[Harp-L] The Greatest?

["Aongus MacCana" <amaccana@xxxxxxxxxx>]

The night before last, on a UK chat show I happened on an archival clip of
Larry Adler playing a duet with the classical violinist Perlman. It quite
took me back and made me wonder how I had lost the true faith after all
these years. In my youth there was only one "Mouth Organ Player": Larry
Adler! and everyone in the world had heard about him. Mostly he seemed to
play a 12 hole chromatic, which largely due to his efforts was beginning -
grudgingly - to be acknowledged as maybe a 'real' musical instrument (as for
10 hole blues harps - it was a case of forget it!). Big time art music
composers like Vaughan Williams even wrote pieces for Larry Adler. I only
once heard Larry perform live. That was at an intimate little theatre in
Dublin in the mid nineteen fifties.  Larry reminisced for an hour or two,
with musical interludes where he held the harmonica in one hand and
accompanied himself on the piano with the other. He showed his usual ease
with and mastery of the instrument.

Thinking about Larry Adler's musical legacy reminded me of an Irish
parrallel. At about the same time as I heard Larry Adler perform in Dublin a
genius of Irish Traditional Music one Sean Maguire was just beginning to
make his name. Sean Maguire brought Irish Traditional Fiddling to new
undreamt of heights and was unchallenged as the greatest living Irish
Fiddler for over fifty years until his recent death. Strangely though he was
kind of written out of the script in the Irish Traditional Music scene. It
was as if eveyone decided that he was in such a different league that we
needed to "forget about Sean Maguire- now let's see who is the best
traditional fiddler?" The Culture Police occasionally alluded to the fact
that Maguire had had a classical music  education - the suggestion being
that this might have polluted the purity of his traditional music. Some of
these people had the view that true traditional players could and should
only acquire the tradition from their mother's milk and/or by osmosis from
other older trad players, who happened to live in their immediate
neighbourhood.

I began to wonder whether the late Larry Adler might not also have suffered
from a similar unspoken cultural exclusion. Sean Maguire and himself shared
another trait. Like Muhamed Ali neither of them had any doubt that "they
were the greatest".

One way or another I think it is time for me to augment my meagre library of
Larry Adler records and start listening to them again.

Beannachtaí
Aongus Mac Cana