A Breath Of Fresh Air

Some of the best flute playing you’ll hear anywhere. Lovely settings of some well known tunes.

I can’t find any information on this album at all. The album cover I see on a few websites redistributing the tracks online looks like a joke. Supposedly this was released in 2006 on Green Linnett.

Kind of looks like a rehashed “In Good Company”. Is this supposed to be like a Best Of album or something? Wasn’t mentioned on Kevin’s myspace page. Wierd.

OK, what is going on with this album? I just bought this on iTunes, which said it was released on Green Linnett in 2006. This site <http://worldmusiccentral.org/artists/artist_page.php?id=147>; says 1996 but the version I downloaded has cuts from the 2001 album “In Good Company”.

This album is on literally every online mp3 store in existence. Yet I cannot find a single page giving a description of the album or who plays on it.

1. This is the same track from In Good Company with the fiddle track removed. This is not a new recording of the set. It is a remastered version without fiddle.

2. Unreleased set. Played on a very sharp F flute?

3. Unreleased set. E flat flute with string synths.

4. Unreleased set.

5. Identical to Frankie Gavin duet on “In Good Company”. They left the fiddle in this time.

6. Unreleased set.

7. Another “In Good Company” track left intact.

8. Well this is certainly interesting. It’s a set of two reels. The first reel is flute and guitar, the second is flute, bodhrán and piano. It literally sounds like they spliced two tracks into one. The guitar from the first tune is never to be heard again on the track!

9. Unreleased duet with Frankie Gavin.

(The tags get messed up here. 10 is not the slow air “Coilsfield House” from “In Good Company”. That’s actually on 11. All successive tracks are off by one.)

10. This one is aAnother bad splice job--two polkas on whistle. This track does not match the album at all in recording quality.

11. This is the “Coilsfield House” from “In Good Company”.

12. Splendid Isolation (“Brendan McGlinchey’s”) and a reel. This is unreleased.

13. Farewell to Jim--the jig set as it appears on “In Good Company” except they cut off the whistle intro.

14. Unreleased set of reels.

Oh, here is the excellent cover art:
http://i23.tinypic.com/11udzrt.jpg

My theory with this album is that Green Linnett threw together a bunch of Kevin Crawford recordings (some unreleased) and decided to make some money off of it (as is their custom). I’d be surprised if Kevin approved this or gets any of the profits.

Sorry, bad link: http://worldmusiccentral.org/artists/artist_page.php?id=147

Can’t help but wonder if Kevin knows about this.

http://www.tradmusic.com/newspage.asp?newsID=363

Several years ago, before In Good Company was released, I was given a cassette that was said to have been copied from the master of Kevin’s upcoming album. (Yes, I remember who gave it to me. No, I’m not telling who it was. But no, it wasn’t Kevin.) When In Good Company did come out, it ended up being what looked to be a highly re-worked version of the cassette I’d been given. Some selections the same, others not. Obviously the whole In Good Company concept of Kevin playing duets with a variety of fiddlers was not in place on the earlier version of the album on that tape. But the track list was close enough to tell that indeed the tape was a prototype for the CD, although those tracks that were on both the tape and the In Good Company CD had been re-recorded for the CD.

Now it looks like somebody who either owned or obtained that master tape of Kevin’s prototype of In Good Company has decided to release it. It’s worth wondering who this might be, and if Kevin knew about it and approved of it.

That stinks. I wouldn’t have bought it should I have known.

why not getting in touch with Kevin and asking him?

It is disappointing that an album with this name isn’t as fresh as it should be. Looking at the Lunasa website it is easy to find fresh new solos from Kevin which would sell if they were arranged and put on CD

So if you have the other KC CDs this one is the one NOT to have?
Is there anything on here that hasn’t appeared on another album?
Anything worth having on its own, without the other tracks?

“1. This is the same track from In Good Company with the fiddle track removed. This is not a new recording of the set. It is a remastered version without fiddle”

Maybe it’s the otherway around…Maybe they didn’t remove the fiddle here but added it on the earlier album, and the set on “Breat O Fresh Air” is the “untouched” version, see…
https://thesession.org/recordings/87

Thanks, Jason G., for listing the tracks on this album that differ from those on “In Good Company”. I was able to download only the new tracks from Rhapsody, although I had to use Hotspot Shield to fool Rhapsody into thinking I was ordering from the U.S.

At least I have a new (although short) Kevin Crawford flute album!

Randomly re-stumbled upon this recording and discussion, and not ever wanting to be one to steal somebody else’s credit or hard work, I just thought I’d mention (in response to drewr’s post) that it was mcdevincabe (not me) who did the leg work of figuring out how the track listing differed from “In Good Company”. I’m pretty patient with a lot of things, but not sure that I would have been able to go through each track like that. Anyways, I know this is inconsequential to this discussion here, but I just wanted to give credit where it was due.

In the version I have from iTunes, “John Carty’s” on track 1 seems to be this tune AKA “The Mossy Banks”: https://thesession.org/tunes/1846