Snowflake Challenge: #6 & #8 - Creative Process & Top Ten List

[lebateleur]

Challenge #8

Talk about your creative process.

Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done, they’re done.” — Kurt Vonnegut

I am a hopeless basher.


Challenge #6

Top 10 Challenge. Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it.

Let's do something a little different and talk about my favorite recordings of the slip jig Elizabeth Kelly's Delight.

Irish traditional music is superficially quite simple: most tunes are 16 bars in an AABB structure. But within that framework there's a ton of things players can do—changes in ornaments, articulation, or rhythmic emphasis; melodic variations; juxtaposition of different tunes in a set—to make you hear a single tune in completely new ways. For instance:

• The Chieftains - The Session
  I love, love, love the solo whistle that starts off this track. It is the thing that made 12-year-old me sit up and go, I want to do this. Of course, our cassette tape of this album had zero liner notes (not even the artists' names) so I spent years fruitlessly trying to find sheet music for a tune called "The Session" until my brain finally went "Fuck it" and decided I would just magically be able to play the entire thing by ear—ornaments included—without ever having seen a note of it written down. (Sadly, it would be another decade before I was able to replicate this again.)
  
  I now know that "The Session" is a medley of three separate tunes: Elizabeth Kelly's Delight (a slip jig), Fraher's Jig (a double jig), and The Hag at the Kiln (a slide), some of them repeated multiple times in the track. Mixing tune types and interspersing them this way are things that you would not typically do at an actual session, but they work to great effect here, really emphasizing the various ways you can approach these tunes.
  
  So how did I finally figure out that the first tune is called Elizabeth Kelly's Delight? Well, that was thanks to:
  
  
• Lúnasa - Aoibhneas
  "Aoibhneas" being Gaelic for "joy" or "delight"—Lúnasa are continuing The Chieftain's pattern of cheeky, IYKYK track names here. They're also playing the tune in a non-standard key (albeit one that still fits well on flute or whistle), so while I fell in love with this track the first time I heard it, it took a good while before the lightbulb came on: "Oh holy crap, they're playing 'The Session'!" Which I was then able to figure out, with the "aoibhneas" breadcrumb, is actually called Elizabeth Kelly's Delight.
  
  Anyway. This is a great version of said tune. I love the brio of the guitar in the intro, and the extended transition from Elizabeth Kelly's into the second tune, the double jig Jimmy Ward's. (The third tune is a modern composition, Not Safe With a Razor.)
  
  
• Cran - Humors of Ballyloughlin / Liz Kelly's Delight / The Kerry Jig / Hardiman the Fiddler
  The yt link to this appears to be dead, which is a shame because it is a banger. It kicks off with the double jig The Humors of Ballyloughlin (including some absolutely insane piping from Ronan Browne) before transitioning into Elizabeth Kelly's Delight, then The Kerry Slide, and finally, Fraher's Jig. So we have a double jig, a slip jig, a slide, and another double jig: again, something you typically wouldn't do in a session, but it works beautifully on this track. Another interesting thing to note is that the band mistitles the final two tunes: there are actual tunes called The Kerry Jig and Hardiman the Fiddler, but neither of those are what Cran is actually playing here. That said, it's Cran, so it goes without saying that whatever they're playing, it's fantastic.
  
  
• Jesse Autumn & Friends - Out on the Ocean / Aoibhneas Eilis Ui Cheallaigh
  This recording also mixes tune types, starting with the well-known double jig Out on the Ocean. The harp playing is spry and works so nicely with the wooden flute. And then.
  
  That transition. To Elizabeth Kelly's Delight. On smallpipes. It's just baller. Smallpipes are such an underrated instrument, and the unexpected contrast here between the respective timbers of flute and pipes is so good.
  
  
• Tom Delany - Aoibhneas Eilis Ni Chealaigh / Nóra Crionna / Moss Martin's
  Is a version of Elizabeth Kelly's, this time on uilleann pipes. I love Tom Delany's playing, how unhurried and flowing it is. He pairs Elizabeth's with two double jigs: Wise Nora and Moss Martin's.
  
