Fiercely Traditional / Happily Contemporary
by Michael Simmons
Although he didn't know it at the time, Sean Gavin had launched his younger brother on a career as one of Ireland's finest traditional musicians. In 1973, seven years after taking up the violin, Frankie won the All-Ireland Under 18 fiddle competition. (He also won top honors for his flute playing in the same competition.) The next year Gavin and his friend Alec Finn formed the innovative band De Dannan, and created a new way of playing Irish dance tunes in a group format, which Gavin describes in The Companion to Traditional Irish Music as "tightly percussive melody lines set against a flowing, contrapuntal background." And the band's cheeky versions of classical pieces such as Handel's "The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba" and pop songs like "Hey Jude" and "Bohemian Rhapsody" helped remind the world that traditional music doesn't exist in a cultural vacuum.
Gavin also released a handful of solo albums over the years, and he has performed with such disparate musicians as Stéphane Grappelli and The Rolling Stones. In 2001 he recorded Fierce Traditional for Ireland's Tara Music Company. The CD features Gavin playing a selection of jigs, reels, hornpipes, and slow airs on fiddle, flute, and tin whistle with backing by his brother Sean on accordion and his old friends Brian McGrath on piano and tenor banjo and Alec Finn on bouzouki.
"I was inspired to make the CD by working on a recording project with Brian Rooney," Gavin says. "He's not that well known, but he's a beautiful player. John Carty and Brian McGrath were working on his CD, which is called The Godfather, and asked if Alec Finn and I would play on a few tracks. I had never heard Brian play before, so I went up and heard him. His music was so warming I thought to myself, 'I have to do an album of fiddle music like this.'"
So Gavin began rummaging through his vast repertoire and selected a handful of tunes that paid homage to the musicians who inspired him as he was growing up. "She Lived Beside the Anner," for example, was one of his father's favorite slow airs, "The Mason's Apron" was a reel taught to him by the great tin whistler Micho Russel, and he learned "Jenny Picking Cockles" from Jimmy Cummins, a truck-driving accordionist who used to give Gavin lifts home after sessions. But the majority of the tunes are drawn from the 1920s recordings of fiddlers like Michael Coleman, Paddy Kiloran, Paddy Sweeney, and James Morrison, who is a special favorite of Gavin's.
"A lot of the music on Fierce Traditional is firmly based in the 1920s playing of James Morrison," say Gavin. "I have to say he is my all-time favorite fiddle player. To start with, his technique is phenomenal, and his tunes were just wonderful. Even when he played the old schmaltzy, sentimental things, he was really good. He had the complete package."
To help him bring the old tunes to life, Gavin turned to Alec Finn and Brian McGrath, two players from his own past, but most of all he relied on his brother. "Even though he played accordion, in a way Sean was my first fiddle teacher," Gavin says. "It was a struggle at first, but playing duets with him helped me come around to it. He used to get me records of various fiddle players and tell me to listen to this and listen to that. Thanks to him I heard a lot of different fiddlers at the beginning, like Sean McGuire, Sean Keane, Michael Coleman, James Morrison, and people like that. I really owe it to Sean for getting me started on fiddle."
Sean's record suggestions also helped young Frankie forge an individual fiddle style. "I've been lifting elements for years," Gavin explains. "I took bits from various players and did a sort of amalgam of them all. Apart from Morrison, the other player who most inspired me was the late Tommy Potts. His mind was amazing and the way he played a tune was like nothing I'd heard before. I showed up at his house once, and of course he didn't know me from Adam. But right out he asked if I wanted to hear a tune. He set me down in his sitting room and went and got his fiddle and played for half and hour. I cried the entire time because the music was so powerful and so emotive. I can't copy Tommy Potts, although I'd like to. I think his musical brain was extraordinary."
Two of the tracks -- the airs "She Lived Beside the Annar" and "Sliabh na mBan" -- are dedicated to Gavin's father, who taught him to play tin whistle when he was four years old. "My father was very fond of slow airs, and he got very emotional about them," Gavin recalls. "Whenever I would play one, he'd start crying, which might be a reason why I didn't play them much at first. But I've been making up for it since then. Somebody once said to me you shouldn't play a slow air unless you know the original words, and that's always stuck with me. I suppose knowing the lyrics helps you put the emphasis in the right places in the melody, but most of the songs are these huge epics in Irish, which is a language I don't speak very well. So I overlook that part, and just play the music. I learned many of them from people who did know the words, who did speak Irish, and I try to keep them as close to what they played as I can."
Gavin came up with the title Fierce Traditional after reading an article that took him to task for supposedly ignoring the old tunes. "The writer thought that in the recent past I had strayed too far from the traditional music with De Dannan," he says. "He thought that we were doing too many covers of '60s pop tune and the like. He decided that my conscience must be eating me, and that I should bring out an album of traditional music because I had gone so overboard. He suggested I call the album Fierce Traditional, which is a term people in Cork use to describe the music. I thought it was a bit of a giggle title, and I like the measure of it, so I used it. Of course, if I felt like recording an album of pop tunes, I'd do it in a minute."
Asked if he has any advice for fiddlers who want to learn to inject some Irish soul into their playing, Frankie Gavin says, "It's dance music, let there be no mistake about it. And if it's going to be dance music, it's going to be rhythmical. To me, the rhythm is almost everything. It's the hypnotic part of Irish music that takes you into another place."
Check out the Frankie Gavin page at this site to hear him play
Frankie Gavin's website is newly updated an includes videos! Check it out at: FrankieGavin.com
Tara Music Company: www.taramusic.com/
For the full text of this article and the tune "The Man of the House" as played by Frankie Gavin, subscribe to Fiddler Magazine!
Michael Simmons, Fiddler Magazine's Review Editor, is a guitar player and writer living in Mountain View, California.
