Porch Session, August 6, 2011

Edgartown Porch Session, August 6, 2011 from Sara Piazza on Vimeo.

Dual whistling by David and Chris; backed by Bob. A wonderful Saturday night in Edgartown, with many people stopping by the porch - friends and strangers alike.

Thanks, especially, to Chris for coming all the way down from Boston, and to Irene - from Derry - who graced us with stories and songs from Ireland.

Tommy Doyle's, Thursday Night, August 4, 2011

So great to be back in town for a couple of days.

Tommy Doyle's, Thursday Night, August 4, 2011 from Sara Piazza on Vimeo.

Messing with Premiere Elements - not enough time in the day to learn all I want to learn - in every department. Shot with G12. Great to be back in Cambridge - love you guys!

Tommy Doyle's, Thursday Night, April 14, 2011

Untitled from Sara Piazza on Vimeo.

Above is a short clip from Tommy Doyle's, featuring Sean Connor. Sean, as always, manages to shine through the din.

I showed up at Tommy's on Thursday night and found perfect light and great music, but I accidentally started shooting with the G12 before I formatted my card so I ran out of memory. The only way to free up the card would have been to format, thereby losing this gem, so I called it quits for the night, video-wise, anyway. The 5D took over for the rest of the evening for the stills.

It was a great night at Tommy's. I'm glad we're back downstairs. I didn't like the acoustics, or the layout, upstairs. The light downstairs is now fantastic, early in the evening, anyway - and a great relief after suffering through the dark winter, now past, thank God.

A few favorites from the evening (I really love you guys - you're beautiful - thanks for putting up with me and my camera):

Tommy Doyle's - Thursday Night, February 10, 2011

Great sessions Wednesday and Thursday nights this week. Wednesday night served as a transition from having been on the island for a few days, and was most welcome; a small-ish turnout, the intimacy of which I always enjoy. Thursday night brought out a few more of the gang and was quite rollicking. Without really planning to - Ryan got me fired up, I guess - I randomly picked up my G12 and caught the last set of the evening, a long one - or, more like a few sets on top of each other. I ran out of memory at 15:22, and it went on for a full three more tunes. Man, that place is so dark, though - it's hard to see anything on the screen.

I ended up having to break this up into four parts, largely due to the upload limits at my web-site (1GB). This was my first time editing video - I was psyched to find settings for brightening the image (though I think it affects quality, somewhat), also the BW option, my being the BW junkie that I am.

I'm thinking that Rosanne will come through with the names of these tunes.

Thursday at Tommy Doyle's, 1/6/11

My fourth night out in a row. Not bad for this grandma. A good circle of musicians tonight, though we are missing Sean, who is in Ireland at the moment. (And I wonder if he's at some pub in Ireland, thinking of us and singing, "Missing you, all for the price of a flight.") Also, Cormac and Alex have not yet returned from their travels abroad. Still, for a cold January night, there was a good crowd - a nice mix of regulars, folks who knew each other from other venues, and folks meeting for the first time. Good to have David back among us, as well.

All shot with G12 on Low Light setting, mostly at ISO 3200, though a couple were shot at 6400. 






Jon, David, Liam, Chris.






Jon, David, Liam.And daddy won't you take me back to Muhlenberg CountyDown by the Green River where Paradise layWell, I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking Mister Peabody's coal train has hauled it away.From John Prine's Paradise.



Clockwise, from top, center: David, Liam, Chris, Wynter, Rosanne, Ben, Levi, Eric, Jon.


Rosanne

Tommy Doyle's, 12/9/10

It's difficult to explain what, exactly, this music means to me, though I could probably sum it up in one word: homecoming. Yes, my involvement with Irish Traditional Music is a coming home of sorts; the gatherings I find myself in in various Boston pubs being so very reminiscent of the kitchen table of my childhood, when many evenings would find my mother, my brother, and me - and often an assortment of neighbors, friends, and relatives - gathered,  mother playing her Silvertone baritone uke, my brother, John, on guitar; all of us joining our voices in the folk and civil rights songs that were popular in the '50s and '60s. It was at this table that I learned to play guitar - beginning with my mother's little uke, at age 8 - and it was at this table that we were united in heart and spirit as a family, through music. Indeed, those kitchen hootenannies, as they were called then, remain as the happiest memories from my childhood. While the music we played and sang at our table was not specifically Irish, though some of it certainly was, it is the music that I now play around the table in the Irish pub that has reconnected me with my musical roots, with a sense of family, and with joy - after being away for far too long.

(I'm still sussing out the G12, trying to reconcile it with the very dim lighting in Tommy Doyle's.)


Floating Crowbar, Bag of Spuds, O'Connell's Trip to Parliament



(Above) Liam Hart, accompanied by friends (Sean Connor, Alex, Rosanne, Wynter), sings his arrangement of Fill a Ruin, "Come back, dear, come back." This song is on Liam's album, Far From Home.




I'm sure these tunes (above) have names - somebody help me out -  but I will always think of this set as Wynter's Set. Brilliant. Can't wait to learn them. Okay, got 'em (thanks, Rosanne, for these as well as for video #1): College Groves, Jenny's Wedding, Cregg's Pipes.

Thanksgiving Weekend Session

Eric, Chris, Rosanne, Dave.

    Rosanne and Dave very graciously hosted a post-Thanksgiving seisiun at their home in Medford last night. Seems I spend a lot of time wandering around unfamiliar Boston neighborhoods lately, sometimes in the dark, often with lots of one-way streets, with incoherent, tiny-print directions from GoogleMap in hand. Someday I'll get a GPS - but that would probably take all the fun out of these city ramblings (and having successfully gotten out of there, reversing the directions while accounting for the one-way streets, in the dark, can only be counted as a miracle - and thank you, Wynter, for your trust in me - if you only knew how lost I thought we were!). It was a great party, with the usual suspects in attendance - a sundry group of people who probably would not know each other except for the music; folks I certainly did not know until the last six months-to-year, people I now count as friends. All I know is this: the first set of tunes I played along with last night transformed me. Suddenly, all was well with the world.
      I have a long way to go, but I know I've come miles since that first night at Paddy Barry's last December when I could barely keep my bow on my strings, or finish a sentence for that matter, I was so terrified. I also know that I make more advances playing - or trying - with the group than I do at home alone. I'm listening differently at a session, pushing myself beyond my limits (and often surprising myself).
     The strange thing about a house session is the lack of pub noise. The music stops, and it's very quiet. Not a bad thing, but a little eerie, in a way. But very nice to be able to have a conversation.
     My awareness of the trad world's being a close-knit community was further enhanced last night by Eric and Colin's late arrival, their having come from Brendan Bulger's session at the Littlest Bar, downtown (Brendan is another of Boston's Irish Trad royalty - fantastic fiddler - one of the finest - from a rather intriguing family), and bringing greetings from David and his parents who were in attendance there; David playing tunes while his parents had dinner. Lovely that Susie and Woody could enjoy a night out in the city while seeing and hearing David shine in his world.

Wynter, Alex, Levi.

Levi, Chris.

Chris

Wynter, Alex, Levi, Colin

Eric, Chris.

Eric, Chris, Rosanne, Dave.

Eric, Chris.

Alex, Levi, Colin.