Overall Comments

This is a recently published book of banjo tablature by Kyle Datesman. Here's the link:

http://www.melbay.com/product.asp?ProductID=96574BCD

I bought this because the content looked largely unfamiliar to me, and there were some enticing tune titles. The blurb promised some unusual key signatures and modes. I liked the fact that it gives several tunes in more than one key, and that it tells you which mode every tune is in. I've had it about a week, and I'm learning a few tunes from it. It's an eccentric book in many ways, and I find certain aspects of it utterly baffling.

For one thing, the title is a bit of a misnomer. I hear little that isn't Irish in these melodies. The repertoire is predominantly fiddle tunes, jigs and hornpipes. It's fundamentally Irish-American in character, with plenty of repertoire from the US of A.

For another, I'm really curious to know where on earth Kyle Datesman has found all this material. His introductions discuss certain details of the melodies in quirky and interesting fashion, but he never mentions sources.

I wouldn't care, only many of these tunes bear no relation whatsoever to tunes I'd associate with them. There's a "Sail Away Ladies", a "Wind That Shakes The Barley" and a "St Annes Reel" that I've never heard before. They're not simply variations on a theme: they're completely different tunes. I'm no expert, and this may well be ignorance on my part, but I've never heard any arrangements of these that come close to what's tabbed in this book. In the case of "Wind that Shakes the Barley" there's a further anomaly: he gives the tune in two different keys, yet the second arrangement is almost an entirely different tune.

I keep experiencing a nagging scepticism to how much of the author's own composerly 'tweaks' has slipped in. There are a lot of dischords and whole-tone progressions. And the majority of the tunes have a peculiar resistance to resolving themselves in conventional ways – phrases end on strange notes of the scale, and do so too often to ascribe it to a tab typo.

A good example is a beautiful tune called 'Ebenezer'. It has some gorgeous discordant intervals that bring to mind both Joplin rags and Ravel. It doesn't sound like anything I've heard from any British traditions, or indeed from any old modal mountain tunes. Does anybody know this tune? Where's it from?

The closest thing I've heard to this material is the banjo playing of Dan Levenson. He has an album calld Barenaked Banjos that has a similar flavour. ('Betsey Likens' being a good case in point.) And I can hear some echoes of these melodies in some of Andy Irvine & Paul Brady's albums too.

The book comes with an accompanying CD, which isn't all that helpful: it sounds like it was dashed off quick, and it's pretty messy. There are no dynamics to the playing and quite a few other open strings ring out sympathetically, making it very hard to get a sense of the song's mode and mood. (He even - I think - hits the odd neighbouring string once or twice.)

All that said, this is in some ways the most facinating banjo book I've ever bought. It's got my fingers negotiating some very odd stretches. Datesman loves these descending runs that are often chromatic or whole-tone, which have you splaying your fingers in spidery stances up the neck. In the short time I've had it, I've grown much more practised at flea-like springs across strings and frets. These tunes really favour – in fact demand – taking brave liberties with the pace and the dynamics. You get a lot of mileage out of letting certain notes sustain over the next.

So there you have it: some gorgeous if eccentric tabs that may or may not be of dubious provenance. For anyone interested in [very] old-time modal mountain stuff, this should be a must-have. And that goes, in a funny kind of way, for anyone interested in classic or ragtime banjo too.

[ENDNOTE: I'd really appreciate it if any banjo pickers on here, or any experts in this repertoire could check out the link and tell me a bit more about yr opinion of these transcriptions and where they might be from. On the Mel Bay site, you can look at a few sample pages.]

Overall Rating

8