The Dubliners Live

Liner Notes:
To say that the Dubliners are Entertainers is to state the obvious. I can think of no better way of underlining this simple truth than in a live album.
“The Dubliners Live” is a fairly typical Dubliners programme performed in front of an enthusiastic and appreciative audience in one of the Yorkshire Clubs. These clubs have a well-earned reputation for expecting and getting the best in the entertainment field. This show is no exception. It scores in other ways too. Here is a completely new recording of a number of well loved Dubliners Classics alongside updated version of numbers guaranteed to raise the roof. Then there are the first ever Dubliners recordings of “The Four Poster Bed” (a traditional Shetland wedding tune) and “The Belfast Hornpipe/Tim Maloney” medley played on tin whistle. John Sheahan then takes up his fiddle again for the “Blue Mountain Rag”.
Add to this the between number talk and humour which is so much part of the Dubliners, and the album which has been long and eagerly awaited, is complete.
It is something of a minor miracle that five such diverse characters have remained together as a group for more than eleven years now. Maybe it is their very differences which provide the strong bond between them – that and the fact that they have never seen the need to use the slick trappings of showbusiness. To say that they have succeeded on a world stage is perhaps an over-simplification. However, it remains an irrefutable truth that by remaining themselves they have brought something very special to people the world over. Wherever they appear they engender warmth, affection, laughter and perhaps ever an occasional tear.
Their unique brand of magic has assured them of a niche in the annals of popular music. Even more important perhaps is their impact on people. Barney MacKenna once remarked that the Dubliners were made by their audiences. No matter how talented they were individually or collectively, if people lost the will to listen to them then they would be finished. This precept has undoubtedly played its part in their lives but as a member of innumerable audiences over the years one can say that without the Dubliners many lives would be the poorer.

MARY HARDY

Special thanks to the Shakespeare Theatre Club, Liverpool
Recorded at the Fiesta Club, Sheffield (24th March 1973)

Jimmy Shand Favourites Volume 1

Jimmy Shand at Wikipedia.

The 50 Guitars of Tommy Garrett - Take you to Hawaii

Liner Notes:
Hawaii is one of those fun sun places which everybody has heard of but comparatively few get the chance to visit. It’s rather a long way away in the blue Pacific and nobody in Britain has yet managed to organise a conveniently priced package holiday deal to enable we sun-starved Britons to sample its sun sea and sand.
We all know about its existence of course lots of us were aware of it via soothing and sultry recordings of Hawaiian music featuring those seductively wailing steel guitars and strumming ukeleles long before we made the TV acquaintance of Steve McGarrett and the other sleuths of Hawaii 5-0. Music can be totally expressive and it certainly is in the case of the Hawaiian Islands Lulling languorous sometimes syncopated but always evocative of palm trees gently swaying in a light breeze off an azure sea and miles of golden sand and tropical temperatures. The eight Hawaiian Islands containing people are Hawaii, Maui, Molokai, Lanai, Kahoolawe, Oahu, Kauai and Niihau. They grow sugar cane and pineapples amongst other pleasant sun drenched things and they entertain and charm immense numbers of tourist halidaymakers each year. Captain Cook (British you know) was the first European officially acknowledged to have visited those shares in 1778. Although the Spaniards reckoned they were there briefly at least two hundred years before, Captain Cook didn’t really get the right tourist treatment because when he resigned to those sunny shares in 1779 he got involved in a scuffle with the hitherto friendly natives who believed him to be an incarnation of their god Lono on his first visit. The second time around was not so idyllic and Captain Cook died thereon the beach the first of a considerable number of white people from afar to be eliminated by the indigenous Polynesians. American missionaries pacified the Islands a hundred years and more ago and The Hawaiian War Chant is really the last relic of warlike character of a basically friendly people some of whom settled in New Zealand a long time ago and are known as Maoris. They took to the guitar and gave it a special character and style of their own as well as developing the smaller ukelele in its support. This LP presents the best known tunes that have come out of the Islands played by a famous group of Californian guitarists who have built up a formidable reputation on record over recent years under the skilful direction of Tommy "Snuff" Garrett one of Americas leading record producers.

The 50 Guitars treat the songs of the Islands in authentically mellow style drawing forth the full melodic charm and remembering the Maori element with Now Is The Hour. Also present is the beautiful Hawaiian Wedding Song, the evocative Lovely Hula Hands referring to the enticingly graceful matrons of the pretty wahines or Hawaiian girls who speak a language with their hands as well as their hips when dancing and the famous song of farewell Aloha Oe believed to have been written by Queen Liliukalani the last ruler of the Hawaiian Islands before they went under American administration. It's another winner by the 50 Guitars and redolent of sun sand and surf.

