting, purchasing and transporting of a beautiful antique oak table, only to discover that its presence in his living room left naught but a one foot wide path in which to move around the perimeter of the room. An Otter’s Pocket, as you might expect, would be a rather dark, damp and probably furry place.
Gav introduced us to Felix the (greased up greco-roman) Wrestler. Felix is also known as ‘Biddy from Sligo’ by some of his mates in the west of Ireland, though now he really prefers to be called Loretta. Felix has been an inspiration to us on a personal level as a fine example of how to really be in touch with oneself. We have put him next to Siobhán Ó Domhnaill’s no. 2 with The Choice Wife taking up the rear. This final tune was extracted from the grey matter of Orkney guitarist Kris Drever. Some people also call her the ‘Whinny Hill Jig’ but we like her better like this.
Gavin composed this first tune, Hardanger Fjord by carving it into a piece of frozen cheese while trying to hitch a sleigh ride from Helsinki back to Tromsø: for a concert with the Trondheim Beaver Squeezing Philharmonic. Mrs. Mary Macdonald was found, quite innocently but rather squashed, between pages 162 and 163 of the Atholl Collection. It was our friend Laura Risk who originally introduced us to her and to whom we are grateful for the arrangement.
We are assured by those who claim to know that The Ass in the Graveyard was originally neither an ass, nor indeed an arse, as some have suggested. It was composed by Terry Tully, of Dublin, and, according to our sources, was done so after a funeral whereat the entire mass was held in the graveyard. Due, perhaps, to poor elocution, to a lack of careful listening or to just plain, common garden variety inebriation on the part of the oral conduits of this piece we now find the title in the form given above. Tha Còt’ Orm ‘S Àrdach Muileinn[5], which title translates as ‘I am wearing a coat in praise of the mill’, we got from Barry Shears. It is a driving wee strathspey from Cape Breton but derives ultimately from a Scottish port a beul that satirises the soft mill-woven cloth of the lowlands while praising the rougher homespun fabric of the Gael. It also appears as a 2/4 march called Domhnall Gorm or Donald Blue’s March in the William Ross Collection. The Oceanographer is a light-hearted wee reel, which sprang from one of Dan’s frequent and often lengthy mental recesses. It was composed to commemorate one of his father’s birthdays - the number of which we are not at liberty to disclose. The tune and his father’s profession bear the same title.
Pirsta is a Finnish tune whose name means ‘silver’, or so we were led to believe. Subsequent encounters with native speakers of the Finnish tongue have left us with the distinct impression that either some nit may have fed us a pile of porkies or that our informant was speaking b dialect. The Good Drying is another stomping tune from the fingers, via the pen, of Roddy S. MacDonald who now, poor soul, lives in London... or maybe Singapore... no wait! it’s Japan. Onga Bucharesti is a Yiddish wedding reel of the type traditionally played for smashing glasses and plates to. It was infact composed by Mr. D. Taris, known to his frineds as Mr. “D”. The rehearsals for this set resulted in three or four trips to A&E for cut feet, two large domestic disputes and fifteen pounds of broken crockery to sweep up. The tune itself came to us by way of De Danann.
The Marquis of Huntly’s Farewell, by Willie Marshall and The Leys of Luncarty are two strathspey from central and north-eastern Scotland. Bog an Lochan is a tune which is very popular particularly in the north and west of Scotland and Cape Breton. There are several puirt a beul texts sung to this tune, one of the more popular being Ciamar a ni mi a dannsa direach, ‘How will I do the straight dance’. The title refers to a Water-ouzel, cinctus aquaticus, which is a small shore bird but one cannot help but wonder, given the imagery associated with certain birds and particularly their nests in Gaelic poetry, if this is not an anatomical rather than zoological reference (see the Otter’s Pocket). Clem was composed by Stéphane Devineau from the French Trad-ish band Mes Souliers Sont Rouges in honour of his niece Clementine. Sheepskin Beeswax is a traditional Irish tune, which we obtained from the Montréal-based band La Bottine Souriante. When finally given the chance to ask them whence they obtained it we were so over joyed with the result and celebrated it so throughly that upon waking up later that morning we found that not only La Bottine but any useful memory of the information imparted to us had vacated the premises.
