Recorded live at Tommy Doyle's pub in Harvard Square, Cambridge, Mass. Featuring Sean Connor on fiddle and David Bowman on whistle. Recorded by Ryan Abernathey and Sara Piazza and edited by Ryan.
We are there every Wednesday and Thursday evening!
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):
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.
Quiet night at Tommy's. The good news was, there were plenty of parking spaces in Harvard Square tonight because everybody was either out of town or home baking pies. For the most part, it was Sean and Yours Truly for most of the session, and Liam came towards the end, in time for the last few tunes. Oh well, it's not quantity, but rather, quality, as they say. It was a pleasure and an honor to play one-on-one with Sean, hanging on for dear life on my fiddle and accompanying him on bouzouki, and catching at least a couple of tunes with the two of them - love you guys.
The above photo was taken with the G12 at 3200 ISO, slightly complicated by the fact that LR3 does not support RAW files from the G12. But at least I know I can come up with some recognizable image with this camera, even in the darkest situation, and yes, it is very dark in Tommy's, so this was a good test for this camera, only hours old at the time (I have since downloaded LR3.3, which does support the G12's RAW files).
(PS, please don't let the empty beer glass next to my fiddle give you the wrong impression...)
Below: Harvard Square at 3200 ISO.
