This week's winner, by a landslide, is a Jay Ungar tune, Ashokan Farewell. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about the tune. Here's what Jay Ungar and Molly Mason have to say about the tune. Here's more from Jay and Molly. Here's some standard notation with lyrics. Here's some notation and ABC. Here's a video of Jay Ungar and Molly Mason performing it.
Here's a link to it's run as an "other" tune. And here's a recently revamped version of my previous post on that thread.
Wonderful, David. I am wondering how big your house is? People here tend to have 5 or six mandos. So if you have 5 or 6 guitars, five or six organs, five or six ........... of all the instruments you play
Manfred actually my house is small, less than 650 SF, I have (4) mandos (2) guitars (1) bass (1) concertina (1) keyboard and (1) flute that I never play. Not so much really.
Ashokan Farewell in your hands is beyond beautiful. It's simply one of your best...
I agree with Michael.. Absolutely wonderful David!
Time to take this out & dust it up a bit
Nice playing Rick! I thought this could be a good one for practising Tremolo.... Here's my version..
Wonderful stuff so far from David, Rick and Hendrick. Here's mine - I stuffed a bit of guitar in there this time:
Wonderful and inventive versions this week! Here's one I did a good while back. Want to work on picking up the tempo and making it a bit more lively this week. Hoping I can do that.
Really enjoyable and varied versions from everyone this week. Special mention for David whose HD video and picture in picture is now the icing on top of his great playing and studio quality sound. And now my take on it. Piano and Irish Bouzouki (what no mandolin!).
James I really like your piano playing and the bouzouki sounded good as well, nice arrangement and playing.
Great playing everyone. David, love the sound of the Sobell. Really nice on this and the organ and concertina were great. Rick, nice to get the dust off the mandolin. Keep it up. I really liked the tremolo with Luurtie and David. I need to learn how to do that. Karon you have the tremolo, keep working on the speed. James, the piano and bouzouki really worked out quite well together. You are quite accomplished on both keyboards and strings, time to get out the accordion though. I'm sneaking this one in under the wire before Barbara posts the next tune. I have been playing Ashokan Farewell for 20 some years. I learnt it on fiddle from a friend of Jay Ungar's. So of course I had to drag out the fiddle. I can't do it justice anymore on the fiddle but it is fun to be sawing away on the old thing again. Still fighting with iMovie. Couldn't get the fiddle synced up correctly. Fussy trying to do this on a laptop with a trackpad.
My version is taking quite some time to record, but I hope it will be worth it! I haven't listened to your versions yet, but once mine will be done, I will!
Here it is at last: It's past 6am here, it seems I fell asleep while waiting for the end of the upload... Good night everyone! It seems YouTube has detected the presence of copyrighted content in my video… has this kind of problem ever happened to anyone here, on a cover of an existing song? Of course I'm not using anything from any existing recording here.
Applause! Applause, Niavlys! Great work on getting all those instruments together. Lovely playing and waltz time. ALL of the posts on this tune have been really nice. It's fun to see the different styles and interpretations
Many thanks, justkaron! I'm satisfied with the mandolin and mandola parts but the fiddle part isn't great, the more I listen to it. David: Great job on the multi-instrument recording! Nice chords on the guitar too. Rick: your mandolin is slightly out of tune on some strings but your playing is great, you manage to keep a very steady rhythm while adding nice extra-string strumming! There's a moment (at 1:30 and 2:22 for instance) you use a D chord (200x) when I think you should playing an A chord (220x), but I might be wrong. luurtie: I'm impressed by your tremolo! And yet usually I'm not very fond of tremolos. OldSausage: Love the variety of your interpretation. James: It was a great idea, mixing piano and bouzouki, it works very well. woodenfingers: Nice playing, some notes on the fiddle are a bit flat, but I'm entirely guilty of this myself too!
Ashokan Farewell was written by Jay Ungar and is not in the public domain so YouTube is correct of course! (I'll bet you wouldn't have been contacted if you hadn't put the author's name in the title of your video...) I once recorded Blue Christmas and received the same notice about a detected copyright –– and even though I've never received any money from it, I just took it off my YouTube site to be safe. I'm always tempted to work on a song that we've picked as the Song of The Week that isn't in the public domain but resist it somehow. Ashokan Farewell may become a traditional fiddle tune in the future, but with copyright laws as they are now, it'll be in the public domain many years from now after we're long gone... which kind of defeats the folk process in my mind... what does everyone else think? By the way, excellent renditions and multi-instrumental arrangements of this great song from everyone. Well done!
