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| Fiddle Tunes Illuminated: 45 Tunes Transcribed and Annotated for Stylistic Study, As Played by Alan Jabbour on Two CDs, A Henry Reed Reunion and Southern Summits Transcribed by Liberty Rucker and Alan Jabbour with introduction and commentary by Alan Jabbour Reviewed by Bill Hicks The Old-Time Herald, Vol. 11, No. 12 (August-September 2009), pp. 55-56 |
. . . let me then say that almost anyone interested in the art of fiddling will find Alan Jabbour’s wonderful book of great and enduring value, to be
placed in the bookshelf beside Chief O’Neill’s collections and memoirs, Breathnach’s Ceol Rince na hEireann, R.P. Christeson’s The Old-Time
Fiddler’s Repertory, and more recently the work of Lisa Ornstein. Jabbour has been so kind as to tie his transcriptions and analysis to actual CDs,
a link sorely lacking in much of the previous published fiddling work. The fact is and always has been that music is its own universe – learning to
read musical notation, or to discuss its characteristics, is not the same thing as learning to play a good tune or even a good symphony. But this isn’
t to say that learning to think analytically about a tune’s character isn’t a joy in its own right. I have always found Alan Jabbour to be a joyful man.
The joy, if you’ve heard Alan playing tunes live or on recordings, is obvious. It was said about the extraordinary Irish fiddler Tommy Potts (his LP,
The Liffey Banks, is now in CD format), that he could go into a room to play an air, and would be found at the end of the tune to be sitting in a pool
of tears – Seamus Innis being a man to call on for liner notes given that Joyce was in Trieste. Alan’s joy in tunes is no less. As a fiddler lucky
enough to have played in sessions with Alan, and to have been influenced by his approach to fiddling ever since I began my own journey down the
fiddle path, I have never seen him play without passion and verve. It is thus another, expected, joy to hear Alan “talk” at length about his work and
interest in this collection. And if you should want to learn one of “his” tunes via notation, or by mixing reading the notes with one of the cuts on either
of the two CDs which accompany the book, success should follow industry. Alan’s precision makes for fine learning, even when the effort is
entirely by ear, and here his precision serves to tie the notes on the page tightly to the notes played.
There isn’t room to quote the annotations in enough length to give you a full appreciation of this work. If you would like to think systematically
about fiddle tunes, and learn many features of this body of music when observed by a scholar-player of Mr. Jabbour’s caliber, this is the book for
you, without any doubt. And if you simply want to learn some of Alan’s fine repertoire, this book would be like several week-long master classes
with Mr. Jabbour. . . . [excerpt from notes to “Magpie”]
There is a great deal to think about in this little paragraph. Alan’s book is full of this kind of depth of analysis, including in many cases his
reflective self-analysis of his own playing, and how it has changed and evolved over a lifetime of sawing the strings. As with his playing, Alan
possesses a mind which sees great detail and resolution. If he were a sportscaster, Alan could tell you what just happened better than you could
see it yourself. And he’s willing to share. Tunes Illuminated, then, is a triple threat at the very least. In the actual tunes, written in notation, a fiddle
student can find a leg up on a terrific repertoire of fiddle melodies. With the accompanying CDs (also available separately, and each reviewed in
past issues of the OTH), any listener can enter the musical realm directly. And with Alan’s accompanying text, the tunes are, indeed and most
assuredly, illuminated, with the result that the reader should leave the book with a broader understanding of the musical context of the melodies,
and of what a fiddler actually does when playing them. . . .