A Stellar Album Tribute to Andy McGann

Burke, Conway, and Dolan Make Great Music in His Honor

[Published on July 25, 2007, in the IRISH ECHO newspaper, New York City. Copyright (c) Earle Hitchner. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of author.]

In my recent interview with Brooklyn-born, Baltimore-based button accordionist Billy McComiskey, he told me that he had once asked his uncle Andy what's the difference between good Irish music and great Irish music.

''My uncle Andy thought about it and said he'd get back to me,'' McComiskey recalled. ''Six months later he burst into our home one Saturday morning, held up this record, 'A Tribute to Michael Coleman,' and said, 'Now this is great.' It went on the phonograph and never came off. I hold that recording in the highest regard.''

So does everyone else who loves great Irish traditional music.

Thirteen years ago I had the privilege of writing new liner notes and musician biographies, based on fresh interviews I conducted, for ''A Tribute to Michael Coleman,'' a Green Linnet Records CD reissue of that classic 1966 LP, ''Joe Burke, Andy McGann & Felix Dolan Play a Tribute to Michael Coleman.''

Issued originally on Joe Burke's own Shaskeen label, it featured Andy McGann perhaps at the acme of his fiddling ability. It was also his commercial recording debut, at age 37. Only about 500 copies were released of the LP back then, but its impact was seismic within the tight-knit, Irish trad-music community of New York, and the recording's stature has grown globally in the years since.

A couple decades ago at the Philadelphia Ceili Group's Irish festival at Fisher's Pool in Lansdale, Pa., I remember watching Clare-born fiddler Seamus Connolly walk deferentially up to Andy McGann and shake his hand for making great music. That simple handshake was one of the most spontaneous and moving personal tributes I've ever seen from one great musician to another. McGann, true to form, smiled in appreciation and, with laconic cordiality, thanked Connolly.

Andy McGann always let his music do most of the talking for him, and in that sense he spoke volumes. To my ears, at his peak he had no peer among U.S.-born Irish traditional fiddlers. The subsequent recordings he made--especially his 1977 solo debut, ''It's a Hard Road to Travel'' with Tyrone-born guitarist Paul Brady, and the 1976 LP he made with native Longford fiddler Paddy Reynolds and Paul Brady--only burnished his reputation as one of the all-time fiddling greats.

McGann's death from cancer on July 13, 2004, at age 75 was an ineffable loss. But his memory and legacy are assured through such gestures as the renaming of the Catskills Irish Arts Week's Irish Traditional Music Festival to the Andy McGann Irish Traditional Music Festival this summer and now the release of ''A Tribute to Andy McGann'' by button accordionist Joe Burke, fiddler Brian Conway, and pianist Felix Dolan for Galway's Clo Iar-Chonnachta, Ireland's foremost active traditional label today.

The first 13 tracks of this CD were recorded in studios, while the final four tracks came from a concert the trio gave in Chicago's Irish American Heritage Center in early April of last year. Cork-born, Chicago resident fiddler John Daly, who's the director of the Irish American Heritage Center, organized that concert and was a prime mover behind this recording.

The playing by Burke, Conway, and Dolan on this CD is heartfelt, inspired, virtuosic, and vital. Their joint playing on the jigs ''The House in the Glen/Coleman's Maid on the Green'' is impeccably paced, finesse-filled, and buoyant, reflecting the musical attributes of McGann himself.

The trio's performance of the slip jigs ''Kitty, Come Down to Limerick/The Kid on the Mountain'' and the reels ''Miss Lyon's Fancy/The New-Mown Meadow'' is just as impressive. Revealed in those two tracks is a kind of synaptic shift onto a plane of playing unique to itself. It's not merely great execution. It's what the execution aspires to, what artists sometimes call ''the zone,'' a can-do-no-wrong performance inducing a pinch-me reaction from listeners. This is the highest expression and experience of art in music, and that is what Burke, Conway, and Dolan have achieved there.

