CD of the WEEK

GERRY O'CONNOR
No Place Like Home Ossian
****

It's his first studio outing in five years, and banjo/fiddle maestro Gerry O'Connor has gone full throttle. Reinvigorating tunes siphoned from the playing of box player Paddy O'Brien and fiddler Seán Ryan, O'Connor's banjo retraces the links between Irish and Appalachian traditional music with the effortlessness that only the true virtuoso can muster.

Listen to the old-timey take on The Teetotaller, christened The Temperance Reel here, and then twist your tympanic membranes towards the set of Tom Billy Murphy's jigs and search for the faultlines between traditions. With a deceptively skeletal backing of Brendan O'Regan on bouzouki, mandolin and guitar, Tommy Hayes on bodhrán and percussion, and Damien Evans on bass, O'Connor weaves an intricate pathway between the Thomond Bridge hornpipe and The Cuckoo's First Call, the two tunes knitted together with a subtle tribute to Planxty's Little Musgrave.

O'Connor's playing has long startled and shone in gigs from Clondalkin to the Catskills, his mastery of the four-string banjo often compared to that of Earl Scruggs's pre-eminence on its five-string sister instrument. Now we've a chance to relish his double-jointed finger-picking beyond the confines of the session. Balancing niftily selected traditional tunes that celebrate their past and sit cosily in the present, alongside his own three original tunes, O'Connor has birthed a magnificent beast that will travel well beyond his own Tipperary/Kerry borders. A tincture more of that freewheeling O'Connor fiddle wouldn't have gone astray, though. www.ossian.ie