Bit of Ginger Slow

Bit of Ginger aka The Lilting Fisherman, traditional Irish Jig played slow for listening on a Jefferies 38 button G/D Anglo concertina.

Slow is More

When playing for contra dancers, the tunes have to go at a right proper clip. Speedy, but not too fast and certainly not too slow. Just right. The Goldilocks Tempo. At a dance, I am always playing Anglo concertina with a good fiddler and some solid rhythm section, with a combination of bass, piano and guitar.

However, when there are no dancers around... I can play these same traditional tunes by myself, as fast or as slow as I like. For this project, I’ve decided that SLOW IS MORE. I’m going to slow the tempo way down and even stretch the extremes of tasty slowness... all in a solo concertina recording.

I recently had the opportunity to teach a hundred of my favorite fiddle tunes, by ear, to a friend. We played almost every night during the plague. Me on concertina and her on autoharp.

Teaching by ear that way requires slow playing. The tune gets learned on the fly through repetition. I grew to like those relaxed teaching tempos and started noticing that some tunes responded to the slow treatment better than others. Here, I’ve collected the best of the bunch. Tunes robust enough to stand proud in their naked slowness.

With the right tune, slow playing reveals the music clearly in bold relief and allows us to distinctly hear the dynamic interplay between melody, harmony and rhythm with an exquisite focus on the minute and granular details of expression and articulation.

In short; slow play is good for teaching and learning, but it also sounds super good all on its own, transforming standard dance tunes into majestic anthems.

Without the dancers these exquisite dance tunes are set free. Playing them slow, allows the ear to better savor the complex interplay between the musical elements of these specially selected, slow-friendly and ancient dance tunes.

All played here on the solo Anglo concertina.