SOURCE: Madigan, Charles M. “A Good Session with Irish Music.” Chicago Tribune Books (16 March 1997): 7.

In the following review, Madigan lauds Carson's look at the traditional world of Irish music in Last Night's Fun.

There are good sessions and bad sessions in Irish music, and it doesn't take a music critic to know one from the other. In the best of the best, everything melts away but the music. There are no clinking glasses, no shouting patrons, no drunks. There are only musicians, fixated, absorbed and reaching deep for something difficult to define.

You don't learn this stuff from music written down on paper. There are people who have spent a lifetime trying and still don't get it. And there are those who connect with it immediately, as though it was all just sleeping inside, waiting to be tapped into life by a good 6/8 jig beat.

This is the...