Concertina player
John Williams
hails from Chicago, but comes from a long line of Irish musicians with roots in County Clare; he has won five all-Ireland titles and was the first American-born musician to take first place in the senior concertina category. On his second solo album, he's joined by local fiddler
Liz Carroll
, guitarists
Dennis Cahill
,
Randall Bays
, and
Dean Magraw
, bassist
Larry Gray
, percussionist
Paul Wertico
, and his colleagues from
Solas
Seamus Egan
and
John Doyle
, for a set of
traditional
tunes played with equally high levels of energy and skill.
Williams
himself spends most of his time on concertina, but also plays button accordion, flute, whistles, and bodhran, and sometimes more than one at once, as on the multi-tracked slow reel set
"Paddy Canny's Toast & Paddy Faheys."
Elsewhere, the arrangements are more minimal: The jigs
"Up in the Garret"
"The Old Tipperary"
are bare-bones concertina and guitar (and beautiful in that setting), while the reels
"Billy Brocker's,"
"The Old Dudeen,"
"The Night We Had the Goats"
feature
on whistles,
Paul Donnelly
on bodhran, and an unidentified drone; the result is vaguely eerie. This is a complex and lovely album. ~ Rick Anderson