Jacqueline McCarthy
The Hidden Note


                                   Track Listing
         1. The Old Torn Petticoat / Farewell To Miltown 
         2. Mrs Ellen O’Dwyer’s Fancy 
         3. The Connaught Heifers / Gilbert Clancy’s 
         4. The Blackbird 
         5. Cheer Up Old Hag / Walsh’s Favourite / The Yellow Wattle 
         6. Thomas Burke (Turlough Carolan) 
         7. Gerdy Commane’s / The Heather Breeze 
         8. Pol Halpenny / An tSean Bhean Bhocht 
         9. The Trip We Took Over The Mountains 
       10. Hardiman The Fiddler / The Humours of   Derrykissane 
       11. The Ravelled Hank of Yarn / Trim The Velvet 
       12. The Old Bush / Nellie Donovon 
       13. Paddy Taylor’s #1 / Paddy Taylor’s #2 
       14. Sporting Paddy / The Beauty Spot 
       15. John Dwyer’s / An Boithrin Cam 
       16. Kitty Gone A Milking / Sarah Hobbs


Click on underlined titles to hear MP3 sound samples.

We are delighted to announce our release of this classic CD.

Jacqueline McCarthy
The Hidden Note
Guest musicians.
Tommy Keane: Uilleann Pipes
Alec Fenn: Bouzouki

The debut solo recording of concertina player Jacqueline McCarthy. Her family, Tom, concertina, Marion, uilleann pipes, Bernadette, fiddle and piano, and Tommy, fiddle are also featured on this album. This is their first recording together, having played together for over 30 years. Tom and his wife, Kathleen lived and raised their children in London where they were the mainstay of much of the traditional music played in that city for many years. Sadly for London they have all returned to Ireland where their music is very highly regarded.
Tommy Keane, who is Jacquie’s husband plays uilleann pipes on some tracks and produced this album. De Danann’s, Alec Finn provides bouzouki on several tracks. Jacquie, Tommy and Alec collaborated previously on "The Wind Among The Reeds" an album of concertina and pipes, which was highly acclaimed and is also available from Copperplate. Jacquie’s style and repertoire is very much influenced by her father, Tom who is from Kilmihil, West Clare, an area which produced many fine concertina players. Other Clare musicians who have influenced Jacquie’s music are Bobby Casey, Willie Clancy, Junior Crehan and John Kelly.

also featuring Jacqueline, Tommy and Alec:
The Wind Among the Reeds.
The McCarthy Family Album

                                              Press Reviews

The Irish Times
The concertina…a wonder in the hands of this lady..her constant, spontaneous swellings and squirtings around the shape of her tunes. Lovely indeed.
Mic Moroney

The Irish Post
Extraordinary. A beautiful collection of concertina tunes from the heartland of that instrument, Co Clare. This is an album your collection cannot afford to be without.  Malcolm Rogers

Irtrad
It is as wonderful as you might expect. Excellent "pure drop music".   Phillipe Varlet:

The Galway Advertiser
Brilliant stylish concertina playing… a superb collection.  Jeff O’Connell.

Musical Traditions
The playing is just what I think it ought to be, relaxed, simple, direct and no flash. It’s a real pleasure to hear…her playing sounds so much more familiar to me than the majority of Irish music does. Rod Stradling

The Irish Post
In the sleeve notes of this album, Jacqueline McCarthy includes Tommy Pott's summation of what traditional music is all about. Tommy believed there was a cycle in music. It begins with hearing and liking a tune. So you learn the tune. And then you play it to death. You become bored with it so you dont play it anymore. Then you might hear the tune played by somebody else, perhaps on a different instrument even. The tune would be transformed merely by changing a note or two. This is what Tommy Potts called, "the hidden note, and is what traditional music is all about. Even as I write the above paragraph, with the CD playing, the hidden note actually appeared to me!  I originally heard a Scottish fiddler in Co Down playing the set dance, The Blackbird, on a fiddle. I was entranced and have played the tune in that manner for these 30 years or so. On Jacqueline McCarthy's album the tune is played on the concertina, and yes, she's transformed it with a couple of hidden notes, extraordinary.
Jacqueline McCarthy comes from a famous musical family who were the mainstays of the traditional scene in London from the 60's onwards. Her father, Tommy McCarthy, a master uilleann piper/concertina player who has since moved back to county Clare, presided over sessions everywhere from the Constitution in Camden Town to the White Hart in Fulham Broadway. Thus young Jacqueline was brought up hearing the very best of Irish music: Bobby Casey, Raymond Roland, Roger Sherlock and Danny Meehan et al, and she certainly absorbed those early influences putting them to good use. The Hidden Note is a beautiful collection of concertina tunes from the heartland of the instrument, Co Clare, with music ranging from slip jigs like, Hardiman the Fiddler  to the great Carolan piece, Thomas Burke with the likes of, The Trip We Took Over The Mountain and The Humours of Derrykissane thrown in for good measure. This is an album your collection cannot afford to be without, if you have any interest in the development of Irish music over the next 2,000 years.   Malcolm Rogers,

