February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
But technique should serve melody, not vice versa. Even in jazz, our most improvisational music form, performers keep an eye on the melody line and almost always return to it, like jet fighters to an aircraft carrier.
Born to a father from Brocca, Co. Offaly, and a mother from Ballyhahill in West Limerick, Chicago’s Liz Carroll enjoys an international reputation on fiddle because she respects melody and artfully uses her vaunted technique to convey it.
On “In Play,” her first duo album with guitar and bouzouki player John Doyle for Nashville’s Compass Records, Carroll at times cuts loose and appears to give free rein to her bowing. This is especially true in “Rolling in the Barrel/The Laurel Tree/O’Rourke’s,” a medley of traditional reels that gain in ferocity as well as inventiveness. Carroll’s bowing there swoops, slides, soars, and, yes, sizzles. It may be the closest example to date of what I’ll call her “statement playing,” an attempt to show that she, too, can pack a pyrotechnic wallop in her music.
But even in that three-reel medley, as boldly coruscating as anything you’re likely to hear from her in a studio recording, Carroll sticks to the melodic spine. Not once does the listener get the impression that these venerable trad tunes are excuses for an ego trip of technique. She’s having fun with style but not making fun of tradition.
We’ve all heard over-hyped, hyperactive fiddlers treat the past like silly putty, molding it into fanciful shapes out of the desire to be “current” or “cutting edge.” Tradition must change, but that doesn’t mean all change will become part of tradition. Time, the ultimate martinet, punishes flimsy or false-motivated fashion by condemning it to obscurity.
Liz Carroll’s music will not suffer that fate because there is nothing flimsy, false, or fashion mongering about it. As some other Irish American traditional musicians continue to veer toward guest-dotted recordings deemed a desirable end in themselves, the trad music coming out of Ireland has been increasingly lean, focused, and passionate in an unstudied, unforced way. It is neither retro nor primitivist. Instead, it’s a heartfelt, joyful, imaginative reclaiming of Irish traditional music’s primal spark, where heat and light emanate in equal portions.
It’s true that Carroll’s previous albums, “Lake Effect” in 2002 and “Lost in the Loop” in 2000, featured several guests frequently creating Solas-like settings for her music. Those recordings were tendon-stretching efforts to vary and expand the impact of her sound principally through rhythm and percussion (as well as the classical tincture of the Turtle Island String Quartet on one track), and they largely succeeded.
“In Play” takes a different tack. Like the best trad albums now issued in Ireland, it radiates confidence in the power of pared-back instrumentation. Carroll on fiddle and Doyle on guitar and bouzouki are the only players heard here, and the approach they take recalls that of Carroll and Altan guitarist D_ith