I never do this, but some self promotion:
I know many of you, mostly from my decades of playing Irish mandolin and accordion. I've had the pleasure of teaching several workshops (including the O'Flaherty retreat where my friend John Liestman does a fantastic job teaching mandolin), and I managed to win the Midwest Fleadh Cheoil one year and compete in the All Ireland.
A few months ago I completed a recording project of American Shaped Note music, using acoustic instruments as the voices for these harmonies. Recorded over 18 months in Alabama and Texas, the result is the CD, "Till The Warfare Is Over", the name being taken from a refrain of a Sacred Harp tune.
Though not a solo mandolin album in the way we usually think of it, there is plenty of mandolin here, all within the context of this unique style of music.
Since we're players here and you might like to know, the recording was made mostly with a Fylde Octavius bouzouki (sometimes 8 of them at once!), a Breedlove FF, a Kentucky oval-hole A model (which worked well for this) and a mid-90s Taylor 410 guitar. Uilleann pipes are on a couple of tunes also, and a "choir" of electric 12 strings appears on a few tracks.
So far as I know, no one has approached this music as it's done here. The "old-sounding" harmonies do lend themselves well to our instruments, I think. It's an interesting project, and not a bad recording- and was featured just this past weekend on "Eclectic Celt", a radio program hosted by Irish journalist/musicologist/broadcaster John O'Regan on 99.9 FM in Limerick.
Please consider checking it out.
"Till The Warfare Is Over" is available on CD from Amazon and CD Baby (though CD Baby's sample files sound like crap), and on download from both of those places, iTunes, and Google Play Store.
https://www.amazon.com/Till-Warfare-...arfare+is+over
Many thanks and all the best,
Rick
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