Celtic / Irish Trad
Irish trad is built from reels, jigs, hornpipes, airs, and song, most often carried by fiddle, uilleann pipes, flute, whistle, accordion, concertina, bodhrán, harp, and bouzouki, with swing arising from lift, bowing, and articulation rather than brute backbeat. It can be intimate and modal in slow air form or explosively social in session tempo, where a room can go from polite to airborne in about two bars.
History
Although rooted in older rural and regional practice, the modern shape of Irish traditional music owes much to 20th-century collecting, radio, recordings, dance-hall adaptation, and revival bands that re-balanced authenticity and arrangement. The Chieftains, Planxty, The Bothy Band, and later groups helped move session music onto world stages without fully domesticating its rhythmic bite and local variation.
Defining artists
Essential listening
Sources
- Irish traditional music overviews and revival histories