Pica Pica

Happening as I do to know a couple of enthusiastic concertina aficionados here in Sydney, and happening as I do to have known Dick Miles when I lived in West Cork, I have from time to time been asked what he actually plays like when it comes to the jigs and reels and polkas and slides and hornpipes of the dance music. Alas, I was not enough of a concertina lover to appreciate the finer points at the time. I will say that I did rather like the way he would accompany a sad traditional song on the ‘tina, but when it came to the diddley-di we love I didn’t listen closely.

But recently I’ve been importing old material from cassette tapes (remember them?) and mini-disks (a technology that was never quite at the right place at the right time to catch on as much as it might have deserved) into computerised files. And what do you know? An MD of an entire session, recorded at Casey’s in Baltimore on 14 May 2005! What else do you know? I’d almost forgotten about it, since the postioning of the microphone caused the concertina – yes, Dick Miles’ concertina – to dominate the other assortment of tooters, scrapers, bashers and pluckers.

There are 10 short clips. I’m open to correction on the names of any of the tunes, especially the first, which I think is Dan O’Keefes:

 [audio:01_1.mp3]

The Road to Lisdoonvarna:

 [audio:02_2.mp3]

McMahon’s reel:

[audio:03_3.mp3]

Off to California:

[audio:04_4.mp3]

The Ballyvourney Polka:

[audio:05_5.mp3]

The Plains of Boyle:

[audio:06_6.mp3]

The Fairies’ Hornpipe:

[audio:07_7.mp3]

Brosnan’s #1:

[audio:08_8.mp3]

The Frost is All Over (harmonica):

[audio:09_9.mp3]

The Stack of Barley:

[audio:10_10.mp3]

Ten clips in one:

[audio:dick_miles.mp3]