https://tommyreck.bandcamp.com/album/the-master-pipers-volume-4
Much anticipated and a long time in the making, it was launched on Dec 3d. Kudos to Emmett for putting in the legwork and pulling it all together for launch during the year of Tommy’s centenary. .
Between one thing and the other I did not travel to attend the launch night (for one, I only got boostered on the 5th) but I am expecting the cd in the post.
His tracks on the ‘Valuable treasures’ cd are nice too.
Yesss!
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I had high hopes that Emmett would have unearthed new recordings of Tommy and that the recordings would have been of a higher quality. It is very disappointing that there is such a dearth of recordings of this brilliant piper. I wonder is there any other recordings out there (wherever there is) that would throw further light on Tommy. I know that he played in a Tionol in the Netherlands towards the end of his career and maybe there are some recordings from that? I don’t know.
As Peter said great kudos to Emmett and NPU for these recordings.
John
Emmett really moved heaven and earth to find material that would make Tommy shine but as you say, it was slim pickings and very little was to be found that was good enough to go on the CD. It was important to show Tommy playing in his prime, the later recordings were put aside for that reason. There was a good cache of recordings in the Joe Burke collection, some of which would have been useable if there hadn’t been someone repeatedly talking over the piping. I talked to Mick O’Connor in relation to this, expecting he’d have something, considering he was always recording interesting stuff and he knew Tommy well, but he said he had only very little ‘and he always played the same tunes anyway’. Tommy Keane was chasing down something as well but I don’t know what came of that.
I showed Mick the ‘Rupert Guinness Hall’ recordings at the time, he immediately got back ‘ah yes, I organised that concert’ . It was a fundraiser for the Pipers club. Around the same time Sheila said she could remember Joe Ryan and Tommy practising for that concert. It would have been nice to have more of the two. Joe Ryan always spoke with great fondness of Tommy and playing with him. They won a duet competition at the Oireachtas at some point.