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):
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.
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 County
Down by the Green River where Paradise lay
Well, I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking
A quiet night out at the pub, due most likely to folks being either at home wrapping presents, or in transit, headed home for Christmas - Cambridge being a college town, the place does empty out on major holidays - or, maybe all the money was spent on gift shopping and none was left over for a pint. Nonetheless, the music was brilliant, as always.
I decided to mess around with the 40D and my 50mm/1.4 tonight. The verdict: it's still bloody dark in that place (Dear Santa, please bring a 7D, with ISO range up to 12,800 and HD video).
Text Rec'd from friend: Tunes tonight?
Reply: Desperately need tunes.
Still struggling - photographically, that is - with the dark cave that is Tommy Doyle's. All shot at ISO 3200, between 30th - 40th sec @ 2.8. Shooting in RAW format does allow me to recover an image that is even 2 full stops underexposed - all processed, including some noise-reduction, in LR3 - but I think these have crossed over into the realm of art. I rather like them, nonetheless.
Rosanne, Jon.
Sean Connor
Sean, Rosanne, Jon, Cormac, Eric.
"Christmas Eve"
There's medicine in the music.
I'd love to know the names of these tunes - one of Cormac's brilliant sets.
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.
Still catching up with myself. Here are a few favorites from my birthday party down on the Vineyard back in October. This was an amazing and wonderful weekend - there will be more of these Vineyard Sessions to come. Stay tuned.
Liam
David, Seanny.
David, Liam, Sean
Laura, Stuart.
My favorite photo from the weekend: Sean, Laura, Liam, Eric, and David.
Post-session session, Stuart and Mark.
My house was built on land that was farmed by my great-grandparents. The original farmhouse, next door and shown above, was my great-grandparents', Charles and Mary Isadora Lawlor Shurtleff's home, and is where my grandmother grew up, and where my mother spent summers as a little girl - playing games with her cousins in the glow of kerosene lantern light. Mary Shurtleff''s parents were Mary and James Lawlor, both born and died in Naas, County Kildare, Ireland, really my only biological connection to Ireland. On some level, this party was a nod to the Lawlors. Isn't DNA grand? Who really understands why we follow the paths that we do? Coincidentally, Charles Shurtleff and I share the same birthday, October 22.
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.
