Four Canadian banjo players were driving across the border.
"What are those cases you got in the back?" asked the customs agent.
"That's our banjos!" answered Arnie.
"Do you have any other weapons?" asked the customs agent.

The Banjo Special is full of very special banjo music. The album features tunes and one song track played variously by four premium Canadian banjo players, mostly in traditional and Anglo-Celtic/North American styles. Included here are tracks by Ontario duo Arnie Naiman and Chris Coole, bluegrass boy Cris Quinn, and Brian Taheny who may be remembered for Celtic liasons with spouse Loretto Reid.

The banjo rambles by all four players are perceptive and often very quick. Celtophiles will enjoy Sligo-native Taheny's tenor Irish tracks, especially since tenor banjo players aren't exactly a euro a dozen. The tunes always skip perkily; it is fun music with fine rolls and skips. The funkiest of these is "Ace and Deuce of Piping"/ "Doherty of Donegal", a paced tune with some odd accidentals..."two crazy tunes" is what the liner notes call the set. Amazingly, Taheny has been able to play guitar and cittern at the same time as the banjo! OK, well maybe the tunes are multi-tracked, but it was a job well done. Leon Taheny keeps time with the bodhran. All the sets consist of traditional tunes...or in just a few cases traditional style tunes. Taheny hugs close to traditional styles, yet works with the tunes within that range to effect spirit and originality.

The remaining banjoaires play CanAmerican traditonal music with a few original compositions. One of these compositions is "Cold Tea" by bluegrasser Chris Quinn. According to the liner notes, the tune is about beer in a teapot in a Chinese restaurant. Maybe, but it reminded me of a bluegrass band drinking chai tea under a Vancouver skyline. The tune follows a temporal progression from standard bluegrass to that modern-day cafe, with Joey Wright's mandolin and John Showman's fiddle accompaniment most firmly housed in modern espresso cuisine, leaving Quinn's banjo to tarry in mint juleps. Otherwise Quinn's tunes are high powered bluegrass with a full-band. For instance, "Lonesome Road Blues"...the band with its very quick solos are so fast that you might imagine the lonesome boys to be jogging down the highway powered by Zoloft! Not a note is missed, however, in these finely textured tracks.

Arnie Naimen and Chris Coole play some of their tracks in tandem, and both play the clawhammer style which is such a treat for traditionalists and banjo minimalists. From the first song, Naiman's easygoing composition-set named "I'm On My Way To Somewhere/45 KM to Town", it is the clawhammer tunes that form the backbone of the album, the studs of the musical house. This first tune set, inspired by a song about a train, reminds me of something that might be written for a movie about coming home on a train across bright fields. Naiman's other originals, including "Waltonian Sunset" (about a sunset) and "Heartbeat" (about loved ones departed), also carry subtle but lush melodic overprints that also might be used in a movie with a rural theme and lots of sky and sunflowers.

Chris Coole's tracks are more likely to be traditional plunky clawhammer tunes. One very familiar tune is "Year of Jubilo" mated with "Turkey Sag". The former is from 19th century writer Henry Clay Work and, as the liner notes point out, is also known as "Kingdom Coming"...from the raw depths of my memories of childhood, I always hear the words "The Sunday Barbecue!" The second tune has the quickness and fine movement that defines the album...from the raw depths of my imagination come sheet metal nursery shrub tags rotating and interweaving in a wind tunnel! Coole also presents the only vocal track, "Little Birdie." Coole's voice is melodic but still sufficiently red-necked, and complements the "rolling banjo motif" between the verses...again those shrub tags rolling endlessly in time as water over rapids, falls, and mills.

Pickers will like seeing those tunings in the notes that accompany the tracks. They -- and any reasonable listener -- will also appreciate the sparks of talent, mastery, and originality that are contained in this album. My major complaint, that I wouldn't have had if I hadn't read the liner notes, is that despite the plethora of banjo boys on this album and the eight additional acoustic musicians, some of the musicians are multitracked so that they play to accompany themselves. Since this is obviously a studio production, there is nothing really wrong with this double-play trick....except that what you hear is not really real and with the clarity and integrity of production, this album is something I would have really liked to be real and reproducible live.