Two of the great masters of Irish music combine their talents and the results are quite as delightful as one would expect.

Combined with Charlie Lennon's hand-in-glove accompaniment, whose magical touch constantly augments the sound without ever imposing upon it, this is one superb album. Very highly recommended.

The CD is an absolute gem and is sure to keep turning up on my playlists

His skill is more often displayed in letting the tunes speak for themselves, with measured phrasing, judicious ornamentation and a wonderful internal pulse that effortlessly pushes the rhythm along. Excellent all round.

Joe Burke is a living legend who, rather than resting on his considerable laurels, is still making remarkable music nearly 50 years after making his first public appearance. He is widely credited with helping to initiate a revival in his instrument, the button box, at the tail end of Irish music's general popularity decline in the mid-20th century. The 78 records he made for the Gael Linn label in the late 50's were the last ones released in Europe, and he has taken in every format since then, right up to this recent CD. In his entertaining and yarn-spun sleeve notes, Burke comments about Michael Coleman, the great Sligo fiddler, that he always 'regarded the music as a friend and never attacked it. there is a difference between playing a tune and performing a tune'. The same perceptive praise could easily be extended to Burke on this album, whose easy, strolling pace wends through a great assortment of tunes and moods without ever rushing or otherwise obscuring the inherent best of each melodic piece. Even when playing at a clip, as he does on the reels 'Heathery Breeze and Rigney's', the pure lack of effort, abundant lift and technical mastery in evidence are striking and satisfying. Combined with Charlie Lennon's hand-in-glove accompaniment, whose magical touch constantly augments the sound without ever imposing upon it, this is one superb album. Very highly recommended.

Five decades of recording history can prove a tad intimidating to us hacks. Dissecting and disassembling the music of players whose reputation was forged long before one's emergence from the womb is akin to Britney passing judgement on the finer points of Nureyev's choreography, but yielding oneself to the intricacies of Joe Burke's music is such a painless process that the history matters not a whit in the end. There's space enough between the balmy sighs of Le Petit Accordion, and enough lonesome regret beneath the stately The Green Fields Of Canada to sate the thirst of most fervent box aficionados. Charlie Lennon lends muted keyboards and piano, as the tide rolls in yet again. A reassuring reminder of greatness.

Joe Burke, for those new to Irish traditional music, is one of the living legends of the music. He is also a living link to many older Irish musicians that have already left this world. Born in 1939, he grew up learning from people like the great accordion masters, Joe Cooley and Pady O'Brien, nach maireann.

Joe Burke grew up in a time when the music was probably at its weakest in the last century, when many pubs prohibited the playing of what they called "diddley-dee" music. When Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann was founded in 1951, and the folk music revival started in earnest in the 1960s in Ireland, Joe Burke was there to play a pivotal part in the resurrection.

Over the years, he has released a number of brilliant recordings, playing the accordion, flute, uilleann pipes, or fiddle. On this new CD, he sticks with the instrument of which he is an undisputed master: the accordion.

The CD has a wonderful warmth to it. The sound of the accordion ranges from a bright yellow to a deep burgundy, always rich and vibrant at every turn. Never was the accordion so sweet, and never was the accordion more melancholy.

As you would expect from the arch-druid of the accordion, the speed is measured, no rush here, even on the reels, which are sometimes played by some musicians as if competing to see who can finish first. Joe Burke is an old master with nothing to prove, just a few tunes to share.

Like the best Irish CDs, this one offers notes on each tun. Joe Burke gives fascinating detail about the tunes, and the people that have kept them alive over the generations.

Also running through the notes is a theme that echoes the warmth of the tunes themselves, and that is the spirit of sharing and good nature that marks the Irish traditional music community.

Joe wrote the title track, "The Morning Mist", in 1958, (when I don't even think I had cut my first tooth). Since then he's played with not only the best but some of the most important musicians, Charlie Lennon, Paddy O'Brien and Séamus Connolly, Paddy Kelly, and crucially with Andy McGann the last surviving link back to Coleman and the authentic Sligo tradition.

Players looking for a wealth of new tunes, might pass this by on the shop shelves, although Anne Conroy Burke's "Currants for Cakes and Raisin for Everything" is only two years old and may well not have filtered out to the session pubs yet. This you see is no novelty album from a young buck who feels the need to impress with speed and tunes in sinful keys and umpteen accidentals. No, much of the selections are more or less standard repertoire: Spike Island Lasses, Last Nights's Fun, Bonnie Kate & Jenny's Chickens, , Caíleach an Aírgid, even O'Carolan's Concerto is included.

What you do with what you've got is the true test of skill. Joe has been long known for his mastery of technique, any easy ability to coax hidden notes from the box, to endow tunes with a spirit beyond mere playing while refraining from resorting to over-performance, technique never becomes trickery, never takes over the tune; even tough on a live stage he's one of the most entertaining of musicians we have ever produced. Joes web site says it all "This CD is in a sense a musical memoir; the sleeve notes link the tunes to circumstances, places and people. The playing is as precise and lively as you'd expect and the accompaniment is by Charlie Lennon. Any album by Joe Burke will be good, and here he's at his best."

For me the best comes on the slow airs, The Wounded Huzzar, the Lament for Aughrim and the Green Fields of Canada, which Joe got from the singing of Paddy Tunney's aunt Mary "Mountain Streams" Gallagher. Verdict, style like this was never out of fashion, it's a cloth cut by Dior from the Galway master.

Amazing stuff from the master of the Irish accordion, this is the real thing! When John Doonan played me an LP with Joe Burke's 'Frieze Britches' going back in the 60s, I knew the man was something special. Seamus Ennis once said he'd go a long way to hear an old melodeon and this CD of the modern version would be well worth stepping out from Malin to Mizen!

The 'traditional' Irish B/C chromatic accordion style was pioneered by Paddy O'Brien of Tipperary only in the 1950s and Joe Burke was in at the start. The first tune on this CD, 'The Dawn Reel', he originally recorded for Gael-Linn in 1959 on a 78 - how's that for pedigree?

Accompanied on piano and keyboard by Charlie Lennon, this is a mighty musician on top form. Unusually for the instrument, there are four slow airs, played "within my limitations and lamentations" to quote Joe and also plenty of reels, including Coleman classics like 'Bonnie Kate' and 'Jenny's Chickens', all at a lovely flowing pace with just the right amount of ornamentation, the great traditional musician knows when NOT to play a note, but for evidence that Joe can play it all, jut listen to his stunning 'Shaskeen' hornpipe... " I think I knew it before I learned it," he says!

Excellent background to the music is given in his own notes, and like a good man, he gives sources, as well as memories of old friends like Joe Cooley and the McPeake Family. That Scott Skinner's 'Laird of Drumblair' is described as a 'Stratsby' is surely evidence of the oral tradition in action, but if you've room in your collection for only one Irish accordion CD, this is the one - a classic of its kind.