Up In The Air (jig) on The Session

This is a tune by Kevin Burke. Does anyone know any other tunes by Kevin Burke?

A direct quote from Da Man himself: “When I overhear people saying, oh, he plays all those Kevin Burke tunes, I’ve written maybe six tunes, and I rarely play them. I see these on album covers, ‘Kevin Burke’s tune,’ I don’t know where that comes from, they’re not my tunes! I only play them.”

Mr. Burke is a wonderful storyteller and a very funny man.

Zina

Believe it or not, Kevin actually wrote this one.

Real Kevin Burke Tunes

For starters, he’s written 2 other jigs in Bm! One, The Split Rock, is on the Open House album Hoof and Mouth. It’s a real Kevin Burke slow and sensual one. The other is called Across the Black River. I’m not sure if he’s recorded this one or not - it’s a bit livlier by nature.

I first heard him play Up in the Air at a concert in 1981 or 82 - he hadn’t got a name for it yet and was joking about having a suggestion box on the way out. Wonder how he came up with the name in the end. Anybody know?

The 3 albums by Open House feature quite a few of his compositions.

By another title, recorded by Johnny Cunningham

If I am not mistaken, I learned this tune in the early ’80’s by the title “Up up and Away” , as played in agreat medley by Johnny Cunningham…I don’t remember if he gave credit to Kevin as the author of the tune. I think it was the first album Johnny made after moving to Pennsylvania…it was engineered with quite a bit of sound effect, but for the life of me I can’t remember the title of the album. I still play the medley for dances though.

Post script

One of the tunes in the medley Johnny played was “There’s Nobody to Blame” If I get the time to figure out the system, I’ll write it out in abc format and submit it.

From the dim and distant past……..

As I remember, Johnny’s 1st solo recording was called “Thoughts From Another World”. I don’t recall this tune [ “Up In The Air” ] being on it, but it is a long time since I listened to it , apart from the brilliant “Linden Rise”, which I posted here soon after Johnny died. He had 2 tunes together, both his own compositions called “There’s Naebody Tae Blame But Masel’”, and “Philip Cunningham’s Odd Dance”. [ or something very close ]. Both were slowish jigs - almost 6/8 marches. I’ll have a hunt through the tapes - I never did get hold of the record - and check it out.

Who wrote Up in the Air

I’m surprised nobody in the discussion has a CD called Portland (Kevin Burke & Mícheál Ó Domhnaill) I got it from a music shop in Moscow years ago. That’s what the sleeve notes say:

“UP IN THE AIR - Kevin Burke / Mícheál Ó Domhnaill”

No idea how exactly the co-authorship works when it comes to tunes, but this one might be the case of it)) There’s also a nice concert tape dated 1983 where Mr. Burke says: “It’s a tune Mícheál and I wrote”.

Nice tune, btw 🙂