Planxty 💫

 

Trying to rank Planxty’s discography, The Beatles of Irish Trad. 

1 - Planxty 1973 - A perfect debut comprised of nearly  all standout tracks. Notable highlights: Christy Moore at his most prolific with the group: Raggle Taggle Gypsy, Sweet Thames Flow Softly, Follow Me Up To Carlow. Andy also shines, "The West Coast Of Clare", "The Jolly Beggar", "The Blacksmith." Some of the groups best tunes too: "Sí Bheag," "Sí Mhór," "Merrily Kissed The Quaker."

2 - The Well Below The Valley 1973 - A perfect sophomore album. Highlights include perhaps the most beautiful ballad of all time "As I Roved Out", "Pat Reilly", "Cúnla", Donal's vocal debut on "Bean Pháidín," "Hewlett", and the most haunting yet enchanting song you've ever heard "The Well Below The Valley" 

3 - After The Break 1979 - The time off, with so many prolific side projects in-between, really served Planxty well. The return is magic, and the addition of Matt Malloy really propels the group. If only "Bonny Light Horseman" was on the original release, this album might have made it to the number 2 spot for me. Highlights: My go to introductory track I show to new Plaxty listeners, "The Good Ship Kangaroo", "You Rambling Boys Of Pleasure", "The Pursuit Of Farmer Michael Hayes", and the Bulgarian 9/16 tune "Smeceno Horo" is such an epic closer. 

4 - The Woman I Loved So Well 1980 - For me, this record is carried by the opening and closing tracks by Christy Moore. "True Love Knows No Seasons" - Irish trad meets Western ballad and "Little Musgrave", a 12 minute epic that is one of the most beautiful pieces of music and poetry ever recorded. I could do with another 12 minutes of it. 

5 - Words and Music - 1982 - A strong epilogue to Ireland's greatest group. Highlights include Donal Lunny's production and use of synthesizers and electric pianos, "The Queen Of The Rushes", "Thousands Are Sailing", the progressive "Accidentals" into the gorgeous "Aragon Mill", and the victory lap celebration "The Irish Marche" to end it all. Just wish there were a little more Christy led songs on this one. 

6 - Cold Blow and the Rainy Night - It's a good sign for your band if this die hard's ranking puts an album like this at the bottom spot. Still a great record, but one that I find myself returning to the least. Even as I'm writing this I'm debating whether it should be in the number 5 spot. Nonetheless, highlights include Donal taking a central singing role, "Johnny Cope", the discography's closest singing / mixing of the three singers on "Cold Blow And The Rainy Night", "The Lakes Of Pontchartrain", the polkas, and "The Frost Is All Over".

Thanks to Cialan Scanlon 🍀

21st Century Schizoid Man 💫

 

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Tomwaitsing con gusto 🖖

  

Listening to the coolest music on earth: I want “Dirt on the Ground” played at my funeral!

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Dictaphone - Poems from a Rooftop and Headfall - stars don’t shine to noise 💫

 

I’m back after - maybe - 13 years 😳🤭☺️ to this fantastic record: this is one of the 350 limited-edition first pressings.

Thanking Thomas Schick who gifted it to me when we met, some years ago, in Lindlar, near Köln, at my pal Klaus Speth’s, my Goto Unit/Royal Sound sensei-san.

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… and continued my musical morning with this nice, obscure record from Bristol, in (about) same vein as Dictaphone’s, a tad darker.

(not by chance, they were in same bin, cheek-to-cheek)

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Pierre Bensusan on Cezame 💫

 

I almost forgot I had the first three seminal records by beloved Pierre on Cezame label… after his early ‘70s Montreux concerts and collaborations with Bill Keith - he was just sixteen years old! - he began extensively gigging in the USA and the Rounder reissues of these marvelous discs appeared.

Pierre today (photo courtesy of Luke Richardson)

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Duffy Power

 

I forgot I bought this mono record: Duffy Power played harmonica on John Renbourn’s Faro Annie and Bert Jansch’s Birthday Blues, but his collaborations dates from the very dawn of British blues… look at the impressive line-up of this disc, originally issued on Transatlantic: all top musician who gravitated in Graham Bond’s and Alexis Korner’s groups before their careers skyrocketed.

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Horny 💫

 

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Abdullah Ibrahim passed away 💫

About half a century ago, Duck Baker’s Tintinyana and John Renbourn’s Little Niles renditions on acoustic guitar introduced me to Dollar Brand/Abdullah Ibrahim’s music… after these epiphanies, I collected many of his discs - my most beloved his superb records on Enja label - and saw him alive in 2024. 

RIP for one of the greats.

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TdP’s “The Head” vs. WE 618B 💫

 

It was some years I was exclusively using the mighty Tim de Paravicini’s TX-4 “The Head” MC SUT, always with Analogtechnik’s DST15 IceAge cartridge and The Peak 13” arm, while my (from now-reduced-to-the-bone collection) other SUTs’ remained in a closet… BUT, the overwhelmingly radical changes I made in my system - i.e. the woofer-less Gotorama 2.0 - loudly asked for further investigations.

Why?

Easy said: the level of introspection and overall tonal palette changed drastically… this augmented transparency brought my ears to re-consider TdP’s superb SUT, which was sometimes, with some dry-sounding ECMs’ discs, sort-of imposing a slight sense of leanness and “thinning” highs without improving air among instruments or imaging.

