A new live release on Claddagh records capturing the Clare Festival of Traditional Singing

CLARE FESTIVAL OF TRADITIONAL SINGING

Cascades of Song

Claddagh Records

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You can almost feel the deepest breaths of the ghostly listeners alongside you on this superb live recording. Judicious excerpts chiselled from nine years of the Clare Festival of Traditional Singing (the brainchild of the late, lamented Tom Munnelly, to whose memory this collection is dedicated) paint a Technicolour portrait of a song tradition that includes the familiar and the scintillatingly strange in its ample gabháil. Standouts are plentiful: Pádraigín Ní Uallacháin's lung-filled openness catapults An Bhean Chaointeinto the ether, while Stan Scott's Bhatiali-Bengali Boatman's Songbrings to mind Bob Quinn's compelling Atlantean theory, linking the singing traditions of Ireland and India.

Other standouts include The Voice Squad, Tríona and Maighread Ní Dhomhnaill (separately) and Jim and Seamus McFarland. Here are voices of wit and wisdom, united by the spirited stories they recount.

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SIOBHÁN LONG