The first air in this set, All the Seasons in a Day, was composed by Cammy after an afternoon during which it snowed, rained, howled a gale and spat little balls of ice on him before sun-burning the top of his head and causing him to sweat. Three days after he first played it for us Cam was struck by lightning, fell from his roof into a burning tar-pit only then to be run over by a bus while trying to crawl back to his front door. We’re looking forward to whatever compositions are inspired by that experience. Sets a Dish Cloot was not inspired by falling off of roofs into burning tar pits but rather by the looks, charms and affections of his special lady friend, to use the parlance of our time.
The Joker’s Polska is a traditional Swedish dance tune, which has its origins in the region not far, but on the other side of the border, from where Gav hitched that lift to Tromsø[6]. Most of An Dro no. 211 was salvaged from the wreckage of an old cassette tape of Breton piping. It appears, however, that the third part may actually be a stowaway part from another tune fleeing state sponsored persecution. Gav got An Dro no. 625 from Jackie Molard in exchange for six pairs of socks (that’s a tune title, by the way). An Dros are a type of chain-link dance from the south-central region of Brittany. Individual tunes of this type traditionally take their names from the first line of the text sung to them. Since we have not yet found words to any of these tunes we have, as you can see, come up with our own indexing system for them.
Jon learned Panpoxa from a cellist in between recording sets in the basement of a multi-storey car park in Bilbao. The name means ‘a sweet young girl’ (oooh! aaah!) in Basque and was composed by Benito Lerxundi, a Basque composer who is apparently ‘very into his Irish music’. We were originally going to stuff this lovely melody into a dark and cramped, sock-drawer type of set with a bunch of other tunes but upon reflection we decided to leave it out on its own to breathe, expand and mature.
The Cantrip (not Catnip, Cantrap, Cat Trap, Cat Flap or worse) is yet another fine tune from the vast and probably criminal imagination of Mr. Bews. ‘Cantrip’ is a word in Scots which, well, rather than waste time here with etymology, go look at the first page of the website. Mo Cheallaichin Fionn, ‘My Wee Fair Kelly’ and An Tiocfaidh tú abhaile leam, ‘You Will Come Home With Me?’ are two well-known Irish Jigs which have theis roots in both the vocal and instrumental traditions. Ian’s Jig is traditional or at least a large percentage of it is. The first two parts as played here or close variations thereof, were played in Cape Breton. The hereinbefore mentioned Barry Shears has transcribed one such version from the playing of piper Alex Currie, though he notes that it is also found in the Logan Collection no. 4 under the title ‘An Irish Jig’. The third, fourth and fifth parts of this tune (and, in all probability, the name) were added on by piper Ian MacInnes during his time with the Tannahill Weavers. Ian’s Jig is here accompanied by the air to the Gaelic song Theid Mi Dhachaigh Chrò Chinn t-Sàile, ‘I will go home to the Cattle folds of Kintail’ original text to which, according to Allan MacDonald of Glen Uig, was composed by a Highland soldier, gravely wounded at the battle of Sheriffmuir.
Cumha gun Ainm or the ‘Nameless Lament’ is a piece which comes down to us solely by means of the MacArthur/MacGregor manuscript. The manuscript was compiled sometime around 1820 so the tune is at least 180 years old but as it does not appear to be one of Angus MacArthur’s compositions it is probably quite a bit older than that. It has a beautiful and haunting melodic structure and uses certain embellishments which are found nowhere in the modern Ceol Mór tradition. According to John Purser Cumha gun Ainm is rhythmically and melodically very closely related to the Pi-li-li-iu lament which, in its turn by way of the vocal lament tradition, is derived from the call of certain sea-birds. With respect to the execution of certain features, in particular the ‘echo-beats’ we have tried to follow the styles outlined by Joseph MacDonald (1763) and Alan MacDonald (1996) rather than that of the modern competition. Dagger (David) Gordon who is a shepherd and mandolin player from Easter Ross composed The Lambing Storm and Brendan MacGlinchy has expressed not only a beautiful sentiment but also a superb piece of tune writing with the Splendid Isolation. Alasdair Fraser composed the Skye Barbecue presumably in honour of a barbecue which took place on Skye rather than as an editorial comment on the social and political history of that island over the last three hundred years. Dolina MacKay has to be one of the sexiest, pelvis-gyrating reels in the repertoire so we thought she would be a good one to go out with...
