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For free reeds, Richard Galliano. Miles Davis for everything else.

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OK Randy, I listened to some Galliano and I admit, he is amazing in his use of register, dynamics, bellows and complete mastery of his instrument. Thanks, I had not heard him before (head in sand?)

 

A humbling experience.

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For free reeds, Richard Galliano. Miles Davis for everything else.

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OK Randy, I listened to some Galliano and I admit, he is amazing in his use of register, dynamics, bellows and complete mastery of his instrument. Thanks, I had not heard him before (head in sand?)

 

A humbling experience.

 

You are amazed by his musical mastery.

As a septuagenarian concertina man (the seated version)

I am equally amazed by such people's shere physical strength !

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Been trying to think of an answer to this thread but I guess I never listen to any music exclusively thinking 'oh, I have to know how to interpret that'. I tend to stick my earphones in put i-tunes on shuffle and...go with the flow.

So anything gain must be subconsciously done.

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All naturally recorded music appeals to me. I listen to primarily Irish trad, and can't take Claire Keville's Daisy Field out of my play list for more than a day. I also find listening to any of the Russell family, and John Kelly Sr, Joe Ryan, and Willie Clancy happens weekly. Now, I also love Nat King Cole ( purity of voice), John Coletrane( improvisational master), old chamber music ( period woodwinds and strings) recordings and Led Zepplin (well, they just kick ass and I am over 50) .

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While I mainly work on Irish traditional tunes, I sometimes will play with melodies, whose sweetness lends themselves, to my ear, to the anglo. "Someone to Watch Over Me" by G. Gershwin and "Moon River" by Henry Mancini are just two of these that work well, I think. I'm definitely more melody- than harmony-centric; probably why ITM appeals to me. I find myself always listening on the radio for melodies in any genre of music that I can hear in my "mind's ear" on my concertina. Its all pretty subjective. If doesn't nicely fit the concertina, as I hear it in my imagination, I don't follow-up with it. If it does, I'll usually find the sheet music and play with it to see if I can make it work.

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ha, i love galliano as well, though i don't find him useful for irish phrasing ideas....i also love maria kalaniemi, and in my paris bal musette life, am paying a lot of attention to emil prud'homme, a more old-school style cba player of musette...

 

and ha, again, i too think fred mcdowell is wonderful, am also very big on Blind Blake, blind lemon jefferson, rev gary davis, big bill broonzy, all the players from the subtype of acoustic rural blues that in america is often classified "country blues...."...ragtime-based rather than the stalking funk of delta stuff..... this is, after all, where the really swingy irish swing/syncopation derives from, via the coleman and other records out of america, which came from the dance halls, which were permeated with this kind of shimmying syncopation thanks to the white string bands looking over the segregation fence at the black dance musicians and then spreading that shimmy elsewhere....so i find it great stuff for getting that shimmy in your bones for irish music, likewise the southern appalachian oldtime stuff...there's a great documentary interview somewhere with the late fiddler tommy jarrell sayng he got it from watching the black stringbands....(that shimmy is not NOT in the east coast contra music, which i suspect sounds more like how the music sounded when the dancemasters first brought it to ireland, before it got the wiggle)...i was very close to embarking on an ethno program with all this as a book/thesis topic, but gearoid o'hallmhurain told me someone is already doing it.....

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likewise the southern appalachian oldtime stuff...there's a great documentary interview somewhere with the late fiddler tommy jarrell sayng he got it from watching the black stringbands....(that shimmy is not NOT in the east coast contra music, which i suspect sounds more like how the music sounded when the dancemasters first brought it to ireland, before it got the wiggle)...

 

Well Cee, I just got home from playing a contra dance out on Long Island (which is not part of New England, just a bit too far south to qualify) and down here on the East Coast in New York we love to play a mix of Northern classic New England tunes with a few Cape Breton and Quebecoise tunes plus Irish jigs but... probably 80% southern tunes with plenty of shimmy mixed in. Lots of bluesy mixolydian A tunes tonight. This particular dance was a trio, a powerful combo with the right players and we got it right tonight with me, Bill Christophersen on fiddle and Marnen Laibow-Koser on piano. We know and do classic old-style New England but the lure of foot stompin' Southern fiddle tunes like Old Man Old Woman, Possum up a Simmon Tree, Abe's Retreat, Brian Picker Brown, Johnny in the Swamp, etc... is just too much fun.

 

Part of what makes this work for contra dancing is that:


  •  
  • Us musicians are all dancers
  • We pay attention to the dancers
  • We are all listening closely to each other and improvising constantly
  • Unlike a Southern string band that might play these tunes, we have a piano so the sound is right.

Edited by Jody Kruskal
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