FolkWorld #80 03/2023
© Alex Monaghan

In Memory of Paddy Fahey

Yvonne KaneLiz Kane

Kane Sisters @ FROG

www.thekanesisters.com

With the death of East Galway fiddler and composer Paddy Fahey in 2019 at the remarkable age of 102, Liz and Yvonne Kane were left as the best known and arguably the finest interpreters of his music - close to 150 compositions, all with the same name but with a range of different chacters within the complex East Galway tradition.

The Kane Sisters

Artist Audio The Kane Sisters "In Memory of Paddy Fahey", Dawros Music, 2022

Liz and Yvonne have continued their excellent work to spread Paddy Fahey's tunes around the world, and this fourth album from The Kane Sisters includes fifteen of Fahey's tunes as well as several of Liz and Yvonne's own in a similar style, and a handful by Leitrim icon Joe Liddy who was not so far from East Galway in some ways. Sadly there will be no new Paddy Fahey tunes, but compositions by Liddy and the Kanes seem set to fill that gap to an extent.

Take Falling Snow for instance, a slow air collaboration between Yvonne and Liz - it's quite beautiful, unhurried and deceptively simple but with those unexpected cadences and catches so typical of Fahey or Farr or even Joe Cooley's music. The slow pieces here are exceptional in general - Grandad's Waltz, the song air Eochaill, and even the hornpipe Queen of the West (a favourite of the late Joe Burke) stood out for me, and these ladies think nothing of building a medley of waltzes and hornpipes, or hornpipes and reels, or even reels and jigs in either order. It all works as if by magic, or more likely telepathy - if you see these two on stage there's a constant private joke running between them as they put their joy into the music.

Twin fiddles, and an occasional solo, are expertly accompanied by John Blake on guitar and keyboards, Neil Martin on cello particularly for that gorgeous slow air, and a couple of energetic explosions from step-dancer Nathan Pilatzke. Two more highlights worth mentioning are the medley starting with Paddy Fahey's Jig and slipping into two Liddy reels, and the selection which starts with Liz's reel Emily's Buzz and goes the other way to end on the jig One for Leo by Yvonne. The stage version of this number can easily take ten minutes by the time all the twists and turns of the story have been ironed out! Marvellous music, uncanny togetherness, and some great new compositions for the tradition - In Memory of Paddy Fahey will not be quickly forgotten.


Paddy Fahey

Paddy Fahey @ FROG

Paddy Fahey (or Fahy, 22 August 1916 – 31 May 2019) was an Irish composer and fiddler who was considered one of the finest living composers of tunes that are in the style of traditional Irish music. He died in May 2019 at the age of 102.

Fahey is from Kilconnell in East Galway. His music has a distinctive yearning, magical quality often referred to as "Draíocht". His music has been recorded by many of the finest traditional Irish musicians including Martin Hayes, Planxty, John Carty and Kevin Burke. In recent years, a few recordings featured Fahey's music prominently including recordings by Liz and Yvonne Kane and Breda Keville.

Fahey was something of an enigma in the traditional Irish music world in that he has never made a commercial recording despite the fact that he is an exceptional fiddler; nor has he published a book of his compositions. There are some privately made recordings of Fahey which have been distributed among musicians since the 1970s, and transcriptions of his tunes are found in many tune collections and on Internet resources such as www.thesession.org.

Fahey never gave his compositions names; instead they tend to be simply named "Paddy Fahey's Reel No.1", "Paddy Fahey's Jig No.2", etc. His known compositions number around 60 tunes, all of which are either jigs, reels or hornpipes.

In 2001 Fahey was named Composer of The Year by Irish Language TV station TG4 at their annual award ceremony 'Gradam Ceoil TG4'. The award ceremony incorporated an extremely rare public performance with Paddy appearing alongside fellow fiddler Paddy Canny, harpist Máire Ní Chathasaigh, the band Altan and others.


From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [Paddy_Fahey]. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.

Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.

Date: March 2023.



Photo Credits: (1)-(3) The Kane Sisters, (4) Paddy Fahey (unknown/website).


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