It’s ironic that every student in Ireland is schooled in the poetry of Seamus Heaney and Eavan Boland, yet opportunities to mine the “profound artistry” of Irish traditional music are few and far between within the context of our educational system.
Liam O’Connor, director of the Irish Traditional Music Archive and long-time champion of the music of the late Dublin fiddle player Tommie Potts, makes this pithy observation in the foreword of this long-overdue exploration of Potts, the man and the musician.
The author, Seán Óg Potts, happens to be a grandnephew of this musician, whose immersive playing drew comparisons with the most complex jazz improvisations, and his genetic connection serves to heighten his insights, without ever risking a descent into hagiography: no mean feat when the distance between artist and biographer is so short.
Perhaps this is at least in part due to the fact that Seán Óg Potts is a renowned piper himself and has long been treading that path between the personal and the musical.
READ MORE
The old tropes about the merits of tradition versus innovation were essentially wasted on Tommie Potts because his music meant so many different things to different people. Tony MacMahon saw him as an exemplar of the tradition with a unique personal style; Micheál Ó Suilleabháin was unequivocal in his assessment of Potts as a clear innovator who pushed the boundaries of the tradition.
His album, The Liffey Banks, released in 1972, is an extraordinary snapshot of a musician in his prime, and its influence continues to gather momentum over half a century on.
A labour of love, O’Connor’s book has been many decades in gestation
Above all, Potts was a man of the world whose listening tastes were urbane and eclectic. He considered that his instrument of choice played second fiddle (pun intended) to the human voice, due, he said, to the latter being the invention of God. Stradivarius, Gigli and Caruso were all occupants of Pott’s universe, alongside Seamus Ennis, Seán Ó Riada and other contemporaries.
The Sorrowful and The Great casts a keen eye over the undeniable depth and breadth of Potts, the man and the musician. Stylistically clear, it is drenched with the richest of musical insights and is a welcome meditation on Potts and the indelible mark he has left on the tradition.
Liberties-born flute player Mick O’Connor is a stalwart of traditional music whose innate passion, curiosity and joie de vivre is stitched into every chapter of this seminal publication, In Safe Hands.
Charting an illustrated history of Irish traditional music in Dublin from 1893 to 1970, this monumental work features a wealth of deeply insightful historical detail, along with biographies and photographs (many previously unpublished) which O’Connor, a master of multimedia, has amassed over a lifetime, with the Pipers’ Club the lens through which much of the history is related.
A born collector and archivist, his own original audio and video interviews form and inform the shape of this essential reflection on Dublin’s musicians, singers and dancers, reaching beyond the Pale to chart their influences and excursions to and from the capital.
From the beginning of the Gaelic Revival in 1893, O’Connor traces the back story of The Pipers’ Club, explores the foundation of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann in 1951 and the founding of Na Píobairí Uilleann in 1968. It’s an enthralling and colourful journey, shot through with the insights and anecdotes characteristic of a man who has lived and breathed the tradition throughout his life with an enviable and unquenchable verve.
A labour of love, this book has been many decades in gestation and its publication provides traditional music lovers and scholars alike with a deep and rich seam to be mined over and over.
A Brief History of Irish Traditional Music from the Dagda to DADGAD is an entirely different undertaking. Its author, Erick Falc’her Poyroux, is Professor of Irish and British Studies at the University of Tours and he takes a forensic approach to exploring the history of our music through the lens of the mythological figure, Dagda, and onwards to the centrality of the adapted guitar tuning of DADGAD, preferred by most who play what he loosely terms Celtic music.
His academic background sits lightly beneath this sweeping consideration of everything from the popular musical traditional from 1601-1850 to the legacy of the completist Chicago collector, Capt Francis O’Neill, and the avant-garde fiddle playing of Tommie Potts.
With a discography that is by his own admission entirely subjective and necessarily partial, this is an engaging and revealing read, infused with an outsider perspective that is both welcome and at times challenging.
Siobhán Long writes about traditional music for The Irish Times
