Dave Flynn - Contemporary Traditional Irish Guitar (2019)

It may seem a bit odd to call any music contemporary and traditional, but that’s exactly what the music on this recording is. The oldest tunes on this recording date from around the 1950’s, most are much more recent than that. All of the tunes have been composed and performed by Irish traditional musicians. So they are part of the tradition, yet they are contemporary. They reflect the constantly evolving nature of the Irish music tradition.

The majority of the music on this recording is by Paddy Fahey, a magical fiddle player and composer who is, to me and many others, one of the finest composers Ireland has every produced. I also hold the music of Ed Reavy, Tommy Peoples, Liz Carroll, Charlie Lennon and Larry Redican in very high esteem. It is a special skill to be able to compose tunes that sound new, whilst fitting seamlessly into the tradition. These composers have done just that and in doing so they’ve created miniature masterpieces of melodic beauty.

All the compositions on the recording were originally fiddle tunes and so in my arrangements I’ve tried to recreate some of phrasing of the fiddle on the guitar by tuning it to match the tuning of a fiddle. The keys of my settings of the tunes differ from the originals in most cases, due to my use of a capo on the guitar to achieve a brighter sound.

Alongside these arrangements I present ‘The Mahatma of the Glen’, a new arrangement of three of the seven sections that make up ‘Music for the Departed’, an extended composition I created for Martin Hayes, Dennis Cahill and Ioana Petcu-Colan, who premiered it in 2006 at the Masters of Tradition Festival in Bantry.

This arrangement and indeed this recording are dedicated to the memory of the great fiddle player James Byrne - the Mahatma of the Glen.