Do any regular session players out there have two jigs that go well with the above? Please indicate the order they’re best played in if possible.
I’ve just been playing it, and realised that due to my unwarranted and strange antipathy towards jigs, I don’t have two more to compliment it. Maybe once I get a few more under my belt I will be cured. My stock of jigs is downright scanty, and those I do have might be considered to well worn (e.g. Saddle the Pony, Trip it up the Stairs).
Thanks for your help, Martin
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[ This Message was edited by: Martin Milner on 2002-03-11 09:05 ]
[ This Message was edited by: Martin Milner on 2002-03-11 09:06 ]
Is Merrily Kiss the Quaker a different tune from Merrily Kiss the Quaker’s Wife? I know the second, but not sure if I know the first if it is different.
I’ll have to look up Smash the Windows, sounds fun! Another jig title I like is “I Buried My Wife and Danced on her Grave”.
If you can get hold of the CD ‘CELTIC MOODS’ (Crimson Productions Ltd. 1997) you will find ‘The Hollywood Set’ viz. ‘Father O’Flynn - Haste to the Wedding - The Irish Washerwoman’
It’s a corker of a set played on the Uileann Pipes with accompanying instruments.
We play Drummond Castle x2 then Haste to the Wedding x2 then The Blackthorn Stick x1 starting on high D then The Blackthorn Stick starting on high E x1 then The Rakes of Kildare.x2 It seems to work really well with the key change of Blackthorn Stick.
[ This Message was edited by: selkie on 2002-03-11 17:19 ]
Thanks Martin, but no thanks. I don’t want spare 4th notes, I want spare fourth beats. In most jigs there are two beats (double jigs), and sometimes four beats (single jigs). Only slip jigs are missing a beat in every bar (what do you expect from baby goats on a mountain or butterflies?).
Read Brother Steve’s section on Jigs if you are learning a lot of jigs right now.
Weird. I think there must be some sort of blondes/brunettes/redheads thing about Irish dance music.
I can be attracted to reels, double, slip or single jigs, and occasionally even to the odd polka, but unconsciously find that most of the ones that really turn me on are jigs. No offence to blondes, many of whom are both beautiful and intelligent, I just have a similar thing about brunettes - and there’s something similar going on with red vs. white and rosé wines.
In the 70s and 80s, sessions seemed to comprise wall-to-wall reels, many of them having little or no character and seeming to me to be little more than clones of each other. The odd set of jigs might be thrown in, but they were generally played in the same hammered-out rhythm as the reels, totally lacking the lift which makes them so attractive.
I was pleasantly surprised on a trip back to Ireland a few years ago to find that jigs were making a comeback, and young musicians were playing them without any hangups. Incidentally, O’Neill comments somewhere about the fact that the slip jig was the most characteristically Irish rhythm, and I think he even says that they were very popular in his time, though numerically they are a minority part of his collections.
I don’t want to belittle the jigs already mentioned in this thread, but they’re mostly pretty hackneyed, if only from being over-played and used as inevitable background music for the Irish [brawl] scene in countless films.
If you want to turn onto jigs, try listening to Liam O’Flynn’s playing, especially on his last album, or to Brian McNamara’s solo album. Sublime. Or what about the slip jig that was part of the original Riverdance piece? Pure magic.
Ready for another list to lose in your innumerable list files? Here you go, anyway. (I’m about ready to pay someone to alphabetize my abc tunes. I don’t even know what I have anymore.)
I know a good number of jigs, even a few slip jigs. Some of the ones you hear at sessions can be boring, but, make no mistake, there are some great melodies in jig rhythm. I go for melodic interest first. I don’t care if anyone else plays them or not. A few accessible (book or recording) ones I like are:
Mist on the Mountain
Paddy Fahy’s (several by that name)
Kitty Come Down to Limerick
Hole in the Hedge
Monaghan’s (the 5 part)
Frieze Britches
Garrett Barry’s
An Phis Fhluic
Bank of Turf
Two cd’s that have a nice selection of jigs are Martin Hayes, ‘Under the Moon’ (or any Hayes cd) and Laurence Nugent’s ‘Windy Gap.’
Everyone seems to have done Kid on the Mountain, but, there’s a good reason for it.
Tony
Mike