Album Notes

(From the CD liner notes)

When Tipsy House would play at the Plough & Stars Pub on the odd Thursday night, Jim Belcher and a gaggle of nice folks would show up and dance a figure from time to time. It was great fun, but it seemed that we were either stopping too soon, or going too long for what they had in mind. I knew a little about set dancing, thanks to Tom Savage (R.I.P.) who would get a lot of people around here up and dancing to our tunes. In this case, however, it occurred to me that it would be nice to have medleys we like to play that fit the dance figures Jim and his gang were doing. So, I asked him to send the bar counts in order to figure out how to accomplish this.

My feeling is that these figures originally might have been choreographed around favorite medleys of the local players, and the medleys probably used a variety of types of tunes with different bar counts. So, I got out my calculator and figured it all out till I knew which figures matched up with specific medleys that we play. The result was well received, although I think the dancers were happy enough that we just turned our regular gig into a set dance.

This CD isn't intended to be any sort of "be-all-and-end-all" set dance recording, and Tipsy House isn’t really a set dance band in the purest sense. What we're simply trying to do is capture the flavor of one of the Thursday night set dances at "The Plough.” I’ve heard some set dance recordings that have more aggressive speeds for these dances, but our tempos are intended for listeners as well as dancers.

Anyway, I do hope anyone who does like set dancing, or just enjoys listening to traditional Irish music, will find something they enjoy about this recording.

Jack Gilder