"Note"-able McCarthy. The Irish Voice
ONE of the best recordings of pure traditional music in recent years was The Wind Among the Reeds, a 1995 collaboration between concertina player Jacqueline McCarthy and her uilleann piper husband Tommy Keane. Tommy, who has also made a couple of solo discs in his time, has now produced one
 for Jacqueline, a highly recommended recording titled The Hidden Note.
Actually, only two tracks on The Hidden Note are entirely solo, though these are among my favourite performances on the disc. As on The Wind Among the Reeds, De Dannan bouzouki ace Alec Finn contributes his delicately filigreed brand of accompaniment to several selections. There are also two
unaccompanied uilleann pipes/concertina duets and several cuts featuring Jacqueline with members of her famously musical family.
Jacqueline, who now lives in County Galway, was born and raised in London, one of four children of Clare uilleann piper and concertina player Tommy McCarthy and his wife Kathleen. As she wrote in the liner notes, "I can't remember learning music — it is something that was always there when I was growing up." Both in their London home and on visits back to Clare, the McCarthy children eagerly absorbed the music of some of Ireland's greatest traditional players, family friends who included fiddler Bobby Casey, piper Willie Clancy and flute players Roger Sherlock and Paddy Taylor.
In due course, Jacqueline took up her dad's little squeezebox. Her sister Marion preferred his pipes, while Bernadette favored the piano (and later the fiddle) and brother Tommy, Jr. (who now runs The Burren pub in Somerville, Massachusetts) also chose the fiddle. For Jacqueline's recording, the whole gang got together with their Dad to put down three marvelous tracks of family music.
The Hidden Note is classic stuff — straight traditional music of the finest kind. So it almost goes without saying that it's not available on any commercial label.  Don Meade.

Taplas 99
Jacqueline McCarthy was born and brought up in London amid many now legendary Irish musical exiles inhabiting the capital on the '60s and '70s - Bobby Casey, Lucy Farr etc. She learned concertina from her father, Clare piper and concertina player, Tommy McCarthy. He joins her on this album, along with her husband Tommy Keane (uilleann pipes, flute and bodrhan) and siblings Tommy junior (fiddle), Marion (uilleann pipes) and Bernadette (fiddle and piano). The inimitable Alec Finn contributes gentle bouzouki.
Jacqueline's style harks back to the unhurried, less ornamented playing of the older generation - heart-lifting music, full of warmth and understanding. The changing combinations of instruments do the varied selections of tunes perfect justice. If you enjoyed her concertina playing on 1995's The Wind Among the Reeds, here it has even more assurance and 'lift'.
The title refers to Dublin fiddler Tommy Potts's opinion that the magic of traditional music came from hearing a familiar tune transformed by someone changing a tiny detail. Plenty of 'Hidden Notes' here: a thoroughly wonderful album.                                               John Neilson

Folk Roots. July 2000
Talking of London players, the McCarthy family, originally from Clare were one of the great cornerstones of Irsih music in England. Tommy McCarthy, a top uilleann piper
and concertina player, moved back to Ireland 9 years ago, and recorded a lovely album last year. Now his daughter, Jacqueline has made a solo album and it shows the little hexagonal box at its very best with a very enjoyable album featuring many of the tunes she heard as a child in London or on holiday in County Clare; a virtual Who's Who of Irish music, Bobby Casey, Roger Sherlock, Willie Clancy etc. The title, The Hidden Note comes from the little tweak of a well known tune that turns it from a run-of-the-mill to the magical. Jacqie and her husband, Tommy Keane, piper and producer, are fairly adept at tweaking an old tune into life. Though generations removed from Mrs Crotty, Jacqueline McCarthy is very much in the tradition of the old lady. Joe Crane

Musical Traditions Web Magazine

The playing is just what I think it ought to be - relaxed, simple, direct ... and no flash!  As I've said many times before, it's a real pleasure to hear to hear diatonic push-pull music again after so many years of the B/C chromatic accordion dominance, and the (comparative) flush of concertina records released recently is greatly welcome - to me at least.   Rod Stradling