Close friends for many decades, Seán, Kevin and Ronan have toured and played socially since the early 1980s. Years of pressure from fans and friends have at last led to them making this recording of songs and tunes. Unsurprisingly, this CD (and so the story goes...) is true to their concert performances – a comfortable balance of gentle and wild pieces, never suffering from that immobilising modern ailment, over-production; just warm, friendly music and song. The tracks are rounded out beautifully by the delicately responsive accompaniment of three fine musicians, Fergus Feeley on mandola, Jimmy Fitzgerald on guitar and Paul O’Driscoll on double bass. SEÁN TYRRELL Seán Tyrrell was born in Galway City and has lived in County Clare for many years. He was the first on either side of his family to take up music although his father was a fairly good singer in the Irish tenor style. Musical help with his first stumbling steps was given to him by his good friend Jack Geary and from then on he has been self-taught. The people who have influenced Seán most are Dónal Standún, Joe Cooley, Kevin Keegan, Seán Chóilín Ó Conaire, Liam Weldon and Martin Rockford. Seán emigrated to New York in 1968 and joined the folk club scene in Greenwich Village. The early Seventies took him west to San Francisco, where he played in many an Irish music session. It was here that Seán's reputation as a singer of songs was formed. After moving to New Hampshire in the Mid-Seventies, he co-founded Apples in Winter, a band which was short-lived but which gained a name for itself. He returned to Ireland in the late Seventies, where he continued to compose, but seldom played in public. In 1978 he accepted employment with the University of Galway, based in the heart of the Burren in County Clare. It was hard to avoid music in this part of Ireland and Seán was soon lured back into the music scene. Swapping the Burren for the shelter of Bell Harbour, close to the border of his native county, Sean spent his time juggling the demands of mussel farming and a re-energised attention to his music. The early 1990s saw the release of Seán’s first CD, Cry of a Dreamer, his winning of IMRO’s 'Best Overall Folk Act' and his first musical adaptation of The Midnight Court, staged by the Galway Arts Festival in 1992, was immediately regarded by many as the hit of that year’s festival. The Midnight Court has been an ongoing success in various forms and has toured most of Ireland’s big theatres and was staged at the Edinburgh Festival in 2008. It has now entered yet another new phase with a collaboration which sees the artist Dara McGee and FÍBÍN doing live animation in tandem with The Midnight Court. Since Cry of a Dreamer, Seán has gone on to release The Orchard, Belladonna, Rising Tide and Message of Peace, while he had previously collaborated on two of Davy Spillane’s CDs and was featured on the Songs of Peace Passendale Concert series. As well as the ongoing relationship with Ronan and Kevin, Seán has been involved in many other musical combinations with Paddy Keenan, Tommy Peoples, Little John Nee and the poet Mary O’Malley. KEVIN GLACKIN Kevin Glackin comes from a musical family in Dublin. He started playing the fiddle at the age of six under the guidance of his late father Tom who came from the Rosses in Donegal and it is indeed the Donegal style of fiddle playing that is most evident in Kevin's playing. Growing up in Dublin, players such as Frank O'Higgins, Leo Rowsome, John Joe Gardiner and John Kelly were regular visitors to the Glackin household and as a result Kevin was exposed at an early age to a wide range of different styles. During the Eighties Kevin embarked on his own musical journey, travelling the length and breadth of the country playing with various musicians. He recorded an album with a number of other Dublin traditional musicians under the title Bakerswell, which included musicians such as Sean Potts, Mick Hand and John Kelly. During this time he also recorded a duet album with his brother Seamus, called Northern Lights. This album received critical acclaim and was voted traditional album of the year by the Belfast Telegraph. During the Nineties he collaborated and toured with other musicians as well as Ronan and Seán. He also made a duet album with piper Davy Spillane called Forgotten Days which was voted traditional album of the year by the readers of Irish Music Magazine. Kevin has toured extensively in Europe, the U.S.A. and Asia. He currently lives in Dublin and teaches fiddle on the traditional music course in the Conservatory of Music and Drama at the Dublin Institute of Technology. RONAN BROWNE Born and bred in Dublin, Ronan Browne left the city in 1990, spending ten years in the Glen of Imaal in Wicklow before crossing the Shannon in the year 2000, to live in Spiddal. Musicians Peter O’Loughlin, Willie Clancy, Séamus Ennis, Leo Rowsome, Tommy Reck, Denis Murphy and Tommy Potts were family friends so it is no wonder that they all had a huge influence on Ronan’s musical development. It was only in later years that the singing of his maternal grandmother, Delia Murphy, became important to him, as the young Ronan saw her more as a grandmother than an influential singer. Ronan’s first lessons were from Dan O'Dowd with the newly formed Na Píobairí Uilleann in the early 1970s and as he grew older, John Kelly’s Capel Street shop, The Horse Shoe and the Four Seasons pub next door, became his places of learning – if you waited long enough it seemed that all the good musicians passed through at some time. Kevin Glackin has been a lifelong friend and they have played together since their youth. The friendship with Seán Tyrrell was built up in the 1980s over many late nights in Ollie Conway’s pub in Mullagh in County Clare. Having spent his whole life as a professional musician, Ronan straddles that difficult divide between pure traditional music and the modern electronic world, his work ranging from solo projects, playing with Glackin and Tyrrell, his celebrated duet with veteran musician Peter O’Loughlin, his trio CRAN, his acclaimed collaboration with poet Louis de Paor and trio performances with sean nós singer Róisín Elsafty and harpist Siobhan Armstrong, to writing and performing music for film and television and as the original piper with both the Afro Celt Sound System and Riverdance. Ronan has been involved in over 100 album recordings since his first venture into the studio in 1982 and has collaborated with many top traditional Irish music, classical, pop, jazz and country artists. Ronan’s recent ventures have included a highly critically acclaimed listening/music appreciation class which opens people's ears to the depths of Irish music and a series of in-depth historical and critical articles on the piper and pipe-maker R. L. O’Mealy (1873-1947) for the Seán Reid Society. Ronan has been a member of the house band for three series of the hugely successful cult music-programme, The Transatlantic Sessions. His music has been used in many films including The Secret of Roan Inis, Circle of Friends, Rob Roy and Gangs of New York while possibly the strangest place his music has been placed was in the Playboy video of Farrah Fawcett, 'All of Me'! Since 2007, Ronan has been playing pipes, flutes and whistles for wedding ceremonies and he was awarded “Wedding Musician of the Year, 2011” at the “Weddings Online” awards.