Mumbling, I today choose Western Electric 618B SUT, searching for that little, tiny quid of “musical warmth” (a naturaI, detailed, breathing smoothness) which I felt I was missing.

I know: some more technically inclined will suggest I could/would measure this or that and adjust here or there to (try to) find the best electric matching among Daniel Kim’s master built cartridge, Misho’s Phono Stage and SUT, but…

… I’m such a stoopid romantic and I strongly believe in fractals and in - precisely - trial & error approach: the first attempt, after removing The Head, was with Peerless 4685 SUT, with a quite satisfactory sonic result, but I nonetheless felt the need to further explore this fascinating audio niche.

The Garrardzilla combo: the best sounding clamp proved to be a cheap Audio Technica’s 🤭

The WE 618B - which I bought eons ago from late Koji-san at EIFL in Japan - immediately clicked with the sound I was looking for: drums skin became more true-to-life, trumpet remained dramatically and violently dynamic, but rounder… piano got some wood from soundboard without loosing the felt and strings, the tension and drama in a climax with increasing volume became more natural and impressive, surprising.

The strong wish to explore more and more records, both well-known and new, drastically increased but without any hurry to change a disc, enjoying what was actually playing.

Vinyl surface noises became more apparent yet less intrusive with music, like an annoying but very background blob, not interfering with musical flow.

I had to fiddle with three different clamps, because the overall sound quite impressively changed - from dull to heavenly - at different weights and materials!

A question arises: what would think the people, the engineers and artisans who designed and built these amazing 80+ years old transformers, about my weird enthusiastic words and - most of all - to the incredible intricacies and nuances they are able to resolve and make them alive?

Was the transparency an unwanted design by-product obtained by chance or something they precisely knew how to get?

Were they aware of the care and quality they infused into these industrial parts which turned into musical instruments, almost a century after they built them?

Satori 

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Made in England 💫

 

… with an intruder from Germany 🤭

That’s it…

 

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In my musical diet for the last 55 years 💫

 

Popol Vuh 

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Luxman FL-202 two ways active-crossover 💫

 

A work of beauty from a legendary brand.

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Charlie Poole - the father of American music 💫

 

Charles Cleveland Poole was born in Randolph County, North Carolina in 1892 and grew up in the mill town culture of the Piedmont South — the specific world of textile workers and small farmers and the string band music that those communities made for themselves in the years before commercial recording arrived and transformed regional folk traditions into marketable product.

He played banjo with a three-finger picking technique — his right hand's index finger had been permanently damaged in a childhood baseball accident and the damage had forced him to develop an approach to the instrument that was not the standard approach and that produced a distinctive, rolling sound that became his signature and that influenced the subsequent development of banjo playing in ways that Scruggs-style picking later overshadowed without entirely displacing.

He formed the North Carolina Ramblers with fiddler Posey Rorer — who had limited vision — and guitarist Norman Woodlieff. The specific circumstances of having assembled a band from himself, a partially sighted fiddler, and a rotating cast of guitarists did not produce a compromise but a distinctive sound — the limitations of each member shaped the music in ways that conventional ability might not have reached.

Columbia Records came to North Carolina in 1925 scouting old-time string band music. Poole auditioned and was signed. He recorded "Don't Let Your Deal Go Down Blues" as his first session — a song of such commercial and musical effectiveness that Columbia had him back immediately.

He recorded eighty-four sides for Columbia between 1925 and 1930. The pace of production was driven by the combination of commercial demand and Poole's specific relationship with money — he received advances, spent them, and needed more sessions to receive more advances in a cycle that the drinking accelerated.

The drinking was comprehensive and constant. His wife Maude had left him. His daughter lived with Maude. He moved between mill towns and recording sessions with the specific rootlessness of someone whose relationship with place was secondary to his relationship with music and whiskey, roughly in that order.

"White House Blues." "If I Lose, Let Me Lose." "Leaving Home." "He Rambled." Songs that documented the specific world he moved through with the accuracy of someone who had not romanticized it and had not needed to — the mill town culture was interesting enough in its actual form to require no embellishment.

Jimmie Rodgers had heard him. The Carter Family had heard him. The string band tradition he refined fed directly into the country music mainstream that Rodgers and the Carters established commercially and that Hank Williams subsequently refined into the genre's emotional foundation.

In May 1931, Poole received an offer to perform in a Hollywood film — the specific dream of the era, when the sound film had created demand for authentic American music performers that Hollywood was beginning to address. He celebrated the offer. He celebrated comprehensively and for an extended period.

He died on May 21, 1931, of heart failure following a prolonged drinking binge. He was thirty-nine years old. The Hollywood job went to someone else.

He recorded eighty-four sides in four years. He spent every dollar before the next session. He drank himself to death a month before the opportunity that might have changed everything.

The Carter Family built their commercial career in the same years Poole was recording. Hank Williams absorbed the tradition both were working in. The three-finger banjo picking that Poole developed from a damaged hand is in the foundation of every country and bluegrass recording that followed.

He is not remembered the way the Carter Family and Hank Williams are remembered. He is remembered by the musicians who trace the lineage back past the names everyone knows to the names that the commercial success was built on.

Made in New Zealand 🇳🇿

 

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Flea-market finds…

 

I scored these humble gems…

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Altan 💫

 

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Guild

 

Took a trip to the old Guild factory in Westerly, RI with my

1970 F212. Bringing it home to where it was made!

Thanks to Dennis Malenfant.

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A new Mary Halvorson’s disc 💫

 

It's always a celebration when a new Mary’s album comes out!

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