Seamus Tansey: "Easter Snow" (Temple) Dial-a-track code: 1641

There are few performers on any instrument who match this player's engagement with music, his intense sense of process. Tansey was the earliest distillation of the many personal flute talents in Sligo/Roscommon; these he brought together in great, rolling exuberance. Here Josie McDermott's, Piper Anderson's, Ah, Surely are embossed as his epitaphic lyric. Sleeve note prose and inter-disciplinary inventiveness characteristically match florid music to local and national history. Slow vibrato stretches the rules, his pioneering "rising the octave" to preserve structure and rhythm is the engine that turns and carries the part and the tune, even in weaker tracks. The guitar accompaniment clashes with this style, but Robin Morton's scarce skin bodhran lifts beautifully, and Tansey himself is in splendid hard-edged voice with, regrettably, only one song, The May Morning Dew.

The Lahawns: "Live at Winkles" Dial-a-track code: 1751

Called after a townland near Tulla, Co Clare this band - feisty, and ceili band in style - is "the business". Cutting through the typical screen of ego-massaging technology with terrific musicianship, they get straight to the point with pounding piano and nifty snare, reels and jigs "on the rocks" - and even a great, swinging burst of that endangered species, the waltz. Moon fight In Mayo shares company with old session battle-axes Roarin' Mary, Sligo Maid, Wise Maid, the likely lads Rakish Paddy, Bucks Of Oranmore, Joe Cooley. There is audible foot-tap, an ecstatic audience, a "battering" set out on the floor: here is not music for dancing to, but music for "talking" to, a truly terrific session in captivity.

Bumblebees: "Bumblebees" (Hummingbird) Dial-a-track code: 1861

Traditional music's dominant aesthetic is decidedly male; Macalla and Cherish the Ladies usefully countered its hegemony. Now The Bumblebees circle the boy on the hill-top again: Laoise Kelly (harp), Mary Shannon (banjo, mandola, fiddle), Colette O'Leary (piano accordion). Three delicate sound textures with an eclectic bag of original, new and old Irish, Scottish and French reels, jigs, and whatnot in beautiful harmony and cosmopolitan taste. Harp interweaves with banjo on Lake Arthur Stomp, accordion skims with it and mandola on Mattie's Waltz. James F. Dickie introduces the harp in tune-picking - still new enough ground in Irish music. Kelly's Eleanor Plunkett is impressive, O'Leary's Chi Mi na Morkheanna air a rather hackneyed throwback to Jimmy Shand (and Local Hero). All a beautifully intriguing tapestry of unusually sweet treble sound.