Trad At Heart

ELEANOR MacEVOY has a lot to answer for. Without her that little vessel that goes lub-a-dub-dub every time a stethoscope gets near it would still be languishing in the advertising pages of the Irish Medical Times, all arteries and veins, but no soul.

Now, though, matters cardiac are en vogue in a way that Maurice Nelligan would've given his entire prize collection of arteriosclerotic vesicles for a few years ago. The Mater could worse than to tie their PR in with the Woman's Heart entourage - who wants to gaze at shrivelled up venæ cavæ anyway?

Depending on what way you look at it, Trad At Heart is either a testament to the renaissance of Irish music as a living, breathing part of contemporary music or a cool calculated leap on a swiftly passing bandwagon that's heading out of town as fast as it came in, our very own TGV, if you like.

Me? I reckon it's just a good way to get a tincture of what some of the best of our musicians are doing without having to fork out a small fortune on each and every one of the albums. a kind of toe-dipping ritual that allows you to test the waters without suffocating - or worse still, drowning in a nebulous sea of fiddles and accordions and sundry other high pitched sounds (that I used to think only dogs were meant to hear).

Many of the finest, most fluid players are here - Arcady, Altan, Máirtín O'Connor, Séamus Begley and Steve Cooney - but it's by no means an entirely representative gathering. Deiseal, Dervish, Máire Breathneath and Sharon Shannon are trad at heart but fail to show. Still, it's an album catholic in sound and style - and highly democratic to boot.

Each artist/group is afforded two airings which have been excised from their own albums. Altan's 'The Snowy Path' waltzes along on a reverie of flute and fiddle that sways and soothes magically. Gerry O'Connor's original 'Funk The Cajun Blues' manages to squeeze Ry Cooder, Bill Whelan and Queen Ida into the one bed for a rapturous (but all too brief) ménage à trois, and Arcady's 'Barn Dances' and 'Hennessey's' reels trip lightly and twirl maniacally around the room 'til the head spins.

The two songs inserted amid the seven traditional and five original pieces are a welcome antidote to the sibilance of the accordions and fiddles. Altan's 'Dónal agus Mórag' is a chant-like memoriam to the eponymous lovers (and an ode to the beauty of Irish - "a rinneadh bainnis" - how much more romantic an expression than its English equivalent?), while Seamus Begley's sublime reading of the traditional love song "Bruach na Carraige Báine" would tug the heartstrings of an ox.

Another song wouldn't have gone astray in adding some shade where the abundance of lighter notes blind; the vocals suggest a space between tunes that allows a group's identity to fix in the memory. And the purist might bark at the juxtaposition of Cajun and Irish a mere laser's breath apart.

But why quibble? It's a fair airing of some of our lightest and brightest - and it might even send the odd bod scuttling towards the Gael Linn section next time they're in the record shop. No bad thing, I'd say.

• Siobhán Long