In 1983 Burke invited Conway to guest on a pair of hornpipes for ''The Tailor's Choice,'' a solo album of Burke mainly playing the flute. Conway ''first impressed me when he was only 12 years old by his brilliant interpretation of the fiddle styles of Sligo,'' Burke observed in his track note. ''Not surprisingly, Brian is now one of the best fiddlers of his generation.''

Burke's compliment of Conway from almost a quarter-century ago can now safely encompass any generation. Taken with his superlative solo debut in 2002, ''First Through the Gate,'' which includes three tracks with McGann that constitute his final formal recordings, the three solos of Conway on ''A Tribute to Andy McGann'' represent some of his finest fiddling on CD and affirm his own lofty, still rising reputation. With Dolan's supple accompaniment on piano, Conway's bowing especially glistens in ''The Flogging Reel/The Boys of the Lough'' reels and ''The Old Grey Goose/Rosewood'' jigs. Like Liz Carroll, Brian Conway is a U.S.-born fiddler whom hard-core trad devotees in Ireland now pay serious attention to.

Joe Burke's three estimable solos on the new CD are ''The Cliff Hornpipe/The Sunshine Hornpipe,'' which include some tantalizingly long-skein triplets; ''The Blackbird,'' a set dance played as an air in an unmistakable nod of respect toward McGann, who recorded it as an air and set dance solo on ''A Tribute to Michael Coleman''; and ''Bonnie Kate/Jenny's Chickens,'' a famed Michael Coleman pairing of reels in 1934 that Burke indelibly recorded on his 1973 solo LP, ''Traditional Music of Ireland,'' and McGann indelibly recorded on his 1977 solo LP, ''It's a Hard Road to Travel.''

The last track on ''A Tribute to Andy McGann'' is ''The Bucks of Oranmore/Reidy Johnson's/The Bucks of Oranmore'' reels. That middle reel previously popped up on the album ''Andy McGann and Paddy Reynolds,'' while the bookending ''Bucks'' reel kicked off Burke's ''Traditional Music of Ireland'' LP and is still the tune most clamored for in his concerts.

Inserted at the tail-end of the repeated ''Bucks'' is the distinctive laugh of Andy McGann. This is not new: McGann's laugh was also heard 30 years ago at the tail-end of the last track on ''It's a Hard Road to Travel'' and may have been partially borrowed from that earlier recording. Whatever its source, Andy McGann's laugh is a welcome surprise and acts as a fitting coda for this CD in his honor.

The two sonic flaws I could detect on this album are brief instances of extraneous instrument tuning, noise, or other sound right after ''Crowley's Reels'' and ''The Bunch of Currants/The Gossoon That Beat His Father.''

My only other criticism concerns some of Jackie Small's writing. A respected musician, collector, radio broadcaster, and sleeve-notes writer in Ireland, Small does not deliver his best prose here. At times he is prolix or repetitious. Also, hyperbole surfaces in his assertion of ''McGann's many recordings'' (apart from very limited guest or spot appearances, McGann made one 78-rpm demo with the New York Ceili Band, one solo LP, one duo LP, and two trio LPs) and the claim that the ''Bonnie Kate/Jenny's Chickens'' pairing of reels ''is now associated largely with him,'' that is, Joe Burke. As great as Burke's renditions of those paired reels are, they remain ''associated largely'' and more closely with Michael Coleman.

In overall context, such points are minor and have nothing to do with the actual quality of the performances on the CD. It is the music that matters above all else.

''A Tribute to Andy McGann'' evokes the spirit of its subject without fawning imitation or mushy nostalgia. McGann never settled for channeling Coleman, and Conway, Burke, and Dolan never settle for channeling McGann. In that intended difference lies the common ground of this magnificent, spellbinding album. It gives the highest praise possible--great music--to a departed fiddler who gave us nothing less.

Earning my strongest recommendation, ''A Tribute to Andy McGann'' (cat. no. CICD 168) is available from Clo Iar-Chonnachta.

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