On Sat, 2003-01-11 at 02:37, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > David Greenburg,( the most fabulous bowing I've ever heard, book is out of > print right now, I found a copy on line in Australia titled: Dungreen > Collection)
I really should have mentioned David in my first email. He's not only an awesome player (I kind of think his playing sounds like Mary MacDonald on steroids), but an awesome teacher. That's more then alot of players can say. Just because you have the chops doesn't mean you can show other people what the hell it is that you're doing. The skill to teach well is truly something special. David has that. He's the zen master of Scottish fiddle music. Another thing about David's playing which rocks is that although he is a very accomplished classical violinist (esp. on the Baroque violin) he doesn't let that all that proper training spoil his fiddle playing :-) He paid his dues listening. There are tons of classical violinists out there that can play Paganini's Caprices, but make Scottish music sound really tedious and boring. I don't know what it is, maybe they pay too much attention to "correct" tempo and "correct" notes, and not enough time listening to worn out old home tapes and trying to get the flavor into their music. For anyone who hasn't struggled that struggle before, it's so so hard to get the blas into the tunes. That's where the real work in playing is. Honestly, Scottish traditional music is really technically not that difficult. The hardest it gets really is the flat-key stuff by William Marshall and the other guys of that ilk. So when it's good, it's good because something is happening that is beyond just notes. In that way, it's like the blues (which is an even more primal style of music): Blues-men spend their entire musical careers trying to make pentatonic riffs stuffed into 12-bars rip your heart out. I have to admit, the good ones are really something to listen to. I usually can listen to about two bars of any player and immediately feel whether they have flavor or not. It's easy, you either say "yeah!", or you toss the CD out the window. Most of the players that I mentioned earlier (and plenty of them that I didn't mention) have that something that you can only get into your playing the hard way. David's definately one of them. > Winnie Chafe, ( Cape Breton: gorgeous waltzes and slow airs) Probably the most amusing thing I've seen/heard on Winnie Chafe in years, was a bit on CBC about her reaction to Ashley MacIsaac. I love Ashley because he's a totally moody, freaky, tempermental genius. He does whatever the hell he wants, and isn't afraid to tell anyone exactly what he thinks, and he backs it all up with a playing style that is totally frenetic, fiery and dangerous. That obviously rubs some people the wrong way on a tiny island like Cape Breton, where people are set in their ways. Winnie Chafe totally bad mouthed him on Canadian National television. She went on about how he was ruining the tradition (as if Winnie is *so* traditional herself with all that vibrato). That really took her down a couple notches in my book. Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
