Merrijig Creek by Fintan Vallely, Caoimhín Vallely, Sheena Vallely, Brian Morrissey

New tunes and arrangements played on the wooden concert flute by Fintan Vallely, with Caoimhín Vallely on piano, Sheena Vallely on flute, Daithi Sproule on guitar, Brian Morrissey on bodhran and Liz Dohetty and Gerry O'Connor on fiddles. Produced by Niall Vallely.

Fintan is privileged to be buoyed along by the enervating nerve of this company: Sheena’s sympathetic flute pulse, Caoimhín’s thrilling Cape Breton-style lift on piano, and with Brian Morrissey accenting moods on bodhrán, tambourine and bones. Dáithí Sproule, who Fintan played with in Scotland and America in the 1980s, is on guitar on track five, Liz plays fiddle on several sets, and Gerry joins on the finale tunes.

Making new tunes
There are many beliefs and assumptions about the ancientness of the airs and dance tunes in Irish Traditional music: “from back in the mists of time”, “learnt from the fairies”, “heard on the wind”. The stories are comforting folklore, and most are at least partly true, for thousands of jigs and reels have indeed been distilled by musicians out of centuries-old song melodies, in times when musicianship was held in high regard, and believed to be supernatural. Generally, too, the tune-names that are the handling tags for performers do always have some organic connection with real lives and happenings. The best tunes had probably already been made and were in wide circulation by the time of late twentieth century revival, making possible the phenomenal institution we know as the ‘session’. Yet tunesmiths still manage to come up with unique, compelling new melodies. In addition to this, there is also an endless potential for re- composition in the melodic contours of existing tunes - their ‘set, accented tones’, a term used by Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin for the key notes which mark out the boundaries and turns of any melody. Like an aleatoric selection-box of phrases, these are subconsciously picked through and re-applied diversely in composition. Potential is expanded further by the challenge of the Irish-music spectrum’s twenty or so different tune-types, and these themselves can be explored for additional depth and breadth by changing the key, octave or tempo. Refreshing dimension can also be given by juxtaposition of different instruments and timbres, displayed elementally in solos as ‘the raw bar’, and with aesthetic sophistication in arrangements. Ethos absorbed from other equally distinctive musics can breathe further new life: the post-1950s fascination for bass, beat and crossovers boosted revival, and orchestration has for more than a century brought out yet other drama and power.
The tunes and arrangements on this album, however, were made, as most tunes are, without consideration of any of this, casually and unplanned. Some emerged out of the headiness of days-long session immersions in counties Dublin, Sligo and Clare, others in pensive exploration while on long road trips on the neighbouring island. Like a jigsaw that begins with just two pieces, a melody starts with a few notes - maybe a favoured passage, a riff. This is gradually teased out from both ends until a phrase emerges, eventually reaching the call-and-response unit that is the first part of a tune. That then is noodled into a diversion which typically reaches up into the second octave, goes off on a brief skirmish and then lands securely back at the starting point. If the muse gets courage, the second part may lead to a third, fourth or fifth, each related to its predecessor, but eventually all returning logically to the opening. And always, in Irish music, with the invitation or compulsion to repeat the whole tune two or three times over.
Eighteen of these twenty-eight tunes were made by me between the years 1977 and 2017; the other ten are favoured, complementary pieces that came out of travel, session playing and critical listening. The older tunes and Lucy Farr’s pieces are felt as a leavening matrix for the newer material which has been honed, re-worked and rationalised at various times, and was eventually coaxed to finality in the head-space freed up by a Deis grant from An Comhairle Ealaíon / The Arts Council of Ireland. A couple of the new tunes have been recorded with Mark Simos in 1992, but most have not been played in music circles before, though I did play them from the mid 1990s though to 2007 in Ireland and Scotland with the poet Dermot Healy as part of the spoken-word presentations The Ballyconnell Colours and Fool’s Errand for which familiar tunes were just not appropriate. The naming of the new tunes follows the convention in Irish Traditional music: their titles indicate stories, history, places, significant events and people over the course of my performing life. So too with the group-titling of the ‘sets’, which is related to personal and circumstantial associations, a practice that has been with us since the advent of the CD in the eighties.

Tracklist

1.	Fintan Vallely - The Three Sisters	5:53

2.	From Ballinakill to Ballinascreen	3:59

3.	Emilia Romagna Redoubt	4:31

4.	Roving Rhythm	4:33

5.	The Humours of Blundell's Grange	5:00

6.	Gregorium Uproarium	5:01

7.	Homage to Brian Keenan	4:24

8.	The Maid of Annaghmakerrig	4:06

9.	The Rambles of Grappa	5:24

10.	The Ballyconnell Colours	6:41

Credits

released January 1, 2021

The musicians
Here are a dozen and a half new tunes on concert flute marking Fintan Vallely’s fifty-seventh year playing music. With him, on flute too, is his sister Sheena, who as a painter as well as musician has lived much of her working and playing life in England, in Manchester, London and Bristol. Joining them is their cousin Caoimhín Vallely, also born in Armagh, a tremendous pianist, a founder-member of North Cregg, a band with which he toured and recorded for a decade, and of the radical Buille in which he plays with his brother Niall; Caoimhín’s uplifting piano draws here on his broad experience of accompanying and working with leading innovators in Irish, Breton, Spanish and Scottish traditional musics. With bodhrán and percussion is Brian Morrissey, a Tipperary-born musician who has also worked with leading artistes including Béla Fleck, Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, Kevin Crawford and Máirtín O’Connor. On fiddle is Liz Doherty, a Donegal lecturer and music-teaching innovator who is an authority on Cape Breton music; she formed Fiddlesticks, and has played with Nomos, with Laoise Kelly in The Bumblebees, and with leading Scottish and Cape Breton musicians in the all-women String Sisters. Also on fiddle, Gerry O’Connor from Dundalk is a versatile soloist in Irish music who has toured Europe with the band Skylark, with Lá Lugh, and solo in the USA; with Fintan he also performs the audiovisual concert shows Compánach and Turas. Guitarist Dáithí Sproule, as both a soloist and singer as well a member of Skara Brae, has toured and recorded with Altan and Liz Carroll.

Produced by Niall Vallely, Artwork by Claire Espanel, photography by Jacques Piraprez Nutan, CD pressing by Axisppm Dublin

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