Whitmores75087 was right in his reply on the last thread. Paddy Moloney should be mentioned. ALOT! If I could credit my interest in Irish music to any one person it would be him. When i was a kid I wanted to play pipes like the guy in the Chieftains. Unfortunately, I took a 14 year detour into Highland pipes (no harm done). I’ve met and played whistle with the Chieftains a few times. Paddy plays as well on stage as he does in the studio. He is also a genuinely nice person. I was really suprised when I went back stage at the Ann Arbor concert this January. I hadn’t seen them live in about 10 years and was bringing some duplicate photos we had taken together at Orchestra Hall in Detroit. Before I could get to him, he recognized me, greeted me well and remembered my piping and jewelry making. I was floored! He also told me he’s been playing a resin chanter for the past year(Michael Booreman made it possibly?)We all owe a debt to him and the Chieftains for making our music of choice more accessible.
Enough gushing from me. Let’s hear what you think.
Marc
Everybody just lurking out of politeness?
I have to admit that, as I got into the pipes, I grew to like Paddy’s style less and less. He’s out there on his own side-track. I sometimes feel that it’s because in his formative years he had a yearning to do something more than what he had been taught, but he hadn’t anybody to develop his playing along more traditional lines and so he developed his own techniques. But that’s pure speculation.
I do acknowledge unreservedly how important an influence he was in helping to present the music in a way which made it accessible to many people, some of whom would probably never have taken up playing without the influence of the Chieftains and Paddy’s role within that group.
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Nope, what I’m politely suggesting is that at an early age he outgrew his much-respected teacher Leo Rowsome who played an extremely open style, and began to develop his own techniques for putting more bite in his playing.
It’s just a hypothesis, put up for people who know more about his development to agree or disagree with
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So would it be a bad thing to emutlate his style when learning tunes?
Marc
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Is it being suggested that Paddy M. ‘outgrew’ what Leo Rowsome was teaching?
Consider that when the Chieftains first started out, traditional music was, in Ireland at least, almost dead. They’re to be credited with, as it was stated, making it more accessible through their world travels.
I seriously doubt that getting AWAY from the tradition was what they were after in the early years of the band, in fact, it wasn’t until trad music was becoming all the rage again that the Chieftains started to take other tacks on the same tunes - playing with a Chinese orchestra, for example - but that stuff didn’t come along until the later 1980s, and they’d been a band for almost 25 years by then.
Like a previous poster said, listen to the piping on ‘Drones & Chanters’ and the early Chieftains albums to hear Paddy’s style - he’s surely influenced heavily by ‘The King of the Pipers’.
I must agree, listen to the drones and chanters, brilliant “pipering” by Paddy M. Also for the interesting double bore Rowsome chanter.
Cheers,
Liam
[ This Message was edited by: omarapiping on 2002-09-20 00:17 ]
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By “open” I mean legato, the opposite of “tight” playing.
When I first heard Leo Rowsome’s “King of the Pipers” record it was so exciting I literally got gooseflesh, and the hair stood up on the back of my neck. But as I began to hear other pipers later on, my taste evolved and I found that I just didn’t like Leo’s style any more: it was just too open for my taste. Tommy Kearney’s style is similar in overall sound, but he inserts enough tight ornamentation to make it more attractive. Likewise, while Ennis sounds “tight” overall, he actually plays plenty of notes open. Andy Conroy, at the other end of the spectrum from Leo, played just about every note tight, but while it’s impressive in terms of skill, it does nothing for me in terms of musical taste either. Tommy Reck played pretty damned tight, but without losing the music.
The point about Moloney is that, although I’m not suggesting he doesn’t play traditional music, there’s something different about the sound of what he does. It’s as if he wanted to depart from the openness of Leo’s style and invented his own techniques. That doesn’t in any way detract from all that he has done to make trad music popular, it’s just that in terms of piping some of what he does is a bit odd.
If you were to draw a graph with a line running from Rowsome at the “open” end and Conroy at the “tight” end, you could position all the other pipers along it in terms of their mix of standard tight versus open techniques, but Moloney wouldn’t be actually on the line.
I’m the first to admit that this is all very subjective stuff, but it does seem significant that while there are plenty of “Keenan clones” or others playing in the style of the other Grand Masters, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone even trying to sound like Moloney. Maybe I should listen to a few of the earlier records and see if I can substantiate what I’m arguing.
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I’m the first to admit that this is all very subjective stuff, but it does seem significant that while there are plenty of “Keenan clones” or others playing in the style of the other Grand Masters,
Have you ever been to a formal GHB competition, or heard how they are judged? To be considered on par the playing has to be just so…
and every ornamentation is heavily scrutinized for style and timing and all that for conformity to the standards.
Now, I see nothing wrong with people playing or aspiring to play Uilleann Pipes in the style of their favorite piper, in fact it’s a good way to learn. I just hope that Uilleann Piping, in general, never goes the way of that sanitized robo-piper thing like the GHB.
Anyway.. My 2 cents.
[ This Message was edited by: paul on 2002-09-20 19:57 ]
I must say ‘the King of the Pipers’ was one of my first piping lps [there wasn’t much else was there]and while it didn’t give me goosebumps ever I enjoyed for a while before moving on. I think Leo was a bit past it when he recorded that one, ill health didn’t do him any favours.
It is often said Leo rose to the occasion when playing and I have some recordings of him playing at concerts during the early sixties and you can’t help being drawn in by his music there [interestingly on the same concert was one of his pupils, ‘Liam og O Floinn’ who goes through The Maid at the Spinning Wheel as the perfect Rowsome clone, this was 1964].
On the matter of opne playing, Leo, certainly during his earlier years, had a range of piping techniques you shouldn’t underestimate, 78 rpms like the Scholar, Peter Street and a few others from the 1930s are displays of mighty piping technique and I remember my surprise at some of them, thinking he had a range and technique very similar by times to Johnny Doran’s [that’s a long time ago though and I would have to go back to the recordings to re-affirm that impression]. I think he just didn’t do himself a favour bashing everything to death with that regulator style of his, it makes his music sound unnecessarily [and very un-appealingly as far as I am concerned]mechanic. If you listen to some of his best recordings though, you can see why he was considered by some at least as ‘The King of the Pipers’. Not by all offcourse, singer Sean 'ac Donnchada once told me the story of how he and Seamus Ennis were staying in the room over the bar in Friel’s during one of the early Willie Clancy weeks. At some morning [afternoon after the previous night more likely]they were woken up by the sound of a piper playing in the bar below. There was no doubt to who was playing there but Sean asked, ‘Who could could that be now playing below, Seamus’. Ennis stuck his head from under the blanket, opened one eye and said firmly ‘NOBODY is playing the pipes there’.
is this michael booreman a well-known pipemaker?
does anyone know where he’s based?
Just a query- I too got my first tape of piping style from those early Chieftain tapes, and I’ve always thought that Paddy Maloney’s piping always sounded like it had a “classical”(as in art music) bent, as though he’d been influenced by that at some point in is life…particularly after listening to other pipers…so what’s the story? Was he?
I know everybody’s got an opinion on Andy Conroy, but his version of “Harvest Home”
really kicks…and is a lot of fun to play.
I’m really not sure if that is the right name. In the 8 months since that conversation and my posting of the name, my memory may have lapsed. I think that was the name. Perhaps if anyone has regular contact with Paddy, they could ask him and tell us all the name. The chanter sounded great anyway.
Marc