Here’s a great clip of the tune called… hu… Maybe “Mist Covered Mountain”. I recorded it in East Durham in july. T’was June McCormak, Michael Rooney, Brian McNamara and a few others playing. Isnt that great?
It is really lovely. It just bounces sort of gently along. Then a bit of a surprise in the second part and then back to bouncing gently along. No rush or frantic feeling.
This is a really enjoyable clip! For quite a while I have wondered what the players are doing to make a tune swing and drive forward like this. In this example the bazouki or guitar helps by giving emphasis on the 1st note of the first 6 beats and the 1st and 4th of the next 6 beats. Does anybody have any other insights?
Mike
Thanks for the clips, Azalin. Because of this clip and the other you posted at http://chiffboard.mati.ca/viewtopic.php?t=31263, I checked out the musicians web site:
http://homepage.eircom.net/~michaelandjune/1024_768/index.htm
and found a few shorter clips there. If you have more, I hope you share them.
Lovely stuff Az.
Am I wrong or was this at the “listening” session where all the invited players were cooped up in a kind of pigpen in the restaurant. The listeners were all crowded around three deep outside the pen and there were about 20 microphones lined up along the fence, including those of some Chiff radio journalists.
After gawping at the very musical animals for a while, some of them very gawpable, I followed our lurker friend to the bar. (Are you reading this, Mr Clurk?). The music was just as good from there and the chat was even better.
That’s a harp, not a bouzouki! Although it sounds like there’s something else in there as well, maybe Karen Ashbrook on the hammered dulcimer in the background?
They would have had that same lift and swing without any accompaniment…listen to the melody players and you’ll see where the swing comes from.
I think there’s a piano very discreetly adding chords here and there to what the harp is doing… can’t be sure though. Hmm don’t remember a hd at that session, but it certainly sounds like one.
You know, I thought that might be a harp but the odds were in favor of the zouk.
Maybe I didn’t phrase my question well. I have been listening for years to group and solo trad playing and I haven’t yet been able to reproduce the swing. At least not to my satisfaction. Perhaps the harp accompaniment was a red herring. It just distracted from the real question I was asking. When I think of swing I think Tommy Peoples. His solo playing is very rhythmic. It could be that I just don’t have the technical skills on the whistle to do this yet. I know I used to be able to do it on guitar.
MB
Definitely sounds like the Bernie O’s session on Wednesday night. I don’t remember there being a piano there, but there was definitely a hammer dulcimer and harp.
That was the best session all week long. Last year, it was more or less the same group at Bernie O’s, also on the Wednesday night.
This year, there as Mike McHale there too, and Patrick Ourceau, Maeve Donnelly, it was a rather large session, and they all seemed to be having a great time 
I haven’t been able to listen to this clip, but from all the discussion it sounds like it was the Listening Room session at Bernie O’s on Wednesday. Playing in the circle that night were June McCormack and Mike McHale on flute, Michael Rooney on harp and concertina, Brian McNamara on pipes, Maeve Donnelly and Tes Slominski on fiddle, and Karen Ashbrook on hammered dulcimer and flute. Patrick Ourceau was there too, but he didn’t really play all that much. I was very lucky in that I got there a bit late after staying 'til the end of the concert up the road, but Paul Oorts (Karen Ashbrook’s husband) was sitting right behind her and happened to have an empty seat next to him that he summoned me up into. So I got to sit right behind the circle for the whole thing. In chatting with Paul, he mentioned that he wished he had his recorder with him, and I said “Gee, mine’s in the car.” I had left it there since there was a bit in the written stuff they handed out at the beginning of the week about not recording concerts, etc, without getting permission from the players first. Normally I’m not all that rule-bound, but for some reason I’d decided to comply with this one. But after Paul expressed his desire to record the session, I figured hey, getting permission from a player’s spouse is just as good as getting permission from the player, so I went out and got my recorder. And boy am I glad I did, as this was the best music I heard up there the whole week - and there was a lot of good music there.
