This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen Magazine #97 (December 2001/January 2002). The magazine is available on newsstands and by subscription.

Vintage Wine in New Bottles
Reissues and Compilations on Topic Records
by Steve Winick

Not long ago, a package arrived at Dirty Linen filled with releases from Topic Records. Many of these were wholesale reissues, or compilations of previously issued tracks. Topic is certainly doing its bit to see that folk music in all its guises remains available on CD and gets to as wide an audience as possible. Here are a few of the sets its put together.

Past Masters of Irish Dance Music [Topic Records TSCD0604 (2000)] is intended as a companion to Topic's Irish Dance Music, released on CD in 1995. It includes literally "more of the same," which in this case means more classic 78 r.p.m. sides from many of the musicians and groups who were featured on the first volume: Michael Grogan (Dublin), The Flanagan Brothers (New York), The Four Provinces Orchestra (Philadelphia), The Belhavel Trio (Dublin), The Ballinakill Traditional Dance Players (Dublin), and The Siamsa Gaedheal Ceilidhe Band (Dublin). It also includes tunes from some prominent folks who were not on the first album. Best known among these (at least in my neck of the woods) would be Paddy Killoran, who emigrated from Sligo to New York in 1925; Killoran was a fiddling student of James Morrison, proprietor of the legendary dance venue nicknamed "The Bucket of Blood" in the Bronx, and a prolific recording artist. His contribution here is most unusual, a set of tunes from his Pride of Erin Orchestra, which in addition to Killoran and a certain Denis Murphy on accordion (not the Kerry fiddler, who also appears on the compilation), features a piano, drums, a clarinet, and a tuba! Other notables include Larry Redican, another New York-based Sligoman who, despite a great reputation, appears on no other available recording that I know of; Seamus Ennis, of whom many recordings exist but none to beat his piping on this track, recorded when he was 30; P.J. Conlon, the New York-based accordion master; and Chicago uilleann piper Tom Ennis, who plays a fine duet with Morrison, who plays the flute instead of the fiddle for which he was famous. If some of the tunes are a little drum-heavy, most of them sound remarkably alive and fresh after all this time, filled with lift and swing and, as the old-timers might say, nyah. The sound quality is as good as you could hope for given the sources, and Reg Hall's notes, as usual, are thorough, informative, and a pleasure to read. The general introduction is essentially the same as that for Irish Dance Music, but the individual tune notes are where most of the information is to be found; in them, Hall gives you a feeling for the times and the extraordinary men and women who kept Irish music alive on records in the first half of the century.

There are four more recordings discussed in this column from Dirty Linen #97 (Dec. '01/Jan. '02). Read the full text in the magazine, available via subscription or on newsstands and in bookstores.