While browsing the shelves at Claddagh Records in Dublin last week, I found our album in the New Releases box! How cool is that?!
This past year has been the most intense period of traveling and music-making in my life thus far, and it’s been great fun! Occasionally exhausting, but mostly wonderful. The summer started off with a bang. Right after finishing up spring tours with Celtic Crossroads and Comas, I flew to St. Louis to perform at John D. McGurk’s for the whole month of May with my buds Dan Lowery and Alan Murray under our bar band stage name, The Bronx Boys. That month was punctuated during days off by occasional camping excursions, a trip to Chicago, and a fly-in visit to Virginia to record a new album with Ensemble Galilei. We always have a great time in St. Louis with our friends at McGurk’s, and this time was no exception. We’ll be back for May and September 2014!
After a short break in Chicago, I hit the road with The Yanks for a two-week tour in June, starting in the midwest and ending in New Hampshire. It was our first time being on the road together for longer than a weekend, and it was a great success! I then went to New York for a couple of weeks to do some local gigs and catch up with friends, then The Yanks reunited for Catskills Irish Arts Week, where we played many sessions and some concerts, including an unbelievably packed midnight concert at the Blackthorne on Friday night. The energy was incredible!
In late July, I headed to western Canada to begin a tour with Comas at the fantastic Mission Folk Fest, just outside Vancouver. It was great to return to Mission, because that was the first major music festival I ever played, back in 2005 with Eileen Ivers. There were some really great performers there this year including Dick Gaughan and Liz Carroll. After the festival, we played a house concert in Vancouver hosted by the fabulous Jenny Ritter, who opened for us with her Scandinavian folk trio, Marmota. A great night followed, featuring a flat-tuned session in the public park outside Jenny’s house including B uilleann pipes, Hardanger fiddle, and tenor banjo! We then made our way to Ontario to play an afternoon concert in Tobermory, the Mill Race Folk Festival in Cambridge, and finally one of our favorites, the Goderich Celtic Roots Festival, where we taught workshops and played concerts for our third consecutive year. It was great to see our friends there and hear all the amazing music there. More than a couple of late night sessions were had!
Next, I flew to beautiful Medellín, Colombia, where I’d spent some time in January, and reconnected with fiddler Carolina Arango. We spent a week getting ready for a concert with her great new band, Æire Irlandés, which went super well! We also played a session one night with the band and several of Carolina’s students. It’s great to see such talent and enthusiasm for Irish music in Colombia, and I think we can expect to hear some great things from her students in the coming years! Just when I was becoming comfortable speaking Spanish again, it was time to head back to the States for a concert with Ensemble Galilei. It took place in a beautiful theater in Rockport, Massachusetts, and we were delighted to be joined by Lisa Gutkin on fiddle! After the concert, Lisa and I drove to New York where we stopped in the Bronx for some curry chips from my favorite local establishment, the Chipper Truck, before making it down to the 11th Street Bar for the end of their Sunday night session.
The next evening, I flew to Brussels, where Philip Masure picked me up at the airport and we drove to his studio in Antwerp, where we spent the next two weeks working on a new album for Comas. This was my second stay at Philip’s studio and I think it was a productive visit! Periodically we would derive some amusement from Philip’s chickens, who live in a pen just outside the studio window, and would come and peck against the glass from time to time. I swear sometimes they peck in rhythm to the tunes…. We also did some nice gigs including festivals in Geluwe and Alden Biesen, and crossed into Holland one night to play at Mulligan’s in Amsterdam. We also took an afternoon to visit Brugge, where we met up with flutemaker Geert Lejeune, who showed us around his workshop and let me play some of his beautiful instruments. I won’t be parting with my Olwell, but hopefully I’ll add a Lejeune to my arsenal one of these days!
After my two weeks in Belgium were up, I went to Ireland to play some session gigs at the Dingle Trad Fest, and also did some gigs in Blarney, Co. Cork, with guitarist Conor O’Sullivan. I then spent a couple of weeks knocking around the country, seeing many friends including my beloved Celtic Crossroads family, my old comrade James Riley, and most importantly visited my beautiful goddaughter, who’s now nearly three years old! Look out boys, she’s a charmer!
As my time in Ireland drew to a close, I was sad to leave, but also excited to get back to New York, where I am now, and get to work playing some gigs around the northeast, and getting ready for upcoming traveling gigs with The Yanks and Comas. Hope you all had a great summer!
That year was CRAZY y’all.
