Several tunes here: Persian Ricardo; Cuckoos Nest; Ashleys Hornpipe and the Savage Hornpipe, are from the manuscript notebooks of east Midlands fiddle player and poet John Clare (1793 - 1864), who in the 1820s collected over two hundred and fifty tunes, some of them ‘pricked down' from the playing of gypsy fiddlers he knew, others copied from printed sources. Jigs, marches, hornpipes, reels and waltzes are crowded into their pages with not a precious space wasted, a characteristic rag-bag of English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, American, French and German dance tunes, along with song airs, and music for the theatre and opera house. Clare's is just one of numerous country fiddlers' tune collections of the late 1700s and early 1800s which, taken together, reveal the breadth and vitality of English fiddle music in its heyday...
... ‘ As contemporary musicians, we connect with the musical spirit of our forebears, if at all, across the ‘dark backward and abysm' of historical time. Here it's neither the ‘heritage', nor the functional ‘folk dance', aspects of the music, however, that interest us, as much as the profound emotional charge the tunes still carry. There's a nagging dark edge to some of the tunes, and even (once the musical synapse filters are off), a strange, funky modernity in a syncopated Lake District reel like ‘Hod The Lass', that demands a deeper response than period ‘reconstruction'. So we also present some of our own new tunes, diverse in their sources and inspiration: ‘Acton Township' with its South African feel, ‘Katya' adopting Swedish-style harmonies, and ‘The Sleeper' driven by Balkan rhythms. In this, we salute the old-style English fiddlers whose music, like English as a world language today, flourished by constantly absorbing, and seeking to integrate, new and ‘foreign' elements.' Tunes in mp3 format: Roadrage/Berserk, Persian Ricardo, Maiden Lane/The World Turned Upside Down Synapse/Hod the Lass, The Cuckoo’s Nest, Ashley’s Hornpipe/The Savage Hornpipe, The Sleeper, Snicket/G for Gnosall, Acton Township, The Lover’s Ghost, Katya, Ironlegs/The Sportsman’s HornpipeSalisbury Plain, Wilbye’s Lament, The Galopede
