Traditional/World Music

Seamus Ennis: "The Return From Fingal" (RTE Records)

These tunes from the late master piper are so hard-wired into the repertoire you can just tune into the heady technique: the percussive belt of the dance tunes, racing off on the reels; the flyaway trills, from shaking the entire forearm - the "shivers", he called them; or the stuttered rolls on the low D. There's an Elizabethan ancientness to the relentless drones, the emphatic honks and barps of the chanters - indeed his instrument, found in pieces in a sack by his father in 1908, was made early in the last century. Another side here is his resonant singing, and the amazing vitality and expressiveness of the later recordings (up to 1980). Some tracks from the early 1940s have to battle through the snap, crackle and pop of the old acetates, but most are nicely cleaned up to give a vivid sound-picture of a giant, hewn from the bedrock of the tradition.

Mic Moroney

Tommy Hayes: "A Room In The North" (Claddagh Records)

This is an album as earthily eccentric as anything Peadar O'Riada ever dreamt up: a world music-drugged collection of sessions, recorded with minimal overdubs, backed by the wonderful Ronan Brown on all sorts of world-flutes and whistles; the American harpist Julie Haines with a rhythm culled from African Kora-playing; and, perhaps least successfully in terms of the mix, Kenneth Edge's urbane jazz-bluesy sax. Hayes himself thunders delicately away on bones, bodhrans, egg-shakers, rainmakers, talking drums, singing bowls, meditation bells and so on - and the music is just as headily eclectic, from the Nubian 48-beat handclap cycles of Nagrisad to the razor-sharp folk-lilting of Hayes' octogenarian aunt Meta.

Mic Moroney

Ben Harper: "The Will To Live"(Virgin) There are those who think that Ben Harper is the nearest thing to competition that the legend of Bob Marley has faced. On the strength of this mixed, though ultimately rewarding, set there might just be something in what they say. For the intensity and sheer beauty of Jah Works, I would certainly cast my vote, and endorse it on the basis of the chilling I Want To Be Ready. Other fuzz guitar-fuelled efforts are not so successful, begging comparison with other less talented figures like Lenny Kravitz. Harper is at his best when his hypnotic voice eases its way through moody reggae rhythms, which are often supercharged with rumbling blues riffs. The sound is initially disturbing, but there is great control and purpose in everything he does and, in the final analysis, it is hard to reject the album's seductive powers.

Joe Breen