Tony Mac Mahon::Tributes
Songlines Review Spring/Summer 2001
Tony MacMahon
Mac Mahon From Clare
Maccd 001 (69mins)
Even if he wasn’t the man who first brought The Bothy Band together to perform on his RTÉ radio programme The Long Note, accordionist Tony Mac Mahon’s place in Ireland’s traditional music pantheon would nonetheless be secure.
Mentored during his early years by the late greats Joe Cooley and Seamus Ennis, he is especially esteemed for his interpretation of slow airs, often described as possessing the lonesome quality or draiocht associated with Irish traditional music at its best. Mac Mahon has collected five superlative examples on this - his first solo release since 1972 - gleaned from archival recordings made between 1967 and 2000. Among them are several sparkling duos with various ‘brothers in music,’ including fiddlers James Kelly and Seamus Connolly, Barney McKenna on banjo, the late Peadar Mercier, bodhran player with The Chieftains, plus a brief but memorable appearance of the aforementioned Cooley, captured shortly before his death.
It’s the slow airs, though - mostly drawn from old Gaelic laments, along with a Breton elegy - that imprint themselves most on the memory. While each possesses its own character, all share Mac Mahon’s exquisitely measured timing, his masterly proportioning of space and silence as well as sound, and his astonishingly deft and subtle control of dynamics, ornamentation and harmony.
A similar sense of rapport with the music animates the reels, jigs, marches and step-dances, via his unerring balance between formal rigour and richly nuanced expressive vitality.
Sue Wilson
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