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The herrings are boiled and the praties are roasting, Kitty lie over close to the wall!

The a line borrowed from the Irish jig “The Frost is All Over”. Dubliners north and south, Mick O’Brien (uilleann pipes, whistle) and Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh (fiddle, whistle), meet. And it wasn’t in the midst of the muddy river Liffey, though one may say this record is a landmark like the newly erected Millennium Spire on O’Connell Street.

These days there seems to be a trend to the pure drop. 15 tracks including 11 pipes/fiddle duets, 2 whistle duets, and 2 fiddle/whistle duets. The only accompaniment is the drones and regulators of the uilleann pipes. These are pitched in Bb, and the fiddle is obviously tuned down. Thus the sound is mellow and smooth.

There is a fondness for Sliabh Luachra music, Mick and Caoimhín pay homage to the great names, Denis Murphy, Patrick Kelly. The latter is almost forgotten:

Isn’t it shocking that with all the recordings available nowadays, you can’t get a single track of this most wonderful of fiddle players. If you were to give him a few bits of cast-off tunes, he would sculpt them into something that could fly – like making an aeroplane out of a scrapheap..

Mick and Caoimhín give their best to continue this legacy. As Peter Browne puts it in the liner notes: Everything sounds right! Walkin’ T:-)M

IRISH ECHO Newspaper. New York City

CEOL Column

By Earle Hitchner

Top 10 Traditional Albums of 2003

Number 1. KITTY LIE OVER, by Mick O’Brien and Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh (ACMCD 102)

The uilleann piping of Dublin’s Mick O’Brien first earned international recognition through his teenage performances on two late-’70s recordings, “The Piper’s Rock” and “The Flags of Dublin.

” In 1996, he issued a superb solo debut, “May Morning Dew,” that finished in the Irish Echo’s list of top 10 albums.

Now comes “Kitty Lie Over,” a duet album with fellow Dublin-born musician Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh that surpasses

O’Brien’s earlier achievements.

In Ó Raghallaigh, O’Brien has found a fiddler whose style is an ideal match to his tonally rich, expressive chanter, regulator,

and drone work. This is much more than two talented instrumentalists getting together in the studio for some tunes.

They’ve carefully worked out the repertoire (much of it drawn from Sliabh Luachra), arrangements, pitch (B or B-flat),

and harmonies that allow them to truly marry their instruments, one complementing and extending and bolstering the other.

Ó Raghallaigh is himself an accomplished uilleann piper and pipemaker (apprenticed to Geoff Wooff in Miltown Malbay, Co Clare), so his pipes-like style and reflexes on fiddle add immeasurably to his duets with O’Brien.

The 11 pipes-and-fiddle tracks are wondrous, with “Woman of the House/Rolling in the Ryegrass” a shining example of this interplay, and there are also some tantalizing whistle and fiddle-and-whistle duets.

Hands down (or should I say up?), this is the most impressive Irish traditional instrumental CD of 2003 and one of the best in many years. [Published on January 21, 2004, in the IRISH ECHO newspaper in New York City. Copyright