Here is my try at it.
Nice job, Victor. On the copyright issue, it doesn't usually matter if YouTube detects the music is copyright, they just slap ads on it (and hopefully pay royalties to the copyright owner, although probably just a pittance). In other words, YouTube has accepted responsibility for handling copyright so you don't have to. If they think it should come down, they will just take it down, they won't ask you.
Ok, I will leave it as it is, then. Thanks for the infos. Michael, actually I've added the author's name in the title and description AFTER receiving the copyright notice. What surprised me is that I thought they were looking for traces of the original recordings, not interpretations of the melody, that's much harder to detect (and less "harmful" to the copyright holder, I would say).
They have audio recognition software that identifies these melodies. It's ruthlessly efficient (not!). The copyright holder is due "mechanicals" on any recording (or performance) of their composition, so YouTube is just obeying the law, or at least upholding their view of it.
Very nice tremelo there, Vic. I decided to harmonise the melody away so the youtube software wont recognise it.
This is a trio arrangement written about ten years ago for our mandolin ensemble by my late friend Tony Judge, who added a simple tremolo mandola harmony to the tune and transposed to G major for the final repeat. For this recording I've adapted Tony's setting for a more informal line-up of mandolin, octave mandolin and tenor guitar. I meant to record this last week, but forgot to borrow the mandola and guitar parts from my colleagues until yesterday's rehearsal. 1921 Gibson Ajr mandolin Mid-Missouri M-111 octave mandolin Ozark tenor guitar Martin
Here's one I recorded earlier: Recorded on mandolin and waldzither.
Here is a new version done by Ginny and me. I am posting it for her as she is having problems with uploading the video from YouTube to the Cafe site. Ginny is dedicating the tune to Len, her husband, who reminded us about it as a favourite of his. I thnk the problem might be that there is now no "=" in the YouTube URL, so I deleted everything to the left of the forward slash and this seems to have worked - hope this helps anyone else with posting problems. Ginny in Canada and I am in Scotland! John Kelly
Nicely played; I always enjoy your collaborations.
John and Ginny that is very nicely played. Its a nice slideshow too.
Many thanks, Kay and Brian. It is always fun to make the collaborations, with sound files winging their way across the ether between Ontario and Scotland then working on synchronising our material and arranging into the final video with the pictures.
John and Ginny, this mix sounds great. it's a lovely tune. I did some long distance colloborations too in the past. it's always a surprise how the end result sounds. Have fun and keep on sharing them with us!
Thank you to all- especially John who helps me with computer issues. Last night I had it up and working with help from IT - and today it is not working again !! So frustrating....I can see text but no videos. So thank you for the comments...John, your turn is next, right?? One day we may actually figure out how to video ourselves and put them together.
Very nice John & Ginny. well played. This is one of my favorites too.
How could I miss such a nice thread for so long? Probably because I got aware of Jay Ungar only a few days ago. Great renditions, folks! There seem to be two ways of playing this tune: 1. Straight Eighths, like for instance John does 2. Swing Eights, like Hendrik plays it I opted for straight eighths and backup chords picked on my classical guitar On to the next Jay Ungar waltz...
Very nice version crisscross. Beautiful tune.
Thanks Robert!
FIne playing and I like your pace here too, CC. Has the qualities of a farewell! It is such a strong tune that it can be performed with so little in the way of backing.
Thanks, John!
I relistened to my version of this beautiful Jay Ungar tune, and it sounded as if I had tried to apply the knowledge gained by working though an Italian mandolin method from the beginning of the last century to a simple folk tune. So I recorded once more:
I have been sitting here comparing your two versions, Christian, and I cannot decide which I prefer. Each has so much going for it, and it is always good to revisit tunes we have played in the past. It is one of those timeless tunes that Jay Ungar is so good at crafting.
Love this one Christian, great where you jump up to the next octave too. Very lively colours.
Nice to listen to both your versions, Christian.
Very nice Christian, very nice...