  
• Pádraic Keane, Páraic Mac Donnchadha & Macdara Ó Faoláin - Elizabeth Kelly's / The First Slip / Hardiman the Fiddler
  Is another stellar recording of Elizabeth Kelly's on the uilleann pipes. I love how this version makes the same tune, played on the same instrument, sound so utterly different from Delany's rendition, due in no small part to Pádraic Keane's use of drones, which gives it much more of a swaggering, strutting sound. Unfortunately, the only way you can listen to this track is by purchasing the album it's on, so you'll have to trust me on how good it is.
  
  
• Gráinne Hambly & Willian Jackson - Aoibhneas Eilis Ui Cheallaigh
  Gráinne Hambly is probably my favorite harpist, and this recording gives a sense of why. Her rhythmic precision is ungodly, but instead of sounding robotic, it makes the tune shimmer. I love the way her harping interweaves with Jackson's and makes the thing somehow both stately and sprightly.
  
  
• Paddy Glackin & Micheal O'Domhnaill - Elizabeth Kelly's
  Being the third recording of this tune I ever encountered. Waaaay back in in the day, upon learning that I played Irish music, a coworker recommended a local music store to me: "They have a lot of Irish music there." Well. What they had was a lot of classical music; both the proprietor and I were befuddled as to why coworker had sent me there. "Oh," he said, as I was on my way out the door after having rifled through a bunch of recordings and sheet music of Mozart and Bach, "I do have this CD though; I'll sell it to you if you want." He put it on, Elizabeth Kelly's started pouring out of the speakers, and within four seconds I was like, "Yes, I would like to purchase this album from you."
  
  Paddy Glackin is a phenomenal fiddler, which you can hear in this track. He has such beautiful tone, and he plays Elizabeth Kelly's with a drive that gives it a different feel to the other versions. The tune is built around A, a note that's easy to ornament on flute, pipes, or whistle, but less so on fiddle. Glackin manages this excellently with those long, drawn out drones and multiple bowing patterns on the note.
  
  And then he transitions to the second tune, which...wait, is that Elizabeth Kelly's?
  
  Indeed it is, just refashioned as a double jig, and it works really well. And what is cooler than one version of Elizabeth Kelly's in a set? A set composed of two different versions of that tune, of course.
  
  
• Maggie Sansone - The Humors of Kilclougher / The Sheep Beneath the Snow
  In addition to having different key and time signatures, a single tune can also have approximately 20 million different names. Thus hammered dulcimer maestro Maggie Sansone is playing the double-jig version of Elizabeth Kelly's here but calling it The Humors of Kil(ty)clo(u)gher.
  
  Along with John Rea and Malcolm Dalglish, Sansone is the musician for Irish traditional music on hammered dulcimer and I've learned an extraordinary amount of my repertoire from her albums, including the second tune: a Manx air with an absolutely gorgeous melody and lyrics that are...a bit of a downer, shall we say. (Another well known musician used this tune as the final track on their Christmas album and I was like, Whut 👀)
  
  
• Todd Denman - Elizabeth Kelly's / Have a Drink With Me
  Todd Denman is primarily a uilleann piper, but he also plays low whistle, both of which you can hear on this track. The backing instrumentation and jazz-style improvisations are definitely a modern, less traditional spin on the tune but his technique and tone are absolutely solid and give a sense of where players can take that 16-bar, AABB structure if they know what they're doing.
  
  
• Cran - Liz Kelly's / The Horseshoe / The Blarney Pilgrim
  To finish things off, here's Cran's excellent rendition of the double jig version of Elizabeth Kelly's. And yes, when customers at pub sessions ask for "that song from Titanic" and they don't mean the Celine Dion ballad, they're invariably referring to the third tune in this set.

これで以上です。