Frankie Gavin has been playing fiddle & flute since his teenage years. At the age of seventeen, he won two All Ireland competitions – for fiddle and flute. Originally influenced by some of the great Irish and American-Irish fiddle players, James Morrison, & Michael Coleman, he later found himself playing with stars such as The Rolling Stones, Stephane Grappelli, Elvis Costello, Earl Scruggs & Yehudi Menhuin as well as with some of the great contemporary players & singers of traditional Irish music. All have left their mark on his eclectic approach to music.
The name Frankie Gavin is also synonymous with De Dannan the globally renowned band he founded in the mid-1970s. After a short break in the early 2000s, Frankie restarted the band with a new young line-up. The current incarnation maintains the super-stellar quality of those iconic early De Dannans.
In his time, Gavin has played for four American presidents, starting, as a seven-year old, when he played for John F. Kennedy on his 1962 visit to Ireland, for Presidents Clinton & Bush & most recently, Barack and Michelle Obama, when the president visited his ancestral home in the village Moneygall in County Offaly.
The plain fact is that there is no more exciting fiddle player or moving flute player in the world of Irish music today.
Footnote The Guinness Book of Records, that bible of bizarre human conditions & activities, lists Frankie Gavin as the world’s fastest fiddle player. On 20 September 2010, he played a traditional Irish tune, The Foxhunter’s Reel, at a breath-taking 150 beats per minute!
http://www.frankiegavinanddedannan.ie