www.thekanesisters.com
Listening these days to "The Well-Tempered Bow", a CD of the fiddle playing of Liz and Yvonne Kane from Letterfrack, County Galway. Their musical influences range from Sligo to New York, but it's the East Galway tradition that has stamped itself on their sound and repertoire.
When one mentions East Galway music, the name that immediately springs to everyone's lips is Paddy Fahey. His tunes are filled with what's often referred to in Gaelic as dra���ht , a word meaning "spellbinding" — not so much in the dramatic sense, but more the idea of the hypnotic. If you've heard Martin Hayes, the great Clare fiddler, you'll get the picture. It's a sophisticated music, with maximum effort placed on extracting a melancholy, modal sound.
On track 7 of the CD, "Leddy from Cavan/Paddy Fahey's", Liz and Yvonne Kane produce their best example of this sound. The two reels are taken at perfect tempo — neither too casual nor too energetic — and the emphasis is firmly on presenting the melodic line with all its dips and curves and curls. The result is something that one can come back to time upon time without ever tiring of the playing. The sisters return to this source on track 9 with two beautiful jigs, titled "Paddy Fahey's/Paddy Fahey's". The simplicity of this naming scheme speaks volumes about the music and its practitioners: modest, personal, natural.
The taste that Liz and Yvonne Kane exhibit with their fiddle playing is reflected on their website, www.thekanesisters.com. There's a subtle Flash intro, a rare enough thing these days, and the content is satisfying. All in all, then, two remarkable young people, Liz and Yvonne Kane, with special talents and the ability to convey them.
Diarist of the day: Christopher Isherwood, 4 June 1956"The unpleasant part of this illness is the feeling of utter fatigue. Also a tendency to grey thoughts of old age, weakness, death. These somewhat simulated by reading Arnold Bennett's Journals -- a very sympathetic man, but such a pitiful blind workhorse, self-driven until he dropped. At the end of it all, he could say: 'I made a plan and stuck to it.' Well, that's something, certainly. But the note of obstinacy is tragic, too. It's the obstinacy of an insect. "
