A Tune A Week

I’ve been out of town, traveling and partying for the holidays, not to mention catching the HEINOUS FLU. So for this week I got lazy and dug an old polka out of the depths of my head to work it up using different fingering. When I originally learned this tune on the box, I was going for a minimum of bellows changes; this time, I went for bounce. This one can be found on Patrick Street’s “Made in Cork,” which I borrowed from my roommate in college many years ago. I don’t have it any more, but I don’t think I gave it back to him, either. Whoops.

This week it’s not a Christmas tune, not in honor of Christmas. I’ve heard this jig played a good bit at the Dan McGuinness session here in Nashville, and it caught my ear. So I tracked it down on “Bucks of Oranmore” by Joe Burke and Charlie Lennon, bought the CD, and got it in my brain. These days I can keep a fairly steady beat without a metronome, which is a great improvement, let me tell you.

Back to the terrific Jackie Daly record for a hornpipe. There are lots of triplets, and I’m playing most of them along the row instead of across - for instance, in the G-A-B triplet that starts the whole thing off, G and B are on the push and A is on the draw. That means a lot more coordination with the bellows than if I used different buttons to get all three notes on the push, but it gives the tune such a glorious bounce when I get it right that I can’t give it up. It still sounds awkward most of the time now, but I’ll get it eventually. Memo to myself: do not grab air in the middle of a triplet… this is the first time my air button reflex has worked against me.

I moved to Nashville, Tennessee for a postdoc at the end of July. Now that I’m settled in, I’ll be back in the groove.