Wednesday, 14 April 2010
If there's a problem with world music it's the fact that there is, quite literally, a world of it out there. If you're looking to pursue an active interest in its various branches and genres you'll need to be cashed up, time rich and in regular contact with a community of like-minded individuals who can help you keep up with what's going on.
Having found myself increasingly cash-strapped, shelf-space-poor and following too many parallel interests, it's hardly surprising that Hughesy's collection tends to be spotty when it comes to world music so it's no wonder that while I've enjoyed most of what I've heard my contact with The Chieftains has been sporadic.
A cassette copy of their Irish Heartbeat collaboration with Van Morrison, some tracks on The Long Journey Home soundtrack, and a copy of Down The Old Plank Road: The Nashville Sessions I found in a cut-out bin pretty well pulls it up.
With a discography that goes back as far as 1964, there's no way that a collector's going to be filling in the gaps in a collection all at once, but we try to keep abreast of what's coming out and in that regard a daily earful of Lucky Oceans and The Planet on Radio National is a valuable extra string to the resources bow.
My completist tendencies haven't quite stretched as far as finding copies of absolutely everything Ry Cooder has played on, so while I knew Cooder had contributed a song to San Patricio I wasn't gong to head out and buy it on that basis alone, so it wasn't until Lucky made it the album of the week a fortnight or so back that I decided to take the purchasing plunge.
Having done, in the words of my tattered Rolling Stone Album Guide, more to further the spread of Irish traditional music than anything since the potato famine it was probably only a matter of time before Paddy Moloney and colleagues found their way to Mexico and the story of the band of Irish deserters who fought on the Mexican side against the United States during the Mexican-American war of 1846-48.