NIGEL HUNTER

Arranger Hank Levine
Produced by Tommy "Snuff" Garrett
Art Direction Pierre Tubbs

Golden Guitar

The Royal Guitar Ensemble

The Classical Guitars of Los Indios Tabajaras

Liner Notes:

The Classical Guitars of Los Indios Tabajaras

Produced by Herman Diaz, Jr.

SIDE A

Valse in A Minor, Op. 34. No. 2 (Chopin) 4:46

Für Elise (Bagatelle in A Minor) (Beethoven) 3:03

Recuerdos de Ia Alhambra (Tarrega) 5:00

Hora Staccato (Dinicu-Heifetz) 2:07

SIDE B

Valse in A-Fiat, Op. 69, No. 1 (Chopin) 3:40

La Ronde des Lutins (Antonio Bazzini) 6:50

Serenata Española (Joaquim Malats) 2:56

Romance de Amor (Vincente Gomez) 1:55

Los Indios Tabajaras:

“Innovators with the Souls of True Musicians”

“Classical guitar” may be a relatively new phenomenon in the history of this very folksy, very popular, very romantic instrument. But there are two old hands who have breathed even newer life into it.

The famous pair: Los Indios Tabajaras, two Brazilian brothers who once knew nothing about classical music and who, in fact, had to make sure their first guitar - an abandoned one they found near home on a jungle path - was not a strange weapon. It wasn’t long before they figured out what it was. Magic in their hands.

Like many a great guitarist, Natalicio and Antenor Lima are self-taught (there were few music professors in the rain forest). But they didn’t stop with simply learning to conquer their new-found strings. Nor did they stop with their own country’s music. Nato and Tenor knew there was a world out there. They knew there was music in it. And they set out to find it, first on foot and then through sheer determination.

It was on to Mexico, on to Europe, and on to the discovery of Western music. And to the discovery of the kind of dedication that has made Los Indios Tabajaras unique in today’s music world.

They heard piano music, and they decided to fashion the kind of guitar that could play all the notes a piano could play - even though they had to build it themselves. They heard classical music, they felt its pulse, and it wasn’t long before Chopin, Beethoven and the great Latin and Romantic composers were a favorite part of their astonishing and always growing repertoire.

Like their repertoire, Los Indios Tabajaras keep growing. From Mexico to Japan to Paris to the renowned Amsterdam Concert-gebouw Orchestra to New York’s Town Hall to American network television; they have created a company of millions of fans. But through all of their successes, they remain perfectionists and something more. They continue to be innovators with the souls of true musicians.

Nowhere, does their genius prove itself more beautifully than in their treatment of the classics. You’ll hear it in the majestic precision or Chopin’s waltzes and be amazed that it took only two great guitarists to create the majesty. In the fantasy flight of Beethoven’s Bagatelle in A Minor. In the quiet fires of Serenata Española and Hora Staccato. And in every mood gentled by the guitars of Los Indios Tabajaras.

Los Indios Tabajaras have discovered the world and mastered its music in every delicious variety.

If you haven’t yet discovered Los Indios Tabajaras, do it now. And let them take you to wonderful places where the guitar has never sung so proudly.

Nancy Lawrence

Recorded in RCA’s Studio “B” and “C,” New York City, 1974

Recording Engineer: Ed Begley

Photographer: David B. Hecht

Art Director: Acy Lehman

Pride of the Pipers

Liner Notes:

PRIDE OF THE PIPERS
Pipes and Drums of the
1st Battalion Scots Guards
with Pipe Major Angus MacDonald

The pipes are capable of producing many moods — tremendously stirring when they play marches, exciting in the reels and jigs, and compellingly plaintive in the laments. All these moods are displayed par excellence on this fine album by the Pipes and Drums of the 1st Battalion Scots Guards, led by Pipe Major Angus MacDonald. It is he who plays the solo pipe in the beautiful ‘Amazing Grace’, accompanied on this record by the pipe organ at the Kingsway Hall, played by David Bell. This is a most interesting experiment which has produced a wonderful sound, providing as it does a harmonic structure of the work of which the pipe is incapable.

This album is obviously not intended just for fans of the pipe but for a much broader public who have recently accepted this instrument as a medium for expressing the poignancy of a beautiful melodic line.

Walter J. Ridley

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