The first thing that happened was the party. OH MY GOD THE PARTY. Sean Gavin and Sean McComiskey threw an absolutely amazing party at Chief O’Neill’s in Chicago in early January, just for the hell of it! Musicians and listeners came in from Minneapolis, St. Louis, Detroit, LA, Baltimore/DC, New York, and Ireland and England. I flew in from New York for less than 24 hours just to attend because I knew I wouldn’t want to miss it. My favorite memory was of Mike Gavin singing “Morrissey and the Russian Sailor,” a ballad some twelve or so verses long, which describes a boxing match between John Morrissey, an Irish boxer who lived in the mid-19th century, and his Russian challenger. After 38 rounds – several of which are recounted in the song – Morrissey finally whoops the Russian dude and of course everyone’s thrilled. After each verse, the whole room erupted in shouts, cheering on the song’s hero! Hilarious.
About a week later, my aunt, Susan Wilmarth-Rabineau, was in the final stage of her long struggle with Alzheimer’s Disease. The night before I was to leave for a long tour, my mother was visiting in New York, and we went together to see Susan and her partner, Nick Ullo. My mother asked if I’d bring my flute and play a bit for Susan. When I arrived, I didn’t know if I could bring myself to do it. I called my friend Sam Amidon, who, despite being extremely busy and constantly on the road, just so happened to be in New York, right around the corner from my aunt’s apartment, and had some free time. I needed some moral support, and Sam would have been one of the few people with whom I would have felt comfortable sharing that experience. He brought his fiddle, and we played three selections of music for Susan, the last being O’Carolan’s waltz, Sí Beag, Sí Mor. My mother held her while we played. Sam had to run off afterwards, and my mother and I left together. The next morning, I flew to Atlanta to start the tour, and while waiting for my connecting flight in Charlotte, my mother called me and said that Susan had passed away several hours after we left. It marked the end of a long struggle for Susan, Nick, and my mother, and I was so glad to have seen her just before she passed…. Death is weird. But it’s the thing that allows us to move on and continue living our own lives. And if someone can live out their last days in the comfort of their own home, around people they love, isn’t that a blessing? I believe so. Susan is missed by all who knew her, but we’re glad that her long period of hardship is behind her.
That tour wound up being quite a long one, out with Celtic Crossroads, the stage show I’ve been playing in for the past couple of years. In the middle of it, we had a two-week break, during which Jonas Fromseier and I did a tour of our own. We began in Minneapolis with a house concert at the lovely home of Nick and Liz Lethert, and were so pleased with the amazing turnout of friends and musicians who were there to join us. It wound up being an epic night, to say the least! My last memory was being pushed in a swing, by Jonas, around five or so in the morning, singing “Morrissey and the Russian Sailor,” the ballad I mentioned above. We then played shows in St. Louis, Chicago, Washington DC, Portland (Maine), New York, and Philadelphia, and at each one were overwhelmed by the fantastic audiences and the fun we had with all the old and new friends we met.
(Fantastic experience #X: Walking from Wrigley Field all the way to the edge of the Chicago lakefront during the third largest blizzard the city had ever seen. On the night of February 2, a small gang of trad musicians set out in the thick of the storm. The wind was so severe that we often didn’t think we’d physically be able to cross several intersections, and we were unable to look in the direction we were walking, because of little bits of ice and snow being constantly whipped into our eyes if we didn’t cover them. But, Devin Shepherd and I made it all the way to the frozen lake, touched it, and then rejoined the gang. Afterwards we had late night tunes in my parents’ basement, because the others couldn’t make it back to their homes! Fun times.)
At the end of my mini-tour with Jonas, we were back on the bus with Celtic Crossroads, and finished that tour in April.
Throughout the rest of the year, I was pleased to have an amazing variety of gigs with an equally amazing variety of different people. I became an official member of the band Comas, and had a fantastic time with them at the Celtic Roots Festival in Goderich, Ontario, and also during our tour around the northeast US. I played four epic weeks in Las Vegas at the Rí Rá Irish Pub in the Mandalay Bay casino with The Bronx Boys, had a fantastic month at John D. McGurk’s in St. Louis with Devin Shepherd and Luke Ward (during which, for one weekend, the other Bronx Boys came out and we had a six-piece band on that tiny stage!), and another week there with Peter Browne and Shane McGowan, played two fantastic concerts with Dylan Foley, Dan Gurney, and Seán Earnest, did a one-week Christmas tour headed by Ciaran Nagle and Tara Novak, and featuring a fantastic band, and closed out the year playing two more weeks at the Rí Rá in Vegas with guitarist and singer Sean Roche. I never thought I’d be spending Christmas day with my parents at a bowling alley inside a New Orleans-themed casino off the Vegas strip, but it was a hell of a time!
Here’s to 2011 having been a beautiful, strange year, and to hoping that 2012 will be even more so!