Scoil Samhraidh Willie Clancy, Miltown Malbay, 5 July 2026

Dia dhaoibh a chairde,

Tá mé an sásta a bheith anseo libh inniu chun an t-albam nua seo le Jack Talty a sheoladh.

Coire an Cheoil by Jack is an album of 32 original compositions, performed by 24 musicians, including Jack on concertina and piano, over 15 tracks.

When Jack contacted me about this album in March, I could tell by the way he spoke about it that it was a particularly meaningful recording for him. Composers in traditional music often put together a collection of their compositions that they have written over many years , but this album has a different origin.

Jack explained to me, and he writes on the sleevenotes too, that in January of this year, his mother Colette Talty (née Hill), passed away – ar dheis Dé go raibh a hanam – and although Jack had not been considering a recording before then, this creative response started to develop and evolve in his mind.

By the end of January, he had contacted many of the musicians who would become involved – I can’t mention them all here, but among them then are Cormac Begley, Saileog Ní Cheannabháin, Diarmuid Ó Meachair, the group At the Racket – and he had also contacted the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig, where in February he spent a week writing 15 of the 32 tunes that are on this album.

So you can already sense that this album comes from an intense period of creativity, from conception to completion in less than six months. That’s rare, and all of that creativity and energy is in this album.

This is where the title of the album, Coire an Cheoil, ‘the cauldron of music’, comes to the fore. A cauldron can suggest tumult, but it also suggests a stirring of creativity, ideas rising, things coming to the surface, bringing different combinations together, and allowing the creative process to go to work, often in unpredictable ways. And if you look at the cover and inlay card for the album, you will see these very fine images by Maurice Gunning of the Burren where Jack did a lot of thinking when developing the ideas for this recording.

So Coire an Cheoil is an album of solo playing, duets and group work. It is an album that is also a coming together of the musicians that Jack has worked with over the past 15 years of Raelach Records, the label that he founded. This is actually the 28th album released on the label, which is an extraordinary achievement in itself, and Jack through this label has supported many new voices, like Saileog, Aoife Ní Bhriain and Aidan Connolly, and also given us classic albums by Noel Hill, Tony MacMahon, Tony Linnane, Conal Ó Gráda, Geraldine Cotter.

But 28 is not just a number, it is a community – the community of musicians that Jack has grown around Raelach – and of course, by bringing all of these musicians together, the label’s output, and Coire an Cheoil, is a record of our time too.

And although many of these pieces are very new, because of the nature of Irish traditional music, they have already changed through the creative process of working with the musicians. The group At the Racket, took two two-part reels and turned it into one three-part reel, ‘The Whistling Gatepost’. Fiddle player Aidan Connolly has brought some lovely flourishes to the opening slides, ‘The Farm Gate’ and ‘That Was Allright’. Diarmuid Ó Meachair brings his incredible command of the melodeon to two barndances, ‘Summerhill Terrace’ and ‘The Albany Barndance.’

Half of the tunes were written in that period in February in Annaghmakerrig, but the opening slides were written on the back of a newspaper in a café in Cork, and one of my favourite tunes on the album, ‘Ríl Nell’, was written less than half an hour after his daughter Nell was born, and Jack writes, ‘I can only imagine the looks I got in the hospital as I whistled intensely at our new arrival.’

There are some other tracks I want to mention here. I have to mention Aoife Ní Bhrian’s brilliant solo playing of a three-part hornpipe that seems to have elements of the harping tradition to it, and it was recorded in the Ó Riada Hall in UCC; a duet between Jack and Saileog Ní Cheannabháin where Saileog is playing the viola, and it has this wonderful rhythm combined with electronics; and if you enjoyed Jack’s duet with Cormac Begley, Na Fir Bolg, fifteen years ago, you will be pleased that there is a new duet by the two of them on this album, bringing back together that amazing musical partnership. There’s also beautiful air for Jack’s mother Colette with Neil Martin on the cello and Matthew Berrill on clarinet.

I have to mention the last track because it’s so different. In 2021, Jack was named as the Liam O’Flynn artist in residence at the National Concert Hall in Dublin, and he composed the two pieces that make up this track as part of that residency. This is an area where we hear the experimental side of Jack’s work. The piece combines different rhythms, it has voices and instruments, shifting in and out, and lilting from Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin, and it’s a wonderful way to finish the album.

Finally, there’s something else I wanted to say about the album. This is the first time, in a sense, that we have Jack has brought all of his musical worlds together – his own solo playing, aspects of the Ensemble Eriú world, his duets, his collaborations, his group work, his compositions, and all under the Raelach Records umbrella – and I think that’s always an important moment for an artist when they start to see all of the different aspects of their creativity, not as separate expressions, but as part of the one thing – when they start to synthesise everything take command of the full range of their expression, and it opens up all sorts of new directions. So although this album sadly marks loss in one way, it also signals something new. I enjoyed listening to it – I was fascinated by the breadth of Jack’s creative work –  and I am sure you will enjoy it too.

Go raibh míle maith agaibh.