I agree that there was a bit of the “do not feed the animals” aspect to this session, but if you can get beyond that, this was a perfect example of what a session ought to be. Although obviously several subsets of the group had played together a lot beforehand (June and Michael, for example) there was still that air of unfamiliarity between the players that lends itself to a lot of “do you know this one?”, which in the hands of folks with large tune repertoires invariably results in some lovely lesser-heard gems getting pulled out. (There was an extensive tour through the Sean Ryan hornpipe oeuvre that night, for instance.) Also everyone was relaxed and at the same level, with no one trying to be a star or hog the limelight. Either there were no session alphas, or everyone was a session alpha, whichever way you want to look at it. The music was the star all night, as it always should be. Yet there was great craic between the players as well, although maybe this wouldn’t have been noticed by those who weren’t lucky enough to have a front row seat, as I was.
I found it particularly interesting to see the way that Maeve Donnelly varied her style from what she displayed on stage during the concerts. There, where she was on center stage, she used lots of fancy and flashy bowing - always in the most musical way, don’t get me wrong on that - but in this listening room session there was none of that. She adapted her style to fit her surroundings, and did what needed to be done to maximize the total musicality of the group. The balance and blend between that group of musicians was amazing. Everyone was listening to everone else, and I think that this as much as anything else contributed to the great lift in their playing even at the relaxed tempos they took. All of them were adding lift equally, with no one pulling ahead or dragging down.
All in all, I’d say this was the best class in how to play Irish music I’ve had in a long time…
Yup. I must say I was slightly horrified by the sight of those poor people, penned in like that, surrounded on all sides by all manner of recording equipment. If it was me I’d have packed up and left. I can’t imagine that they enjoyed themselves all that much, although the music was lovely indeed. Whether this gawking/recording is accepted or not, I thought it rather rude. Why not simply enjoy the music as the ephemeral thing it is, rather than insisting on taking it home? If you want to learn tunes, then buy their CDs.
Dave
Aha, smoked you out. And on false pretences too - it seems that I got the wrong session. Never mind, good to see you, glad you rose to the bait. Expect your comments will provoke a storm in a plastic beaker though.
Steve, that was the session on wednesday at the restaurant. It wasnt a zoo at all.
Session playing and CD playing is a totally different thing (with most commercial CDs). I believe it’s MUCH better to learn tunes from that type of session rather than from CDs, especially in this kind of session where, as someone stated above, musicians listen to each other and try to blend in. You don’t have anyone trying to outbalance the others, or anyone lost in his/her own bubble and playing by him/herself. I learned a lot from these session recordings, they’re the recordings I value the most, so I really don’t regret being part of the zoo 
I’m sure you don’t. But if every time you tried to have a few tunes with friends you had fifty microphones very nearly shoved up your nose, perhaps you would see things differently. I agree it is a great deal for the record_ers_; it is the record_ees_ who have the bum deal. I imagine the musicians involved view those listening sessions as a chore, albeit an important one from a teaching perspective. I’m sure they have their fun elsewhere, in private.
Don’t we all? 
Yeah, but not all of us use Joyce’s towel!
It’s a lovely tune, and well played, but it’s not “The Mist Covered Mountains”, which is a Gaelic song and Scottish pipe retreat (slowish march usually in 3/4 or 6/8 time) with the Gaelic title of “Chì Mi Na Mórbheanna” ( trans. ‘I will see the Morverns’ - a mountain range).
Hear a MIDI file here:http://www.contemplator.com/scotland/mistcvd.html (a bit slow, and with no swing at all - also with awful victorian lyrics)
you’ll find the Gaelic lyrics and some translations at http://ingeb.org/songs/mistcovd.html
b
Nope this is the Mist Covered Mountain, its one of Junior Crehan’s tunes. There seem to be some similarities with the part A of the Scottish march though. (albeit in different rhythm)
Junior Crehan apparently turned several airs and song melodies into dance tunes…his jig The Sheep in the Boat is from the air Anach Cuain and takes its title from the story in the song. I had read somewhere that Junior composed the jig and Willie Clancy came up with the title, but I doubt that’s true…it seems more like he composed the jig based on the Scottish song melody and named it after the air.
You can hear Junior playing this tune himself on the great Clare fiddle anthology Ceol an Chlair, which is supposed to be re-released on CD sometime this year.
This tune is widely attributed to Junior Crehan, although there’s always been a bit of debate (including within his family) about which tunes he actually composed.